Crispy glutenfree pizza dough

This pizza dough is clearly superior to any gluten free pizza dough I have baked before. Those have been quite "doughy" "gummy" like. Not so good that is. This one dough was very crispy and all of us in the family were amazingly impressed!
So let me just note down what we actually had in it, as we did not follow the original recipe.
The amounts given will give 3 square pizzas (Swedish oven size). If you think it is too much, just scale down the amounts to what you want to eat. But you be warned: it was sooo good that two of us nearly ate a whole pizza in one shot.

Crusty gluten free pizza

Ingredients

16 dl gluten free flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons salt

8 tablespoons olive oil

6 dl cold water

1 dl cooking water

1 dl cold water

100gr yeast

Instructions

Mix the flour with the salt. Add the olive oil. 

Mix the 6 dl cold water with 1 dl cooking water. Then add the yeast and make sure it melts in the water. Mix then the yeast water with the flour with care for a while. Then mix in the 1 dl cold water and the baking powder and mix again.

To be honest I think it should work to actually mix in the baking powder in the flour to begin with. But as I was actually following another recipe and the dough seemed to be far too compact so I added the 1 dl cold water at the end and the baking powder afterwards, this is how I described it above.

I am not sure if it makes a difference or not. But just to be sure so :)

Oven temperature 210 degrees with ventilation (as we baked multiple pizzas at the same time) and baking time was about 25 minutes, but keep an eye on the progress in case you need shorter time.

Tiramisu'

This is the weirdest of things. You can look up tiramisu' recipes around the world and not manage to find the best recipe around. The best recipe is my cousin Cristina's. She was the one that made tiramisu' for me for the first time. I was over ten then already. How have I even made it to survive the world for so many years without tiramisu, that is really unclear to me. Anyway back to the track: all recipes are different. Still none reminds of Cristina's. And, unfortunately, she does not do "Facebook" so it is basically impossible to get her original recipe. Remember she lives somewhere out in the bushes, too. Anyway. I made tiramisu today. Following some modified recipe of one of the many Internet recipes. And it came to me. I think my favourite recipe went like you find in the following.  I will make sure to use it next time. In the meantime, you are on your own. You might be lucky and have the chance to eat the most amazing tiramisu' or you will get stuck with a crappy one due to a lapse of my memory.

Tiramisù for Christmas - 2013-12-25

Ingredients

250gr mascarpone cheese
2 eggs
4 tablespoons sugar

Savoiardi cookies
Strong coffee

Cocoa

Instructions

Whip egg yolks with the sugar until very fluffy. Add some mascarpone at the time. Mix together. Whip the egg whites. Add some egg whites in the mascarpone fluff. Add then the mascarpone fluff in the whipped egg whites lightly until blended.

Put the cream in a rectangular container. I have used glasses sometimes for individual portions. 

Dip cookies in coffee. Layer it with the cream. I prefer the cookies to be well soaked and also to have a cream to cookie ratio above average. 

When done, use a little sieve and cover with a thin layer of cocoa.

Cocoa powder on the top - 2013-12-25

Ready and out.

Brasato

This is a typical Italian dish that my grandmom used to do on Sundays and we used to eat it together with Polenta.
This is not the traditional recipe, but something that tastes and smells pretty much alike and has very similar ingredients.

Ingredients
3 teaspoons oil
25gr butter  (but if you ask Mom, you'll have to at least double the amount of all mentioned fat :O) )
1/2 carrot
1/2 celery stalk
5-6 leaves of sage
3-4 small pieces of rosmary
500gr small steak onions (originally, the flat onces should be used, not available at ICA though)
3 cans of mashed tomatoes
500gr prime rib (Swedish: Högrev)
1 solo garlic
1 can of water
1 teaspoon salt
2,5dl red wine

Instructions
Grate the carrot and the celery stalk. Do holes in the meat and chunk in sage, rosemary, garlic in them. Salt (and pepper if you wish. I don't). Put carrot, celery and possibly sage and rosemary if you haven't chunked it all in the meat already in the oil and butter. Let it go slowly so that the fat catches taste. Brown the meat in it. Put onions in. Through the wine in and let the alcohol evaporate a little.

Put everything in a croc pot including the tomatoes and the water and let it cook for about 6 hours starting with 3-4 hours high heat and the rest low heat. Grandmom would actually cook it in a pot for 2-3 hours instead. Of course, Grandmoms tastes better, but I am not sure what more magic she did on the stove. :O)

Actually, I did brown meat first and put it in the crocpot and then reused the fat for the onions. That worked fine, too.

I do recommend to eat it with sliced hot polenta and gorgonzola.

Polenta

When I was little, I used to eat polenta nearly every Sunday lunch with brasato that grandmom used to cook. That was a real tradition. As you were supposed to continuously stir the polenta while cooking it in a copper calderon for around 45 minutes, the whole family made turns to cover up the long 45 minutes.

Now the world has developed and with the caldron you also have a stirring device, so no manual stirring is required any longer. I got to take over the copper caldron as my parents do not use it as often any longer.

So today we tried to cook the "original Italian Polenta" in a Swedish kitchen with a copper caldron. With stirring device:

Polenta in copper caldron - 8/8-2011

Ingredients (per person)
100gr Old style polenta flour (the grounding is rough)
4dl water
1ml salt

Instructions
Cook the water. Add the salt. Stir for 30-40 minutes depending on the flour cooking instructions. If it says less than that, you probably have some strange precooked type of meal that does not give the perfect results.
Heat should be slow, but the polenta should bubble at least once every few seconds.
It is done when tilting the pot yields the meal to separate itself from the pot.
Do not worry if a patina builds up around the pot. It is also normal that it burns lightly.

Serving
Serve it hot with brasato and with gorgonzola. I normally slice up polenta, put gorgonzola on it which leads to obvious melting and add some brasato sauce. I then pile up more slices that way and eat!

Collaterals from a Sunday pizza baking session...

A little background
Today, I wanted to use the oregano from the our garden, so I went for home made pizza for once instead of the classical Sunday pizza from Catarì that Janne is so good at baking.
Also a good occasion to test our new baking stones.

Ingredients
1 liter water
1 tbs salt
100gr yiest
1dl olive oil
flour (can be 1,5kg, can be something else... I'll double-check tomorrow)
This gives though a far too large amount of dough:

So I do strongly recommend you to halve the quantities unless you want to "go industrial"...

Instructions
Mix water (can be cold) with half the amount of flour and all the yiest for a while. I use my Kitchen aid. Some 5 minutes give a good result.
Let the dough rest for about 45minutes-1hour.
Add oil, salt and the rest of the flour. Mix some 5 minutes again.
Let it rest some 45minutes-1hour again.
Do your pizzas...
I go the "margherita" style and simply have tomato, oregano, salt, oil mixed together and topped with mozzarella cheese.

I got bored after my first pizza and realized I could do something else instead so we made some smaller pizzas, and some different breads. Apart from the pizza, which I forgot to take a picture of as I was too hungry (looked very good though... :O) ), here is a picture of the collaterals...:

The collaterals will, of course, be frozen. To warm up, use the oven at 100degrees Celsius.