Pizza/Bread Dough

Well, the experiments I was running concerning the water/flour ratio, were consistently producing the same results (or near enough that the criteria I was working with wasn't greatly affected). However, what I did notice was that a water/flour ratio above 0.7 resulted in pizza dough that was hard to work with. I was constantly having to flour it and apply fresh cornmeal to prevent it from sticking to the counter while forming the shell as well as sticking to the peel while assembling the pizza toppings.

The bread on the other hand, does not need to be worked, so stickiness does not factor into it. A higher ratio would be possible without any added difficulty. However, there did come a point where the the bread no longer grew larger (lower ratios had a smaller loaf produced). Luckily for ease of the math involved, this also occurred around the 0.7 ratio mark as well.

All of this combined, has led me to believe, that my maximum water ratio is 7 parts water and 10 parts flour, both by mass.

My next task is to expand on this. Since varying the water didn't enhance the flavours (probably because water isn't flavourful...) is to vary the liquid I use. My current experiments are with substituting some of the water with milk. I chose milk because of its fat content which in theory will help add flavour, I had originally wanted to test oils and butter, which are both fats. But the ease of using milk called to me and overruled my better judgement. I have started with a ratio of 1:1 (1 part water and 1 part milk). I should find out how this turns out in a few days once the dough has fully matured. I don't knead bread right now (pun intended), but I will be wanting pizza. So my experiment is continuing there.

Bread and Pizza

Well, I cooked the bread today, followed immediatly by the pizza. Both turned out exceptionally well. As you will remember, these were the 0.700 ratio doughs. I will move onto the 0.750 dough later this week.

Pizza experiment

Today I made a double recipe of pizza dough. This should be good for four pizzas total. I was hungry today, so I made one of them for supper, but as usual I put the rest in the fridge where it will stay until I use it. From casual reading of the Joy of Cooking, I believe this to be a variant of a sponge starter. Either way it takes bland dough to great dough!

As for the experiment I was doing today. The hurdle I am trying to overcome is the dough not rising as much as I would like while it is cooking. It is still fluffed up, but.... not as much as I want. I hit on my potential solution while talking to a friend about frozen pizza and the "rising crust pizza" came to mind. I instantly saw a potential solution, that is, to use chemical leaveners to supplement the yeast. I added 1 tablespoon of baking powder to my double recipe.

However, I unfortunately changed two things in my recipe by accident and botched the execution. I forgot the addition of 4 tablespoons of oil (I used to use olive oil, but now am working with butter) to the dough. As for how I botched the baking powder experiment, I forgot to add it to the dough before kneading it. I had finished when I remembered, so I quickly kneaded in a tablespoon. This means that it is probably poorly distributed and is not a good indication of whether I need to increase or decrease the amount added to the recipe.

All in all, the pizza I made tonight tasted great, and there is enough for leftovers for tommorows lunch.

Reheated Lasagna lunch

I recently made a vegetarian lasagna (I like meat as much as the next person, but I've had lots of good meat Lasagnas, but never a great one, while I have hat lots of great meatless ones). Nothing special, I tried a few new things and it turned out really well. Probably one of the best ones I've made recently. But those are trivial details compared to how I have discovered how to reheat it for lunches!

My problem was that, Lasagna, doesn't do very well in the microwave for reheating (or at least mine doesn't). It gets soggy and for some reason the cheese doesn't melt, it runs. It still tasted great, but reheated Lasagna is never the same as fresh cooked. Some foods do well reserved, Pizza can be reserved cold or reheated and lose very little of the original "wham, this is good!" This really bothered me, and I wasn't fully enjoying the meal, or at least as much as I could. So, as I had a few lunches that I could experiment with, I did some experiments.

At work I have access to a toaster oven, which does all of the typical toaster oven functions. Toasts, broils and goes up to 450 ºF. But fortunately, it is not located in the lunch room where I eat (rather it is relatively close to my desk, which is where I don't eat, but rather where I work before eating), and the containers that I transport the food to work are plastic, which unfortunatly means that for that "just melted" cheese taste, I need to get some of that freshly melted plastic taste and smell.

My solution? I lined my container with foil! Now don't think I shoved the plastic container wrapped in foil into the toaster oven, 'cause that would be stupid. I would have melted plastic on my foil enclosing my Lasagna, not a tasty combination. I instead removed the foil liner with the Lasagna in it, and placed that in the toaster oven near my desk for 15-20 minutes. I initially tried 350 ºF, but quickly found out that that was too high of a heat and some of the cheese started charring a little ( I noticed it before the charring led to a bad taste, which, is a fine line between good tasting charred and bad tasting burnt). I then turned the temperature down to 200 ºF and let it sit there until I was ready to go for lunch. I grabbed the foil out of the oven and back into the plastic container and headed up to the lunch room.

When I started to eat the Lasagna, it was like eating it straight out of the oven again, there were crispy parts, a nice browning on the cheese, the layers were well heated and not soggy. I was in reheated lunch heaven.

The problem with this in general is that, I am lucky enough to have a toaster oven conveniently close to me that I can shove food in before I go for lunch. So I can keep a semi-close eye on it while I work before going for lunch. I imagine for most people that this isn't the case. For those of you out in Internet land that only have the toaster oven in the lunch room, or worse yet, only a microwave. The only thing I can say is, I'm sorry for your loss, but if you can solve the reheating problem, then I would be more than happy to hear from you.

Juicing Citrus Fruit

In the past I have heard that microwaving a citrus fruit before juicing would allow you to get more juice out of it. After a little research, I found a plausible explanation for this, the microwaves break down the cell membranes so that the juices are able to flow more freely. I accepted this as fact until I read elsewhere that warming the fruit in the oven for a few minutes would have the same effect.

This made me suspicious, maybe it wasn't the breaking down of the cell walls, but rather, just the heat was somehow releasing the juices. All of this started to make me think, the information on the internet was sketchy, only claiming I would get more juice, never how it worked or even how much more I would get.

At this point, I realized that I would be hard pressed to discover how it worked on my own, so that question is still somewhat of a mystery to me. However, testing to see how much more juice I could get was a very easy and simple process.

For the purposes of this experiment I did not try the oven method, only because the information I could find on it said it took a few minutes, where as the microwave would take a few seconds. As such, if the microwave method worked, I would never bother with the oven method, only because it takes so much longer.

 For this experiment, I gathered two fine citrus specimens (I had planned on adding a Grapefruit and Lime to the line up, but I didn't really want their juices). I am going to talk about the steps I took on the Lemon, they were the same for the Orange, I just didn't photo document it.

 I tried to split the Lemon lengthwise so that each half weighed exactly the same. I came pretty close on the Lemon and almost exactly on the Orange, so I believe it is safe to say I succeeded. I then subjected one half of the Lemon to 10 seconds on Hi in the microwave. I haven't tested with other powers and time spans. I may do this in the future, but I have no plans to do so. The other half I did nothing too.

I don't have a citrus fruit juicer, so I used the next best thing, the back side of a spoon to juice both halves into pre-weighed custard cups. Using the tare option of my scale, I was able to measure the weight difference between the juice/pulp/seeds of each method. I then strained the juice and measured it separately. The results are shown below.

Lemon

Initial Weight of the full Lemon = 172 g

Microwaved half weighed = 79 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 30 g, the Juice alone weighed = 24 g

Traditional half weighed = 92 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 33 g, the Juice alone weighed = 22 g

 

Orange

Initial Weight of the full Orange = 188 g

Microwaved half weighed = 93 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 52 g, the Juice alone weighed = 18 g

Traditional half weighed = 94 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 52, the Juice alone weighed = 13 g

 

To break it down, when I Microwaved the Lemon, I was able to get 30.3% by weight as juice, compared to 23.9% when juiced with nothing special done to it. That is an improvement of 6.4% of juice from a Lemon, by microwaving the Lemon for only 10 seconds. Again, I haven't tried other power levels or time spans, so it may get better, or it may get worse. All I can say is that for a Lemon placed in a microwave for 10 seconds on Hi, you can expect to see a 6.4% increase in the volume of juice produced.

As for the Orange, the Microwaved half came out to 19.4% juice and the Traditional method produced 13.8%. Again a net benefit, albeit only a 5.6% increase. As I mentioned with the Lemons, all we can conclude is that you can get more juice my microwaving on Hi for 10 seconds.

The next logical step would be to test multiple power levels and time spans to determine the optimal time and power level to get the most juice from the citrus fruits. You would need multiple samples at each level to create a proper statistical model for this to work. This is my science disclaimer.

 

On another note, from the small sample I had, I noticed that the juice weighed 1 gram per 1 milliliter roughly.