I received a message a week or so ago from our French club president, Katie, who is graduating this year and moving to France. She wanted to organize a party and invite all the students and faculty in the French program to celebrate the end of the year and the end of this phase of life for her and her classmates. She decided on a potluck. In her message she asked if we would make something French inspired and then she wrote:

“If you are planning on coming, just e-mail me and tell me what you are bringing.”

I replied:

“I’m bringing the other professor E. with me, I hope that’s alright. I’m also bringing pissaladi?re. I’ve been telling you in our literature class all semester to look at a word and figure out what verb it is related to. This one is an exception ;). Pissaladi?re is made in the south of France. It’s like pizza but without the cheese; I thought that it would be good for the non-animal eating people. I’m going to try and make some sort of dessert as well, but I’m not sure what yet. Clafoutis, g?teau au yaourt, tarte aux pommes, tarte au citron?”

Like I said, pissaladi?re is like pizza without the cheese. The word comes from pissalat or pissala - originally peis salat or peis sala - meaning salted fish in proven?al. Traditionally, the dough was spread with a pur?e of anchovies or a combination of anchovies and sardines. If you buy it in Nice nowadays, it doesn’t have the pissalat layer, but instead will most often have a layer of caramelized onions and a harlequin pattern of anchovies dotted at intervals with black olives. There is sometimes a little cheese, but only a sprinkling. Some versions are cooked more like a pie and can even be made with pie dough or puff pastry, but these are sacrilege. The toppings and variations are endless. Because some of my students are vegan, I made one with caramelized onions and swapped the anchovies for roasted red pepper strips and I used the wrinkly oil cured olives. For the other, I used thinly sliced tomato, chopped garlic, the same olives and bits of anchovy. I finished them both with a generous dusting of herbes de Provence and a slather of olive oil.

The other professor E. (aka the husband) had decided to stay home, too much work to do he said, but as he saw me packing up the food I was bringing, he hopped in the car and came along. So predictable.

Pissaladi?re

For dough

• 1 t active dry yeast
• 1 t sugar
• 1 cup warm water
• 3 cups flour
• 2 t olive oil, divided
• 1 t salt

For toppings

• 2 lbs onions
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 3 red peppers, roasted, seeded, skin removed
• OR
• 2 cans anchovies
• 16 oil cured olives, pitted and halved
• 1 T herbes de Provence
• Olive oil

One day ahead of time, put yeast, sugar and water in a bowl large enough to hold all of the dough ingredients (or in the bowl of a stand mixer). Let sit for about ten minutes until the mixture is foamy. Add in flour, 1 teaspoon oil and salt and stir until dough forms a ball (if using stand mixer, mix with dough hook). Turn dough out onto a clean dry surface dusted with flour and knead for about 5 minutes. Place dough in a bowl with remaining teaspoon olive oil and turn dough to coat. Cover bowl with a kitchen towel or plastic wrap. Wait for an hour or until dough is about doubled in size. Punch down the dough, reform it into a ball and place it in the towel or plastic covered bowl in the refrigerator overnight. The dough may be kept in the refrigerator for up to 2 days or frozen and defrosted before proceeding to the next steps.

Peel and thinly slice onions into half rounds. Cook them with 1 teaspoon olive oil over medium low heat for about two hours. Stir occasionally and add water if they start to stick or get too brown. Add the garlic during the last 20 minutes or so. Let cool before using (may be done 1-3 days ahead and can also be frozen). Preheat oven to highest temperature possible (mine claims to go to 550 degrees). Put about 1 tablespoon olive oil in a rimmed baking sheet and stretch pizza dough to fit (if it’s fighting with you, cover it, let it rest and try a second time). Spread a thin layer of caramelized onion over dough, decorate with pepper strips or anchovies and dot with halved olives. Sprinkle on herbes de Provence and drizzle a little olive oil over everything, brushing some on the exposed edges. Cover with a towel and let rise about 20 minutes. Cook in pre-heated oven for about 10 minutes, or just until the edges start to brown. Let rest at least 10 minutes before cutting. May be served hot or at room temperature.

I wasn’t really expecting to write about pizza making this week. There are so many sources on-line, and so many opinions about the stuff, I thought I’d just keep mine to myself. But there’s this new blog started by three people who already have their own individual blogs. Beth, Kevin and Susan have invited people to bake along with them for a whole year exploring different methods and types of baking bread and they are posting their experiments, thoughts and recipes for 12 different kinds of bread for a whole year. They’ve called it A Year in Bread.

They announced their project in January and I held my breath to see what kind of bread they’d start with and…it was pizza dough. At first I felt a little let down. Here I was expecting to follow along and bake some perfect bread to go with my Easter feast next weekend and they served up a tomato pie. But then I thought, pizza really is a good way to start. It somehow seems less scary than other yeasty things. People don’t expect greatness from it. Unless of course you are like the guys who write Slice, a blog dedicated just to pizza.

I’ve been making pizza since I was about 14 years old. Back then, it was from some awful mix that came in a cardboard can, kind of like how breadcrumbs are packaged. All I had to do was add water, knead it a little, let it rise and roll it out. I used sauce from a jar and piled on the cheese, pepperoni, ham, bacon, sausage and any other meat that my brothers were begging for. The crust wasn’t very good and I always put on too much sauce. It was really just a topping delivery system. You really can’t blame me, though, this was the 80s in middle America and my family ate it up and begged for more.

Our neighbors were a pizza obsessed family. They ordered delivery a lot more often than we did. They made pizza bagels all the time in their toaster oven. You put pizza sauce and mozzarella cheese on top of a bagel and put it in the toaster oven until the cheese melts. Voil?, you have the perfect afternoon snack. They also always had bags of pizza rolls in their freezer. They are like pillow shaped spring rolls, about an inch long and they have pizza flavoring inside. Kind of. Do those things still exist? I haven’t had them in years. So Sara, the youngest of the family, once got suspended from school because of pizza. She was in middle school and they were having a picnic to celebrate the end of the school year. I think it was supposed to be a pot luck or the kids were supposed to bring their lunch or something. I don’t recall the details. Sara ordered a pizza delivered to the park. For some reason, the teachers at the school got all bunched up because of pizza being delivered to the park during the school picnic. It’s not like she didn’t have the money to pay for the pizza or anything. I’m not sure if this happened before or after Spicolli ordered pizza delivered to his class in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Sara got to stay home from school for three days and her mom had to go to work, so she was home alone. She probably got to make herself pizza bagels for lunch every day.

I started making pizza again after a long hiatus about 8 years ago and since then I make it once every couple of weeks. Other than the rising of the dough, pizza is a pretty easy thing to make and it always feels like we’re having something special. When I tell Erik we’re having pizza for dinner, he never fails to yell out, OH BOY! For a long time I used the recipe out of Moosewood Low Fat Favorites, which is a great book. The dough recipe calls for 1/2 cup whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup oatmeal flour (that you make by whizzing oatmeal up in the mixer, a genius idea) and about 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. This is a great healthy alternative to all white flour pizza dough and it’s how I made pizza dough for about 5 years. Then Erik started making baguettes based on the method in Cook’s Illustrated magazine (and some suggestions from my brother who used to be a baker). One day he had several baguettes chilling in the fridge doing their long slow rise and we were trying to figure out what to have for dinner to go along with the bread. After poking around in the fridge one of us came up with the idea for making the “bread” into a pizza instead. This was the best idea ever. It made the ideal crust, the paradoxical combination of crispy, chewy, bready, bubbled up goodness that is so elusive when making pizza at home. So we switched camps and made pizza from this method until the no-knead bread recipe came out in the New York Times and we stopped making our good baguettes and started making awesome boules. But then we stopped making pizza. How could this happen?

So, the invitation to bake bread is well-timed for this household and pizza now seems like the perfect place for us to start. We’ve made three versions this week. On Monday, we had a guest for dinner who told me he doesn’t really like cheese, so we made a focaccia with carmelized onions, mushrooms and rosemary. For the dough, I had just thrown together warm water, yeast and sugar in the bowl of my kitchen aid, let it foam up and then put in salt, a little olive oil and some flour. I let the machine do most of the work, but then gave it about 5 minutes of kneading at the end. I let this rise once on the counter, punched it down after 2 hours and then put it in the refrigerator until I needed it. I stretched it out, slicked on a bit of oil, put in some dimples and scattered on the toppings. After about an hour on the countertop, I slid it into the oven and then…I overcooked it a little, it was too dry. And there wasn’t enough salt. But the toppings were awesome and so were the tapas that Erik made to go with it.

Last night, we made the Moosewood recipe for old times sake and because we’re looking to put more whole grains in our diet. From what I’ve learned about making pizza and yeasted dough in the last few years I figured I could get a lighter, crispier crust out of those whole grains than I had in the past. I was right. I used to just cook it in a rectangular baking sheet slicked with a little oil, but it’s so much better to divide the dough in half and cook it in two separate shifts. The crust is thinner, crispier and has a more authentic feel to it. It’s also really important to let the dough have a good long rise in the refrigerator overnight and to have your oven at maximum heat for about a half hour to an hour before you cook the pizza so that the pizza stone has a chance to really heat up. We didn’t really respect the essence of the Moosewood collective, though, because we put bacon, mushroom and onions on one of them and sausage and mushrooms on the other one.

Tonight we had pizza again. Are we getting boring? No way. You know those people who say they could eat pizza every night? We are those people. Just change the crust and the toppings a little, though, please, and we could probably eat it for weeks straight before craving something else. This time, I followed Beth’s directions from the A Year in Bread site. This dough was awesome. The one thing that was different from the baguette recipe we used to make was that there was no poulish to start it out, but I think that if I used one, it might be even better.

Pizza toppings can be contentious. When we order pizza, we usually have it with mushrooms and onions. I judge a pizzeria by their crust and their mushrooms. Those mushrooms from a can are out the door. When I make pizza at home, I’ll usually make a salad to go with it, but lately, I’ve been into steaming some spinach and layering some on top of my pizza. Back when I lived in Ann Arbor, I knew a guy who worked for the international division of Domino’s pizza (that’s where the headquarters is). His job was to help people start Domino’s franchises in different areas of the world. He had lived in Paris while they were working on operations in Europe and then he had been to Southeast Asia after that. Part of his job was to work with marketing people to figure out what toppings to put on the pizzas depending on the tastes of that country’s population. My favorite French topping is an egg, it’s placed right in the middle of the pizza about halfway through the baking of an individual pie. The yolk has to stay really runny and you sop it up off of the plate as you eat the pizza. I’m not sure if the Domino’s pizza in France offers that option, but it’s on the menu of every pizzeria in Paris. I guess in India they had to develop versions with chicken curry and different kinds of chutney. And I thought I was adventurous by ordering anchovies. Those of you who are vegan in search of things that taste like meat will be overjoyed with the recent recipe for vegan pepperoni posted at the FatFree Vegan Kitchen. It’s on my list of things to try out soon. Not that I’m vegan, I just like those vegetarian things that taste like meat without having all the fat. And I like to make my vegetarian friends happy.

For making the dough, I recommend that you have a look at Kevin, Beth and Susan’s recipes. Their proportions are all very similar, though Susan doesn’t use any oil and all three of them have good advice. I particularly like Beth’s recipe because you make it the night before and forget about it until the next evening, but I’m a plan ahead sort of person, so you may prefer Kevin or Susan’s method. Here is how I make my sauce. I use it for pizza and also as a base for pasta sauce. Sometimes it ends up in other things like osso buco. I usually make lots of it at one time and then freeze it into one and two cup plastic containers. It can easily be doubled or tripled. I used about 3/4 cup of sauce on each pizza.

Marinara sauce

• 1 T extra virgin olive oil
• One onion, peeled and roughly chopped
• 3-4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 t red pepper flakes
• 1 T oregano
• 1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped
• 1 t salt
• 1/2 t freshly ground black pepper
• 1 box Pom? chopped tomatoes

Put olive oil in a pot over medium high heat. Add next six ingredients, onions through basil. Turn heat to medium low and cook until onions become soft and translucent and everything else becomes really fragrant, about 6-8 minutes. Add salt, pepper and tomatoes. Cook until all the flavors meld together and sauce has thickened somewhat, about 20 minutes. If you want a smooth sauce, you can use an immersion blender while it’s still hot, or let it cool and use a blender or food processor. Makes about 3 cups.

I’m always buying bananas at the store because they are such a good deal and so good for you. The plan is to eat one after I go to the gym, but of course, even when I do go to the gym, I forget to eat my banana and then I’m at work and it’s only 11 and I’m famished and I eat my lunch. That would be o.k., but then I’m starving again by 5 and I never want to eat a banana when it’s happy hour. Maybe I should work on a recipe for a banana daquiri and kill two birds with one stone. What usually happens is I buy bananas, don’t eat them until they are over-ripe, then I take pity on their sad brown and yellow skins and bake banana bread. Instead of bananas, let me eat cake.

Bananas are originally from southeast Asia, but they are cultivated in over 130 countries. They are ranked fourth in world-wide crop production, after rice, wheat and corn. While most Americans know only the yellow dessert banana, sweet and eaten raw when ripe, most of the bananas in the world are of the type meant to be cooked and are eaten as a starch much like potatoes. Bananas are first mentioned in buddhist texts from the sixth century B.C. and are also described by Alexander the Great about three hundred years later. The word banana is of African origin and probably came into use in English through Spanish or Portuguese. One explanation of the name is that it comes from the arabic word for finger, ‘banan’. This may or may not be true, as is usually the case with etymology. Another possibly true claim is the idea that the fruit of original sin was not an apple, but a banana. If this idea were to be widely accepted, christianity might have to be re-thought.

Last year, I made banana bread and took it my brother Paul’s house as a gift. We ate it toasted for breakfast, my favorite time for sweets. He was raving about it and complaining about someone else in our family baking terrible banana bread. I won’t name names, but I’ll say that I think this recipe is very, very good and that anyone in my family, and anyone else for that matter, should adopt it. It includes both baking powder and baking soda, the latter offsets the acidity of the buttermilk, which is what makes the bread so moist and flavorful. If you don’t have buttermilk, you can substitute an equal amount of plain yogurt. You can also make this recipe and bake it in six small loaf pans if you want to give it away at holiday time.

Banana Bread

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 Tablespoon baking powder
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup walnuts, chopped (optional)
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 2 cups mashed ripe bananas
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350?F. Butter and flour 2 9×5x2 1/2-inch metal loaf pans. Whisk first 4 ingredients in medium bowl to blend.

Beat butter in large bowl until fluffy. Gradually add sugar, beating until well blended. Beat in eggs 1 at a time. Beat in mashed bananas, buttermilk and vanilla extract. Beat in flour mixture. Mix in nuts (if using). Pour batter into prepared pans.

Bake bread until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 1 hour 15 minutes. Turn out onto rack and cool.

Makes two 9-inch loaves.

Mark Bittman’s article on Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread has caused a brouhaha in the blogosphere. Here’s the deal: you combine flour, water, yeast and a little salt in a bowl to make a very wet dough, cover it with plastic wrap and wait a really long time, preferably 18 hours or more. You then form the dough into a boule (a large ball, a traditional shape for French sourdough) and let it rise another two hours. You preheat your oven and a 6- to 8-quart pot and its lid to 450 degrees. You toss the dough into the hot pot, slap on the lid and bake for 30 minutes, remove the lid and bake for another 15-30 minutes. The written recipe differs slightly from what is shown in the video. You’ll need to sign in to the New York Times to view this.

Most bloggers are very proud of their gorgeous photos; this bread is beautiful. Not everyone is equally happy with the results, however. If you’re not an expert baker, you won’t know the simple details, like you really do need to have the dough at around 70 degrees for optimal rising. You also can’t disturb the dough too much while shaping it as that will deflate all of the lovely bubbles. Finally, everyone is saying that one reason you don’t need to knead the dough and also the reason that it makes such a divine crust is that the dough is very wet. Unfortunately, this can also make the crumb inside a bit rubbery or wet.

In my typical over-analyzing, I’d been reading about this bread baking craze and the chemistry of yeast, trying to decide how to modify the recipe, and basically just thinking about it. Erik and I had discussed the bread with our friend and colleague, Heather, all three of us having made bread in the past and all three of us interested in trying out the recipe. While I was still hemming and hawing, Heather plunged in and made some bread. She is one of those great spontaneous cooks, never planning too far ahead or measuring, just trying and adapting as she goes along. Well, Heather didn’t measure her ingredients; she just looked at the video. She didn’t follow the recipe, because she already had a sour dough starter in her fridge. So, she made her bread and it was amazing! It had a crunchy crust on top and a chewier, caramelized crust on the underside. Big holes, great flavor. Heather is not only an amazing cook, she is also really generous. She gave me some of her starter and I brought it home and started a batch.

I think I hadn’t made this bread straight away partially because I don’t have the Le Creuset Dutch oven that is called for in the recipe. I’ve got 2 All-Clad Dutch ovens, but they are stainless, and I worried about the bread sticking. Erik reminded me about the Lodge cast iron camp Dutch oven rusting in our basement. He bought it about ten years ago and had never used it and hadn’t even seasoned it. I think this is somehow my fault, though I’m not quite sure why. Before any other steps to my own holey grail, I had to haul this behemoth up from the basement and season it.

I made a first batch of the bread with Heather’s starter and followed the recipe fairly closely otherwise. It was easy. It had the holes. It had the crust. The crumb was a little wet, as predicted, but it dried a little as it cooled and turned out great. It needed more salt, but would more salt inhibit the yeast?

I decided to try the recipe this time with commercial yeast and a little extra salt. The dough rose up a lot more, and I did a better job of not getting it stuck to the towel. I upped the oven temperature as demonstrated in the video. I also measured the flour and water in cups and then I weighed them so that I could give both volume measurements (for normal Americans cooks) and measurement by weight (for non-Americans and people like my brother Paul, who used to be a baker and who would for sure give me some crap about this if I didn’t give the measurements in grams). This bread was indeed very holey and I’ve felt like I’ve enacted my own miracle. I’m starting to feel like I’m living up to my blog’s name.

In the New York Times video, Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery tells Mark Bittman that anyone can make this bread, even a six year old, which has garnered some laughs. The other thing that Mr. Lahey says is that the recipe should be freely shared. This last bit has not been mentioned much, but I take it to mean that I can spread the good news with my own adaptation and you should also tell two friends.

My final conclusions? The starter I got from Heather made a better tasting bread than the commercial yeast. Basically, there are two essential elements to this bread and you can fool around with the rest of the recipe. First, the long fermentation of a highly hydrated dough and second, the cooking method: the closed pot inside of a hot oven gives that elusive crackly crust reminiscent of the best French bakeries. Even if you’ve never been to France, you’ll get the longing for Paris like the rest of us.

No-knead bread: an adaptation

• 3 cups (460 grams) all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
• 1 1/2 cups water (350 grams)
• 1/4 teaspoon instant yeast or 1/4 cup starter
• 11/2 teaspoons salt
• Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed

Combine flour, yeast (if using) and salt in a bowl. Add water (and starter if using instead of yeast). Use one hand to bring it all together into a shaggy sticky ball. Cover bowl with plastic wrap or a damp kitchen towel and let rest about 18 hours at around 70 degrees.

Turn dough out of bowl onto a lightly floured surface and toss a little more flour on top. Fold it over on itself once or twice and quickly shape dough into a ball. Place ball on a smooth cotton towel that’s been covered with a generous amount of wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and sprinkle with more bran or cornmeal. Fold the towel over the top of the dough and let rise for about 2 hours until doubled in size.

At least a half hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 500 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (something that can go in the oven, even a Pyrex covered dish will do) in oven as it heats. Pull pot from oven. Flip dough out of the towel and into your hand, seam side up and toss it into the pot. Don’t worry if it looks a little misshapen. Replace lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until top of bread is brown. Cool on a rack for at least 45 minutes (resist the temptation to cut into this right away; it needs the cool down so that the water can evaporate).