Of Pizza and Dumplings

Pizza

I've been making a lot of pizza.  I mentioned the spelt flour that I've added, but here is another new grain.

Kamut flour turned out not to be that great for creating a crust as it made the dough too fragile, at least in the proportions that I have tried so far.  However, it is a great flour to put on the pizza board in order to slide the pie into the oven.  It will take awhile to get through 4 pounds of the stuff!  Stretching the dough out.

Veggie pizza!

A variety of cheeses.

The before and after shots.

Finely ground black & white pepper with an equally ground up tiny dried jalapeno pepper is the key to an excellent sauce.  The jalapeno peppers are the same ones I use for my Kim-chi.

Dumplings

I was feeling nostalgic for chicken and dumplings.  In my youth, the dumplings were made with quick breads, but I was thinking, "why can't I make them with my wild dough?"  So I gave it a go using my usual pizza dough recipe of 210 grams of flour (Kamut, Spelt, and Organic white in equal proportions), 150 grams of filtered water, 40 grams of fresh starter, and 8 grams of salt.  After developing the dough overnight, I portioned it out into dumpling sized chunks, and let them rise.

 After rising for about 3 hours.

Plop them into some cooking chicken soup.

And served...

The dumplings where open airy, just the way I wanted them, but the flavor match up was off.  It did not go well with this watery soup.  So the next day I used the remainder of the soup and turned it into a creamy sauce using a roux and some whole milk.  The resulting sauce was poured over the dumplings.

This was excellent!  It was delicious. I wish I had saved more dumplings for this treatment.  It was also an excellent example of how to transform a mediocre meal into an exquisite dining experience.  The next time I will shape and separate the dumplings a little better, cook them separately in some water, and make a chicken gravy for them. Bon appetite!