Did I mention that I’m up to my ears in semolina? So far these are the semolina projects I mean to tackle: pizza, bread, crackers, and pancakes. Maybe a pudding. I don’t have to use up all my supplies during the no-shopping week…but I’m on a roll.
Pizza, now. This site provided the recipe for the crust. I modified it a bit, and it appears below.
Some ingredients. You’ll see the package of active dry yeast I was keeping Just In Case. The Case is here: my preferred fresh yeast in cubes was used up last week.
Toppings were:
* A quick sauce made of two fresh, chopped tomatoes sauteed in olive oil with 3 cloves of garlic. When the tomatoes were cooked to a semi-liquid, I added tomato paste, wine, s&p, and some tired basil leaves, plus a dusting of dried oregano. All was mercilessly blended by my kitchen ally, the immersion blender, to an acceptable smoothness. I’ve found you can get all kinds of foods past picky eaters if they’re blended to death. The foods, that is.
*Sliced onions, carmelized with a little frozen duxelles – a mushroom essence – and herb salt. I would have preferred to use red onions, but white was what I had.
Duxelles…
* A little bit of sheep’s milk feta that I’ve been hoarding since starting the Week Without Shopping. Some Kashkeval cheese also, put aside for another purpose but which I’m happy to sacrifice to the cause.
* Sliced olives out of jar that I’ve been trying to use up already.
Semolina Pizza Crust
3 thin, crisp crusts, each yielding 4 slices
Ingredients:
2 1/2 tsp. active dry yeast
1 cup warm water
1/2 tsp. sugar
1 cup semolina
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
a little olive oil
Method:
1. Stir the sugar into the warm water and reactivate the yeast in that liquid. Let it sit till its foamy, about 5 minutes.
2. Combine the flours and salt. Make a well in the middle of the bowl and add the yeast mixture.
3. Mix the dough till it’s well combined.
4. Flour a flat surface. Take the dough ball, put it on the floured surface, and knead it well – about 10 minutes. It should become smooth and elastic.
5. Return the dough to the bowl. Dribble a little olive oil over it. Turn it over a few times to make sure the ball is coated with the oil.
6. Cover with plastic wrap and let it rise in a warm place. The instructions said 45 minutes – I let it go for 2 hours, till it was very light.
7. Preheat the oven to 450 F - 230 C. Prepare your pizza pans by wiping them down with olive oil or by strewing some semolina over their surface. Alliterative, that.
… Bear with me, having to think and write about this Week Without Shopping is making me meshuggy.
8. Punch the dough down and pull it into three pieces. Dust a surface with semolina and roll each piece out thinly. Place the pieces on the baking pans and cover them with toppings of choice. Bake 20 minutes.If you have to stagger the baking, it won’t hurt the pizza to wait around till you can take the preceding one or two out of the oven.
*
Pizza topped with tomato sauce and grated cheese and rapidly disappearing…
In the end, the olive pizza didn’t have takers – the kids were too full. I cut rough triangles out of the prepared pizza, folded them over, and baked four primitive-looking calzones. They’ll go in the freezer for a dairy lunch next week.
The grown-ups pizza, rolled out thicker and without sauce. My favorite of all was the half pizza with feta cubes and dots of pesto. Husband liked the onion topping.
Note: red wine goes well with pizza…
I was pleased with this semolina experiment. The pizza crust was much more flavorful than any other I’ve made or bought – faintly nutty, somehow more wheaty. Of course, if I’d been making this for guests, I would have rolled out neat circles. But since I’m only posting these photos to the World Wide Web, who’s going to notice?
Tomorrow, pancakes.
That all looks beautiful! Maybe I should not be reading this as I am waiting for dinner!
Semolina crust sounds yummy! Next time I make pizza I will try your version
Using up semolina? There’s always kubbeh, if you have a few hours to kill.
I recently shot a kubbeh-making video in my office and uploaded it to YouTube. It was Tu Bishvat, so we improvised a filling with raisins (for demo purposes only; we didn’t try to cook them).
Avital,
Loved this video! Took the mystique right out of soup kubbeh. And the references to the grandmother were great (yay, grannies!). But may I ask – why did you film this at the office?
For readers, here’s the URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zghp4wgtz4c
I confess, though, that I just can’t deal with semolina anymore. Too much of it in the past 2 days.
I made the semolina pizza dough as per your instructions and it turned really great.I even posted about it in my blog (in Finnish…)
Love getting feedback, Yaelian, especially about things that worked out well. I’ll go look at your blog now…
you inspired me to play with pizza crust (i’ve never made my own and i actually have never done anything with yeast since i came to Israel. I used to bake bread in college). I used half regular flour and half whole wheat.
I made cheese pizza for the girls and lahmajoun for me and my husband. The latter came out amazing, if i say so myself.
It was so much easier than i imagined.
the yeast box has a yeast cake recipe that i want to try for shabbat.
Fabulous, Abbi. I love playing with flour and yeast, and it’s exciting to see other folks discovering how manageable they are. And how delicious the rewards for the effort.