Monday Mix 9/18/23
Greek to me
Happy Mondays, everyone. I’m on the road today, so just sending out a quick hello before packing up from our lakeside rental and heading home to get back to the grind. The image above is from the New England Greek pizza recipe I recently finished developing for Chef Steps. If you don’t know Greek pizza, it’s another hyper-local style of pie that can be found mostly in MA and Southern New Hampshire, created by Greek immigrants to the area. You can usually identify a NE Greek pizza spot by its name: almost every place called “[Insert town name] House of Pizza” is one of them. To be honest, most Greek joints make pretty mediocre pies, though there are a few stand-out spots (to me, the best one is George’s Pizza House of Harwich Port, on Cape Cod), and when it is good, it can be as satisfying as any other style. It’s characterized by a thickish crust, with a fried crisp bottom and a tender, almost spongey interior.
My recipe development mirrored the reality of Greek pizza, in that most of the pies I made for the few weeks I spent on it were pretty meh, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to unlock it. Fortunately, in the end I did land on a formula that produced something I was happy with, and the good news is that it is stupid easy to make, provided you have the proper high-sided pan.
Later this week, I’ll be sharing images from an art photography book that veers into bread territory, so stay tuned for that.
What bready things did everyone else get up to this weekend?
—Andrew
I made four loaves of sandwich bread because my son came home from college! Bread fest!
Made pizza and a loaf of Ken Forkish's "The Standard" bread from his new cookbook, which is the most frequent bread made here. What I really want to say is that I cleaned up from all of that with my new Teiger dough cloth, as recommended here, and it's as excellent as recommended, and my regular kitchen sponge is so much happier now that it's not gummed up with old dough.