Home Cooked Brunch

Lately, I was taken over by the urge to make home-cooked food. So on a fine saturday morning, I met up with a friend and went shopping for ingredients for pizza and mudpie brunch!


The Carrefour supermarket at the basement of Plaza Singapura had me disappointed as there was no active dry yeasts amidst it's huge 'Baking Needs" row and due to the poor sectioning of the supermarket, it took me quite a while to locate the bottle of dry oregano leaves which was hidden in a secluded corner of the massive supermarket! The next time round, I'll definitely be shopping at Cold Storage.


At the end of close to 2 hours of shopping cart pushing and trying to play detectives at locating the various ingredients from our shopping list, we got tired and decided to opt for the ready-made pizza crust instead.


Without having to make the pizza dough, lining the pizza crust was a breeze. After spreading tomato sauce as the base layer, the rest of the job were simply to dice up the ingredients into cubes and do a nice layout.


The pizza was cooked after about 20 minutes of baking and I must say the appearance alone looked promising!



However, a bite into the piping hot pizza kind of had me disappointed all over again. The crust was dry and neither tasted fresh or crispy. Luckily, the ingredients sort of made up for the disappointment. Next time round, I'll surely be making my own pizza dough.


As for the mudpie, the only task was to crush the digestive biscuits leaving some bite size crumps for that extra crunch. Melted butter was then mixed into the crumps before pressing the biscuit dough onto a round cake tin. Melted chocolate ice-cream was then added to the biscuit base and stored in the freezer.



Unfortunately, the sweet tooth monster got into us and we couldn't wait till the mudpie was entirely frozen before we were digging into the dessert with spoons and forks. The best part of the mudpie would have to be the biscuit base while the selection of dark chocolate ice-cream could be better if we went for the slightly more expensive Häagen-Dazs. Such was the compromise I have to make for being such a scrooge.

East Meets West

Mother is finally back home last Sunday! And today, I decided to show off my pizza making skills to her - afterall, it's the one proud dish I have successfully re-created during her absence.

However, I did not have the required 600g of bread flour as stated in the recipe so I made do with a smaller quantity and kneaded the dough based on my "ah-gah-ration" skills. This time round, the dough yielded two small pizzas which I managed to roll thinner compared to my previous attempt. For one pizza, I used chicken shreds to replace the hams slices while for the other pizza, I used roasted duck shreds.

Mother prefers the duck shred pizza while I prefer the ham slices. Dad is simply satisfied that the pizza is filling.

In addition, mother stir-fried a plate of vegetables and together with another bowl of white lettuce soup, we had a "East Meets West" theme dinner tonight!

Duck Shred Pizza

Chicken Shred Pizza

Hawaiian Pizza

This is my sixth attempt at pizza making. Success after failures tastes especially sweet.

Attempt 1: My first time making a pizza at the cooking school, Palate Sensations. Under the watchful eye of Italian chef, Daniela, I tasted my first home-made pizza.

Attempt 2: Tried the same recipe at home and offered it as dinner for my family. Total flop. No idea what went wrong. The pizza dough tasted like a lump of cooked flour.

Attempt 3: Refused to give up. Afterall, it really seem so straightforward at the cooking school! I pressed the dough really thin and in the end, I got a really tough cracker-like dough. My parents' dentures almost fell off!

Attempt 4: Downloaded a recipe from the internet. Looks simple and promising. But while kneading the dough, the proportion of fluid and flour just didn't seem right. So the result was rather obvious.

Attempt 5: Downloaded another recipe from the internet. Tried this dough immediately after the failure of attempt 4. I'm just on a losing streak. :(

Attempt 6: After weeks of 'recuperating' my morale, I happened to chance upon this pizza recipe in the Sunday Times on 9 September 2007. And BANG...I MADE IT FINALLY!

Hawaiian Pizza

Ingredients:

2 tsp dried yeast

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

1.5 cups water, at room temperature I used abit more water as the dough was too dry

600g bread flour

3 tbs olive oil I didn't use this at all. It was left out in the method!

flour for dusting

mozzarella cheese, grated

pasta sauce

ring pineapples in a can, cut into cubes

mushroom, sliced

ham, diced into small rectangles

Method:

(1) Mix yeast, salt, sugar with water in a bowl and wait till mixture bubbles.

(2) Put flour in a large mixing bowl. Make a well in it and pour in yeast mixture.

(3) Mix until the flour and yeast come together in a ball.

(4) Let the dough rise in a cold oven for at least one hour.

(5) Dust dough with some flour.

(6) Roll the dough out into a 20cm round or stretch it by tossing in the air several times. Place in a pizza pan or metal pan.

(7) Spread pasta sauce evenly on the dough and add the toppings.

(8) Bake in a preheated 200°C oven for 10 mins, until cheese is bubbly.

Verdict:

(+) This recipe totally rocks! I made my own pizza in about 2 hours!

(-) I tried to roll the dough flat hoping to get those thin Italian pizza bread but had some difficulties doing it as the dough seems to always 'pull' back towards the centre.

(=) Nevertheless, when the pipping hot pizza came out from the oven, the bread was crispy on the outside and light on the inside! It's like Pizza Hut style!