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Pizza!

April 28, 2009 By Gay 19 Comments

May is just a few days away, and I can’t believe I’ve only made one post in April. I have a backlog of posts in the coming days so please bear with me.

I made this pizza from scratch when I was still living in Los Baños. This was my first time to make pizza from scratch and I so love it I made pizza on consecutive weekends. By scratch, I meant making my own thin crust topped with whatever ingredients we had at hand. It’s easy to do, not much kneading required (which I like a lot). The highlight was finding out how  great freshly chopped garlic goes with the rest of the toppings. Garlic pizza, anyone?

I am saving for an oven in my new home in Gen San (perhaps the oven that blogging bought?) and pizza will probably be the first dish that I will cook on it!

pizza

My first ever thin crust pizza
(Modified from Yummy magazine)

1/2 tbsp yeast
1/4 cup lukewarm water
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cool water
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp salt

Whisk yeast, lukewarm water, 1/4 cup flour in a bowl. Dust lightly with flour then let rest for about 20 minutes. Add 1 1/2 cups of flour, water, olive oil and salt. Knead then gradually add remaining flour. Knead the dough until elastic. Shape into a ball, dust with flolur and leave to rise double in bulk. Flatten the ball with a rolling pin to your desired shape and thickness (or thinness). I didn’t use a rolling pin (I knew we had one, but I couldn’t find it!) so I just flattened the dough with the palm of my hands and let it fit an 8-inch pie pan.

To dress up the crust, drizzle the crust with olive oil. Add some chopped garlic. Spread catsup  and pesto all over the crust. Add the toppings you have at hand. In my case, I added black and green olives, onions, bell pepper and salami. Top with grated cheese, fresh tarragon, and more chopped garlic. Bake at 300 F for about 20 minutes.

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Filed Under: Breads and Pizzas, General Santos City Tagged With: pizza. garlic

Homemade Bacon

April 2, 2009 By Gay 18 Comments

I’m trying to catch up with my back log of posts as I’ve mentioned before.

bacon-and-eggs Baconsilog – bacon, itlog (eggs) and sinangag (fried rice)

My sister and I have always wanted to make our own bacon given the fact that we love bacon for breakfast. I found a lot of recipes for making homemade bacon but really didn’t have the inclination to do it at home until I read Marketman’s account on making bacon. Last December, my sister and I set out to make not just one but 4x doing two variations – baked and smoked.

The recipe and procedure is basically from Saveur although I did modify the spices and herbs according to what was in our pantry then.bacon Pork belly and spices

Homemade Bacon

Spice/Herb rub for 1.5 kgs pork belly

2 1/2 tbsp salt
1 1/2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp black peppercorns
1.5 tsp fennel seeds
1.5 tsp dried oregano
1.5 tsp dried thyme
2 laurel leaves
2 garlic cloves chopped finely
1 tsp paprika

Since I didn’t have a large space for curing the bacon, I chopped the pork belly into three blocks. Mix all the spice/herb rub together and cover the pork belly blocks with mixture. Wrap in plastic bag and refrigerate for a week. Turn over every other day. On the 7th day, wash pork belly and smoke for two hours. Trim edges then cut thinly and store.

To bake, after washing pork belly blocks, bake at 200 F for two hours.

So what do we prefer? I think baking the bacon is better than smoking as the smoke flavor tends to overpower the bacon flavor. In any case, both versions are delicious and will certainly often repeated at home.

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Filed Under: Breakfast, Meat
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