Doris Light Zucchini Bread

Here’s one of those recipes that pops out of my folder when I see burstingly fresh zucchini at the produce stand. It’s adapted from a recipe that’s been passed around in my family as ‘Doris Fenton’s Zucchini Bread’ for donkey’s years, and so when I lightened up on the oil and tweaked other quantities to [...]

Totally Fresh Tomato Lasagna

West of Sienna, sunflowers paint the softly rolling hills as far as the eye can see. The road dips and sways through the Tuscan landscape, with shoulder high banks that rise to either side. Swallows glide on late afternoon thermals in the clear blue sky. At an opening to one field a man holds up cars to [...]

The State of British Pizza: 2010

Mauro with the woodfired oven at San Carlo on Granby Street in Leicester

 The following are notes from Sortachef’s recent trip to the UK. 

  

July 21st, Bloomsbury, Central London 

While walking to Covent Garden after depositing our bags at the hotel, I spy a well-dressed man at a sidewalk table eating what looks like a mighty fine [...]

Beautifully Barbecued Baby Back Ribs

I stared at the barbecue contraption and felt a stab of déjà vu. There it was again – that big boxy fire bed topped with a grill the size of a full sheet of plywood and crowned with a funky metal roof. This one was plonked down on the tarmac of the Mount Shasta Supermarket, [...]

Fresh Blueberry Scones

Let me tell you about these blueberries that followed me home from California. There they were the other day, in a hunking great display the size of a small garden shed, right at the front of my local organic megastore: clamshell packages bursting with plump ripe fruit. Okay, these particular blueberries were not organic, but [...]

Antipasto Peppers with Italian Tuna

My Italian was not at all up to this. ‘Lo sportello automatico non pagare il denaro,’ I said to the beautifully tailored man across the desk from me – as close as I could get with my tourist phrase books to ‘the bank machine ate my money.’ I felt perspiration rise on the back of [...]

All Fired Up: Fresh Tomato and Mushroom Pizza with Truffle Oil

My daughter the Cake Princess looked quizzically at the dough laid out on a wooden peel in the kitchen. “Do you make pizza every day?” she asked, striking a pose. “Just this week,” I assured her. “Yeah, right,” she said, and flopped off to check her facebook page.

Thin to thick: Last week's selection

We’re all [...]

Great Pepperoni Pizza in 40 Minutes

My son the meatatarian can eat pepperoni pizza every day. It’s that good. But can you make a pepperoni pizza that rivals the freshness of pizza parlor pizza, and have it on the table in under an hour? Yes. And it’s easy, if you know how.

The secret is dough made with Fleishmann’s Pizza Crust Yeast, which proofs [...]

Test Driving the new Pizza Crust Yeast

A newly minted yeast showed up on my grocer’s shelves last week. Made specifically for pizza crust by Fleischmann’s, a venerable yeast company now owned by Associated British Foods, Pizza Crust Yeast promises a fully risen crust in just 30 minutes. Turbo-charged in other words. I just had to give it a spin.

Fleischmann's Pizza [...]

Huminta: A Bolivian Delight

I’ve never been to Bolivia, but I’ve been many times to the Copacabana Café in the Pike Place Market. A South American beer tastes fine there on one of those perfect Seattle afternoons, when mountains come out to stand boldly against a wondrously blue sky. Okay, they’re not the Andes. But perched there on the Copacabana’s deck, with [...]