As many of you know my wife and I just moved to Dallas, TX. We love pizza and I like to think that I am quite the connoisseur of pizza. However, I am not a pizza snob where I only like one type of pizza. I have had amazing pizza in Chicago, Spokane, Seattle, and Ann Arbor and they are all very different but great in their own way.
So now that we're in Dallas I am looking for great pizza and so far the results aren't good. We tried Olivella's which was rated in the top eight pizza places in Dallas by the Dallas Observer, USA Today rated it in the 51 greatest pizzerias in the US, and Rachel Ray claims it is "the most incredible pizza you'll ever eat!" My response, you must have never had truly great Pizza. The places was small which made it seem like this could be a unique and amazing experience. The sauce was subpar and as my wife says, "it tastes like Campbell's tomato soup," the crust was okay but nothing special, and the center of the pizza was soggy. I know many pizza connoisseurs claim that pizza is supposed to have a soggy center but the pizza was limp and lifeless. The toppings were mediocre with little flavor and again the sauce was bland. They claim on their website that their recipes come from the third ever established pizzeria in Naples, Italy and that the recipes have been passed down through the family. Overall I would give Olivella's one out of five stars for a sad attempt at pizza.
We will continue trying pizza in Dallas and I will write reviews on the pizza. A quick shout out to my favorite Ann Arbor pizzeria NeoPapalis. If you are ever in Ann Arbor and are looking for great pizza this is the place to stop. Joe Sheena is one of the owners and he makes amazing pizza. Check out a video on the place http://www.neopapalis.com/AboutUs.aspx. The video says to use a fork and knife but I would disagree, I fold it New Yorker style.
Saturday, August 2, 2014
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Learning to Laminate
Over the past few months I have been craving sweets and
specifically donuts. I have a recipe from Alton Brown on making donuts but it
makes 50 and once I started looking at dividing the recipe into a more
manageable amount of donuts for two people I gave up. Valentine’s Day rolled
around and Arielle decided to make Pots de Crème out of a baking cookbook we
have. She had the book out to make a grocery list and I started flipping
through the book. Everything looked so good but then I saw a braided chocolate pastry
that looked good and would help fill this need for donuts. The dough used to
make this braided chocolate pastry was Danish which I have never made before.
 |
| The Braided Chocolate Pastry |
As I read the recipe I had to laminate the dough. So what is lamination? Lamination is the process of creating butter layers within the dough which is what makes Danishes and croissants flakey and airy. The basic process is you make a sheet of butter and wrap your dough around it so that the butter which is called the “package” is fully enclosed within the dough. Then you roll it out, fold the dough, and rotate the dough 90 degrees over and over until you end up with enough layers. The recipe I had only had four turns but it takes some time as you need to refrigerate 15 minutes between each lamination. Since the butter was always cold it seemed that it stayed in small pieces within the dough. I’m not sure how this is supposed to be done but I imagine the optimal way is to get full sheets of butter so it would make sense if the butter had time to melt a little more. You wouldn’t want the butter like a liquid in case there is a hole in your dough and then the butter would run out. On the last two of my four lamination runs I set the dough in the oven at 200 degrees for a few minutes to help melt the butter so that I would have more even butter layers.
 |
| Cross Section |
 |
| My breakfast for the past few days |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)