Beautiful Day, and a Pizza Recipe, at the 3rd Annual Minneapolis Bread Festival

The pie

1-Beautiful pie

2-Zucchini, thinly sliced
This past Saturday, we had another opportunity to demo our pizzas and flatbreads at the 3rd-annual Minneapolis Bread Festival and Baking Contest at the historic Mill City Market in downtown Minneapolis. It was a beautiful day, and the pizzas came out great. Our request for the organizers: just get whatever’s fresh and beautiful. Here’s the result (most of these beautiful photographs are courtesy of the Mill City Times). Read on for a pizza recipe, pizza tips, and some beautiful shots from a beautiful day, or check out our entire book on pizza, Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day. Read More

Grilled Pizza On A Charcoal Grill

Grilled Pizza on a Charcoal Grill | Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day

We’ve made a lot of grilled pizzas here at Bread in Five, but almost all of them have been on a gas grill. If you’ve ever attempted a pizza on a charcoal grill you know why this is: the pizza is much easier to manage, and there is less change of burning when it’s not over flaming hot coals. However, many people do not own a gas grill, and so we set out to figure out some helpful tips and tricks in making a charcoal grilled pizza a little bit easier. Twenty pizzas later, and we finally have something for you.

There were quite a few things we learned along the way: bread flour makes a nice, sturdy dough, olive oil in the dough keeps the pizza from sticking to the grill, building a hot and cool side in the grill is a must, and keeping the pizzas on the small side makes them easier to manage.

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Star Spangled Berry Pizza on the Grill

4th of July Pizza 10

There is nothing more American than grilling on the 4th of July, well, maybe a star spangled pizza is the most patriotic of all. This is a super fast pizza that is ideal for breakfast, which I just served my family this morning, or can be throw together at your holiday BBQ as dessert. I made the pizza in a small baking sheet, but you can make a larger one if you have a crowd to feed.

Happy 4th of July! Read More

Gluten-Free Calzone

Gluten-Free Calzone | Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day

Stuff a calzone with any fillings you like and you have a simple and delicious lunch. And if you make them small, individual-serving-size, you can pack calzones for a great school lunch. There is no end to the flavor combinations. This recipe can be made with any of the doughs in our Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day book, but today I made a gluten-free calzone, which is super tasty and the dough is easy to work with. Because the dough doesn’t have the same gluten-full stretch, we have to handle it slightly differently, but it is just as simple as traditional dough with the right technique. Read More

Gluten Free Pizza (Locally Foraged Toppings, the Gifts of Spring!)

This week I had the tremendous pleasure of doing an event with the Minnesota Food Bloggers. The group is held together with the love and sweat of Stephanie Meyer and includes 450 passionate food lovers. The group gets together about once a month to celebrate what is exciting and new in the Minneapolis food scene, which is growing larger and more exciting every day. Stephanie invited me to do a pizza class for the group, and I jumped at the chance. An excuse to hang out with this group and an opportunity to get them all tossing dough in the air and baking pizza. The venue was also a tremendous draw for me, we did this giant pizza party at the Kitchen in the Market. A fully equipped professional kitchen run by the sweet, sassy and talented duo Molly McDonald Herrmann and Tracy Morgan. Here is a lovely post of the party by Sarah Kieffer whose site  The Vanilla Bean Blog is just beautiful.

We made dough from Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day the kind made specifically for tossing high in the air. The dough for tossing is made with Bread Flour, so it is a bit stronger and can handle being thrown as high as you dare. The group has several folks who are on a gluten free diet, so we had our gluten free crust available to them. The g-f crust is tasty and makes a brilliant pizza, but can’t be tossed high in the air and needs to be handled in a different way from traditional dough.  Below are our instructions for the no-fail gluten free crust. But, before I roll out the dough, I want to say a little about the toppings. There are some gifts that are priceless…so rare, so precious and so fleeting that they make you want to weep. Kathy Yerich, one of the partners of Rouge Pottery, brought me such a gift at the pizza party. She went foraging for morel mushrooms, ramps (spring onions) and nettles and brought them to me in a basket. The contents of this basket were almost too gorgeous to eat, but I managed and made this pizza, which my husband said “tastes like summer!” What a gift. Read More

We’re on TV in Phoenix with Grilled Pizza: Thanks KPNX-12News (NBC)

We are ready for warmer weather (50 degrees yesterday in Minneapolis!), and that means grilled pizza.  There’s no better place for that than Phoenix, which is Minneapolis’s alter-ego– it’s pretty hot for indoor pizza-baking in the summertime (which is coming!).  So we journeyed south a couple of weeks ago to do a  demo of grilled pizza on the NBC affiliate down there– and soak up a little sunshine.  We also taught again at Barbara Fenzl’s Les Gourmettes Cooking School.  Thanks for an appreciative group, Barbara!

One thing to explain though, hostess Destry Jetton said that this was cracker-crust pizza on the grill–it’s not.  Everything we showed in Phoenix was Neapolitan-style thickness, about 1/8 to 1/4-inch.  We do have lots of directions for both kinds of pizza in Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day.

Caramelized Onion and Goat Cheese Pizzette

The concept for these little pizza/tarts came from a family recipe. My cousin, Riad Nasr, is a world class chef and quite often the source of inspiration in my kitchen. He practices his craft in New York City at a line-up of crazy-popular restaurants including Pastis, Minetta Tavern and Balthazar. Several years ago he wrote the Balthazar cookbook and included a savory tart with herby caramelized onions and goat cheese. I made it and fell in love. When Jeff and I decided to write our Pizza book I knew this flavor combo would be fantastic as a pizza. I’ve made it in several classes that we’ve taught to rave reviews, so I thought I would make it with you here.

The key to this pizza is caramelizing the onions. You can speed up the process by using a slightly higher heat and adding a touch of sugar, but for this recipe we’re going the old fashion route and doing it slow. I admit this may take a few more than 5 minutes, but I think it’s worth it. For those of you looking for a speedier version you can find one on page 108 of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Read More