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Pizza

Food

So I think I’ve gotten the pizza recipe down to “yeah, this’ll do” levels.

Looks good after two minutes in the oven…

And a good crumb structure and base. Grand.

Recipe:

I usually make enough for four pizzas at once.

In the bowl of the stand mixer…

  • 325g warm water (40C if you want to get all fussy about it, “not hot enough to kill yeast” if you don’t)
  • 10g of yeast
  • 20g of honey

And give that a quick stir with the whisk and leave it sit for ten minutes so the yeast wakes up and starts its thing.

Now add

  • 500g flour made up of bread flour and normal plain flour in equal parts
  • 5g of salt
  • 10g of diastatic malt powder.

And then whisk it until it starts to come together but stop before it grabs your whisk and you have to clean it out of the inside of the whisk.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 3 Comments

Macarons

Food

So the latest thing I’ve tried baking are macarons. Not macaroons, the coconutty biscuit things, but the french almond meringue biscuits with fillings. The ones they fly into Brown Thomas from Laudaree in Paris daily and sell for obscene amounts of money. I figured, if I could make Madeline, why not something else classic and French? How hard could it be?

And the answer is, not very. They’re a little fiddly but ultimately if you can make a meringue and have some patience, macaron are just not as hard as everyone says they are.

There are two or three things you have to do that don’t seem to be written in most of the books mind you, and if you skip those, you get awful results. So here’s my recipe, with notes:

This makes enough macaron biscuit mix to fill one standard large disposable piping bag and that can make up to sixty macaron (120 hulls) if you make them small.… Read the rest

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Pretzel rolls

Food
NYOMNYOMNYOM...

Pretzel rolls

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Edited to add lots and lots more photos and video.
And this recipe is now up on the boards.ie cooking club!
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I love pretzels – the large, soft, chewy kind, not the breakfast cereal wannabe crunchy things – but the only place I can buy them round here seems to be Marks&Spencer’s bakery and they don’t even sprinkle them with salt (there’s a fantastic shop that sells them in Kilkenny in the upper floor of the Market Cross shopping center on the main street, but none round here). The other day, I went into M&S to buy some only to find they had none, but instead had taken the dough and made rolls with them. And they were great. And less futzing about is needed to shape the dough, so why not?… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 1 Comment