pesto pizza & ramblings on local food legislation

Yum! For dinner tonight, we made pesto pizza on a cornmeal crust, topped with our first tomatoes of the season and cheese from Windsor Dairy.

Ingredients for large corn meal pizza crust:
2 1/2 c. all purpose flour
1 c. corn meal
1 T. sugar
1 t. dry active yeast
1/2 t. salt
2 T. olive oil
1 1/2 c. water
Onto the rambling! Windsor Dairy is great. They sell excellent artisan cheeses made from local, organic, grassfed cow's milk. The cheeses are just the gateway. The REALLY cool thing about Windsor Dairy is that they offer raw, unpasteurized grass-fed cow's milk to the masses. The way they do this is a little complicated but it is still effective. In Colorado, legislation allows you to consume raw milk from a cow that you own. Windsor Dairy offers a "cow share" program, where you buy a share of a cow and then pay a monthly boarding and milking fee on that cow and in return you can consume a weekly installment of raw milk.

This is significant to Eric and me because when we started getting into local food in Illinois, we were shocked to find no small-time dairy operations. I mean surely there must still be a few devoted small farmers, right? The thing is, there are laws. To sell milk, you need to own a lot of expensive equipment to process and pasteurize the milk to government standards. The standards are often prohibitively expensive for small processors: "Get big or get out." It's crazy though because you honestly don't need to pasteurize milk if its fresh, local, and from healthy, grass-fed cows. In fact it is way better for you than pasteurized milk trucked to you from CAFO cows. So why is it that the consumer doesn't have the right to choose?? In Illinois, we did end up finding a guy who would sell us raw, grass-fed cow's milk. It was totally under the table and we did it because we're that kind of people, but the point is that it shouldn't be so convoluted for the regular person to sell or buy quality food.

While I am on the subject, the government doesn't just inhibit small dairy, they also inhibit small, local food processors (people who make granola, jams, pastries, pickles, sauerkraut, etc). Small economies have unfair competition with grocery stores thanks to all of our subsidies to agribusiness. As if that weren't enough, you need a license and a commercial kitchen to sell food. You can't just sell your excess jars of jelly or custom cakes occasionally. To sell, you basically need to make a business commitment. I mean you can sell, but it's not so legal. Even if you try to do everything right, the city of Chicago may still swing by and destroy your granola. Unlike Illinois, Michigan recently took a really positive step in this arena by approving a cottage industry farm bill. People selling less than $15,000 a year in goods in Michigan no longer need a license nor do they need a commercial kitchen. They just have to label what is in their product and who/where it came from.

In conclusion, it is time for us all to change local food legislation in our states!

vegan chicago-style deep dish pizza

As we've mentioned before, we rarely put cheese on homemade pizza--cheese is expensive and you can make pizza that tastes great without it, even Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Although this doesn't have the stringy cheese characteristic of of Chicago-style deep dish pizza, the tofu ricotta filling is quite good. We made this, along with the shepherd's pie for a pi day party and both were a hit.

The crust recipe we used is no longer online, but searching for a "Chicago style pizza crust" will yield many results.

Filling:
I took 1 lb. extra-firm tofu, crumbled it and drained it in a colander. Then I mixed in some minced garlic, salt, and oregano. The sauce was 2 pints of our canned tomato sauce, cooked down to the right consistency, with olive oil, honey, oregano, and basil. After baking, sprinkle with "gomasio-ish parmesean": toasted sesame seeds, lightly ground with a bit of salt and nutritional yeast.

artichoke and olive pizza

It's pizza time!

Serving size: 6 (2 pizzas)

Dough Ingredients:
3 1/2 c. flour
1 c. warm water
2 T. yeast
2 T. honey
1/4 c. olive oil
1/2 tsp. salt

Optional Dough Ingredients:
2 T. minced garlic
1 T. basil
1 T. oregano
1 T. rosemary
1 tsp. sage

Sauce Ingredients:
16 oz (1 pint) tomato sauce
2 T. olive oil
2 T. honey
1 T. basil
1 T. oregano

Pizza Toppings:
black olives
artichoke hearts
caramelized onions (1 red onion, 2 T. canola oil, 2 T. margerine/butter)


Note that the dough will need around 2 hours to rise, with a good punch in the middle.

My favorite part of making pizza is adding things to the dough, like LOTS of garlic and basil and oregano...and eating the bits of leftover dough...and the smell of the garlicky dough in the oven. We find that making pizza dough in a food processor is pretty convenient, but you can also knead it all by hand or do it all in a bread machine. The best pizza dough recipe that we've found is Mitch's Basic Pizza Dough--I like it because it uses honey. The link includes directions for all three methods.

If you're using a food processor, you can use a dough blade, but the regular blade works just as well, if not better. If you do use the regular blade, you can put whole, peeled, garlic cloves into the machine first and let the machine chop them up. Otherwise you can chop them up yourself or use a garlic press. You can use whole wheat or white wheat or half and half or half corn meal--whatever you like!

Start by putting 1 cup warm water (about 85 to 115° F) in the processor. Add the honey and salt and mix or low for 20 seconds. Add the yeast and stir with a spoon or mix on low. You should start to see bubbles and smell the yeast working. Add 1 cup of flour, mixing again. Add the olive oil and mix again. Add the remaining flour and any optional additions (basil and oregano are my favorites, but I've also done rosemary and sage). Mix on high until the dough balls up, adding more water or flour as needed. Then take the dough out, balling up loose scraps, and knead for 5 minutes (use both hands, rolling the dough forward, trying to seal the seam with your palms on each fold). It's good if you play some loud music and get really into the kneading until you forget you are even doing it. You can try spinning the dough up in the air here; it's pretty fun. Once you've had enough, ball up the dough, closing and pinching the seam closed. Coat the ball with olive oil and put into a metal, ceramic, or glass bowl. Cover with a damp towel (I use warm water to make it damp). You will now let the dough rise for about 45 minutes. Put the bowl in a warm place. During the winter, putting it above the pilot light, or on a radiator, or in a barely warm oven works nicely. If it is too warm, then it will start to bake! After around 45 minutes, the dough should be close to double in size. If not, then double-check your yeast. Punch your fist into the ball to deflate it. Leaving the big fist hole just as it is, let the dough rise for 1-1.5 hours. (The Tassajara Bread Book is a great reference for the "why"s of bread making.)

While the dough is rising this second time, you can prepare the other ingredients. For the sauce, you can use tomato puree or sauce directly from the can or jar, or you can mix in some tomato paste for a thicker sauce. You can also add other ingredients to make a tastier sauce. For this recipe, I put 2 T. olive oil in a saucepan, them added around 16 oz (1 pint) of sauce. Then I added 2 T honey for a sweeter sauce and some spices (1 T. each of basil and oregano). Add some salt here if you like. When the sauce is mixed up and warm, it is ready.

Now is when I caramelize the onion. You may have noticed that we didn't put cheese on this pizza. We find that often, homemade pizza doesn't need cheese to taste good, especially with caramelized onions on it. Cut up 1 onion (the sweeter the better: vidalia or red are nice) into semicircles and cook on the stove in oil on really low heat. Cooking them slowly will allow the sugar in the onion to caramelize. You can also add honey or sugar for even sweeter and more caramelized flavor.

You can get other ingredients ready now too. The pizza in the photo has black olives and artichoke hearts on it. You could also reconstitute sun dried tomatos or dried mushrooms in wine or water. Even in winter the possibilities are endless: fried tofu covered in bbq sauce, indian curry pizza, thai pizza.

After letting the dough rise this second time, roll it out. Before you do so, get the oven heating up to 400 F. The amount of dough made by the ingredient amounts above is good for two medium pizzas. After rolled out, bake the crusts for 5-10 minutes so they don't get too soggy when you add the sauce. Add the sauce and the ingredients and bake some more until the crust is golden brown. You can put olive oil on the crust and more spices on top of the pizza if you like. That is some good pizza!