Come Mr. Curryman, Curry me some Fennel

 

Today’s secret ingredient in Chez Venza……Fennel!

Fennel is kind of a weird vegetable.  It’s sort of like an onion, sort of like celery, and tastes a little bit like licorice.  It’s not a powerful flavor, but there is nothing else quite like it that you could use as a substitute.  It also confuses the grocery store clerk when you buy one, so you can have a little fun at the grocery store. It also looks funky!

We were looking for an easy weeknight meal and came across Curry Dusted Scallops with Fennel-Apple Broth in Bon Appetit magazine (New food lit crush – totally got a subscription).  Uh, yeah.. doesn’t that sound easy?  Well, it mostly is!

We used to be afraid of cooking scallops, but it’s actually pretty easy.  It makes it seem like you’ve made something really fancy for dinner when you really didn’t have to do that much.

Other fun ingredients include apple, shallot, apple cider, apple vinegar, and curry powder.  You can use any curry powder that you like.  Fun fact:  “curry” just means a mixture of spices and is not a defined set of spices.  And according to Iron Chef, no self-respecting Indian would ever use a pre-mixed curry powder (we won’t tell if you won’t).

So we started with making the apple-fennel broth.  The saucepan includes the fronds of the fennel (that is the green leafy part), a chopped up apple, shallots, and apple cider.  This reduces until the cider absorbs up all the flavor from the shallot and fennel fronds.  We then strained out the solids so that we were left with a flavorful broth.  This is probably the first homemade, recipe specific broth we’ve ever made. Twas very tasty

A scallop is a type of mollusk that lives in a seashell.  You’ve probably seen a scallop shell a million times and never thought about before (but here’s a link to a picture if you need a visual).  Scallops tend to have a little “foot” where it attaches to the shell.  They tell you to remove that foot before cooking (although if you forget to do this step I don’t think it’s the end of the world).

The scallops get dipped in curry powder on both sides and then into the skillet they go!  They cook for about 2 minutes on each side and then they’re basically done.  We put them in the oven on low-heat while we cooked the sauce so that they would stay warm.  Despite the age of the curry powder, and the relatively low amount used… the house smelled of curry for a while.

The fennel bulb is chopped up and then put into the same skillet that had the scallops (so that it can pick up some of that curry flavor).  We also added another chopped up apple and let it cook for a few minutes until softened.  Then we added the cider broth that we had made earlier.  We finished it off with a little more curry powder, a tiny bit of apple cider vinegar, salt, and pepper. Then it’s time to assemble!

Doesn’t it look delicious?  We topped it with some green onions for color.  Fancy enough for a restaurant, but easy enough to make on a Tuesday. 

Weird Pizzas!

 

So… that’s not a weird pizza, but it does represent a breakthrough in pizza cooking in Chez Venza.  We finally found a couple of recipes that WORK, along with one little technique that really seals the deal.

We’ve monkey’d with pizza dough for a long while.  At one point, her mom gave us a pizza stone, and my mom gave us a pizza peel.  It was like it was our destiny to make pizza.  But to really make it… you have to make the dough.  It generally takes flour, water, olive oil, salt, yeast and time.  Previous efforts came out too dry … or too sticky…. or just right but it would stick to the peel as though its life depended on it.  This led to much cursing and bad pizza. 

Now, you can just put your pizza on a metal pan and slide it in the over, and it will work.  But using a peel and stone lets you up the ante heat-wise in the oven by getting the surface the pizza will sit on super-hot.  Commercial pizza ovens get between 700 and 1,000 °F.  Ours gets to 545°.  We need all the help we can get. 

To get your dough to slide off of the peel, cornmeal is often suggested.  We found that this doesn’t work well and doesn’t taste great.  Lots (and lots) of flour works… but then each bite coats your tongue with powder.  Not cool.

So now for the secret:  If you are going to try to cook with a pizza stone (or as a substitute, an upside down sheet pan) and you want your dough to leave the peel, put a piece of parchment paper between the dough and the peel.  Pizza and paper slides right off.  The paper chars a bit, but it doesn’t catch on fire.  Pizza comes out beautifully. 

Now the dough:  no mystery, the reliable recipes come from America’s Test Kitchen.  We did one out of their cookbook which only required about a 2 hour lead time for rising.  Then we tried another recipe off of their website (recipe available after free registration) that required the dough to rise for AT LEAST 24 hours in the fridge.  Both recipes turned out great, so it just depends on how much time you have.  The multi-day rise recipe was a little better, but the key to both is using Bread Flour and patience.

So, with our new found reliable recipe in hand, we got weird with it fast.  Out of Bon Appetit (one of our new culinary crushes), comes Fig and Goat Cheese pizza with Arugula Pear Salad.

A great chance to explore our grocery’s bulk item bin and get some big, ugly dried figs.  The figs are simmered into a jam along with rosemary, shallot, and marsala wine.

A little immersion blending doesn’t hurt either.

Figs as sauce.  Goat cheese on top.  We were too shy with the goat cheese (note for next time:  use more cheese!)

 

A dressed arugula pear salad goes on top (it’s just arugula, salt, pepper, olive oil, and sliced pear).  The figs are savory, the pears are sweet, the cheese is salty, and the crust is crunchy.  Mind. Blown.

Now, a typical pizza dough recipe yields enough for two pizzas, and the dough freezes well… so here is the sister pizza, which is even WEIRDER:  Smoked Salmon, Dill, and Goat Cheese Pizza.

No sauce on this one.  The dill, goat cheese, and red onion bake with the dough.  After it comes out, the pizza is topped with kalamata olives and smoked salmon.  Apparently, inspired by Scandinavian flavors.  It was weird and great.

So go forth!  and make lots of pizza, standard and weird.  Just don’t ask me how to toss pizza dough… at least not yet!