Smoked Salmon Pizza

March 5, 2015January 5, 2019 amcarmen1 Comment

Hello Everyone! This pizza was actually the last pizza I made before flying off, so it was basically a pizza with anything I had left in the fridge to top it off with (except for the smoked salmon though, I bought that especially for this pizza). I have a few others up my sleeve but I haven’t had the chance to try them out. Maybe I’ll do another pizza series later on in the year when I get around to making them again.

If you read my very first post on the pizza series, you would’ve read somewhere that I was inspired to make my own pizzas from a DIY pizza night that my friend Tara held for her birthday last year. I made sort of the similar thing as tonights post. What I had planned was to do another stuffed crust pizza recipe, but I realised, once I had lined the walls of the pizza and sealed it, the dough that I rolled out was too thin in the middle. So what I ended up doing was folding the dough back in and instead of it being a stuffed crust pizza base, I incorporated the mozzarella cheese into the dough.

PREP TIME 10 MINS | COOKING TIME 10-15 MINS | SERVES 3-4

INGREDIENTS

Classic New York Style Pizza Dough Recipe
White Pizza Sauce Recipe
1 small red onion, halved then sliced
125g marinated mediterranean bocconcini
100g smoked salmon
2 tsp baby capers
1 tsp dried chilli flakes (or fresh chillies if available)
Handful of rocket leaves
Mozzarella cheese

METHOD

Preheat oven to 220C. Place your pizza stone in the oven as well to heat it up.
Roll out your dough to a circle the same size as your pizza stone on a lightly floured surface as thick or thin as you want.
Top with a handful of mozzarella cheese and fold the dough in again to incorporate the cheese into the dough. Or, if you prefer a stuffed crust, brush around the edge with a little water, then create a wall of the mozzarella cheese all the way around. Fold the edge over the mozzarella wall and seal it in by pressing down on the damp dough to form a stuffed crust.
Spread a thin layer of sauce onto the dough. Be very careful not to overdo the sauce; if you use too much sauce, it’ll be too rich and also will bubble over the pizza and burn. A quarter cup to a third is just about right per pizza.
Top the pizza with the bocconcini, capers, and red onion. If these aren’t quite to your fancy, then get creative and top your pizza with your favourite toppings.
Carefully remove the stone from the oven and quickly slide the pizza over the top of the stone. Place it back in the oven and bake for about 5-7 minutes. Remove from the oven and top the pizza with the smoked salmon. Then put it back in the oven for a further 2-3 minutes or until cooked all the way through. It should not take more than 15 minutes in total.
Remove from the oven and top with fresh rocket leaves and chilli flakes before serving.

BON APPÉTIT

– Ally xx

Anchovies & Capers Pizza

March 3, 2015January 5, 2019 amcarmen2 Comments

Hello Everyone! To kick off the week, we have something that might not fit people’s fancy. Yes, you read the title right, ANCHOVIES. I know a lot of people hate anchovies, in fact I heard from my manager while she was doing research for her client that there is even a ‘National Pizza with Everything (except Anchovies) Day’ which falls on the 12th of November. Both my manager and I found this ridiculous because we both love us some anchovies. If you too are part of the haters club, then just substitute the anchovies in this recipe for something else.

The links to the pizza dough and white-based pizza sauce is linked below in the ingredients list. Now, if you’re like me and don’t have a peel (a shovel-like tool used by bakers to slide loaves of bread, pizzas, and other baked goods into and out of an oven), then make sure that you roll out your pizza dough onto baking paper to ease in transferring the pizza onto the pizza stone.

PREP TIME 10 MINS | COOKING TIME 10-15 MINS | SERVES 3-4

INGREDIENTS

Classic New York Style Pizza Dough Recipe
White Pizza Sauce Recipe
1/2 punnet (125g) cherry tomato medley, halved
125g marinated mediterranean bocconcini
100g pitted kalamata olives
8-10 anchovy fillet
2 tsp baby capers
1 tsp dried chilli flakes (or fresh chillies if available)
Handful of rocket leaves
Mozzarella cheese

METHOD

Preheat oven to 220C. Place your pizza stone in the oven as well to heat it up.
Roll out your dough to a circle the same size as your pizza stone on a lightly floured surface as thick or thin as you want.
Brush around the edge with a little water, then create a wall of the mozzarella cheese all the way around. Fold the edge over the mozzarella wall and seal it in by pressing down on the damp dough to form a stuffed crust.
Spread a thin layer of sauce onto the dough. Be very careful not to overdo the sauce; if you use too much sauce, it’ll be too rich and also will bubble over the pizza and burn. A quarter cup to a third is just about right per pizza.
Top the pizza with anchovies, bocconcini, capers, cherry tomatoes, chilli flakes, and olives. If these aren’t quite to your fancy, then get creative and top your pizza with your favourite toppings.
Carefully remove the stone from the oven and quickly slide the pizza over the top of the stone. Place it back in the oven and bake for about 8-10 minutes or until cooked all the way through. It should not take more than 15 minutes in total.
Remove from the oven and top with fresh rocket leaves before serving.

BON APPÉTIT

– Ally xx

White Pizza Sauce

February 26, 2015January 5, 2019 amcarmen4 Comments

Hello Everyone! Before we knuckle down to the pizza business, I just want tot cover one more basic recipe. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t discriminate when it comes to pizza toppings, but there are times when I can’t stand tomato-based sauce spreads on my pizza. Most of the time I don’t mind, but there are times when I prefer not to have them and I don’t have a clear definition to explain why. It might be the flavour? Too acidic at times for me perhaps?

White-based sauces can never go wrong for me, which is why you’ll notice in a few of the upcoming pizza recipes, I stuck to a white-based pizza sauce. The recipe is very simple and basic. There’s nothing difficult about it other than getting the balance of flavours right. Get creative and spice it up the way you want to! The original recipe, along with a pizza topping recipe, can be found at Macheesmo. I was actually out of plain flour at the time I made this sauce, and since I was at that time flying off in a week’s time, I wasn’t bothered to buy a whole 1 kilo bag for just a tablespoon’s worth. So I used what I had… Wholemeal flour!

PREP TIME 5 MINS | COOKING TIME 10 MINS | MAKES SAUCE FOR 3-4 REGULAR-SIZED PIZZAS

INGREDIENTS

4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 large red onion, minced
2 cups heavy cream
1/4 cup unsalted butter
1 tbsp plain (or wholemeal) flour
1/2 tsp fresh thyme
Freshly ground black pepper
Pinch of salt

METHOD

Melt the butter in a medium-sized saucepan over medium-high heat. Once melted, bring the heat down to low and add the minced onions. Cook and soften the onions a bit, but don’t brown them. Have a little patience and let the onions cook low and slow until they are translucent.
Then add in the minced garlic and cook for a few more seconds, followed by the flour which will help thicken the sauce. Be careful not to over cook the flour or your sauce won’t thicken correctly. Stir it around for about a minute or two.
Slowly pour the cream over the flour mixture while constantly stirring or whisking to avoid the forming of lumps.
Once all the cream in stirred in, let the sauce simmer for a few minutes until it thickens. It should be the consistency of a light gravy. Season it with a pinch of salt, pepper, fresh thyme, and done!

Let the sauce cool down to room temperature before saucing your pizza. If you have any left overs, you can store it in a fridge and it will keep fine for a few days. You may find that it will solidify; don’t freak out. It’ll turn back into a sauce once in the oven.

BON APPÉTIT

– Ally xx

Homemade Salted Caramel Sauce

September 8, 2014December 31, 2018 amcarmen9 Comments

Hello Everyone! I’ll keep this short and to the point today, to compensate for a rather long post yesterday. Also only because I don’t have an amazing back story to tell! I mean, it’s just Salted Caramel Sauce really. Don’t forget to check out the original recipe at American Heritage Cooking where dubbed the BEST Salted Caramel Sauce.

PREP TIME 2 MINS | COOKING TIME 10 MINS | MAKES 1 JAR

INGREDIENTS

2 cups granulated sugar
170g unsalted butter, room temperature and cut into pieces
1 cup double cream, at room temperature
1 tablespoon sea salt rocks

METHOD

In a small saucepan, melt the sugar over medium-high heat, stirring frequently to avoid burning. Once all the sugar has melted, watch your caramel carefully, swirling the pan occasionally.
As soon as the sugar turns amber in colour add the butter and whisk vigorously until all the butter has melted.
Remove the pan from the heat and slowly pour in the cream while whisking vigorously until the cream is incorporated well, and then whisk in the sea salt rocks.

Now, the salted caramel in this recipe was used for Lydia’s birthday cake (which I did a post on yesterday). If you are making this sauce to keep for other recipes, set the sauce aside to cool for 15 minutes prior to pouring it into a glass jar, that has been sterilised, to cool completely. You can then refrigerate the sauce for up to 2 weeks, but remember to warm it up before using.

BON APPÉTIT

– Ally xx

Prawns with Salted Duck Egg Sauce

May 27, 2014December 28, 2018 amcarmen5 Comments

Hello everyone! Apologies for the lack of posts over the week. I assure you all that I am still eating well and I have not gone back to consuming instant noodles 🙂 The lack of posts is usually because I’ve already uploaded the recipe for it, or that what I’ve made is just a simple lunch/dinner that wasn’t photo-ready, and even also because I use natural lighting for all my photos, so when the sun is down, no photo = no post. And yes, my friends can vouch for the existence of many other photos that I have been accumulating over the past 3 years from when I first started to cook. The reason why I don’t want to use old photos is because some of them are out of focus, not presented well, or not the correct lighting, and basically…all over the place? I’m not too sure how to word the last one, but what I’m trying to say is that I’ve kind of adapted to the whole white background scene for my photographs, and I want to keep it consistently like that (unless of course for food that is not my own). I’m a little bit OCD so I like all my photographs to have the same style…for now.

Anyway, enough of the rant, about my apparent perfectionism, today I decided to make one of my favourite dishes, Prawn with Salted Duck Egg Sauce. If you read my previous post last week, I posted a recipe similar to this but with fried chicken instead. I also mentioned that I first tried this dish with prawns but have never actually made it for myself with prawns. So last week Saturday when I went to Paddy’s Market with Lina and Marissa, I bought myself some fresh tiger prawns to make this dish.

I must admit, I love prawns, but I barely cook with it only because I always have this tendency to overcook them. I always end up with dry and tough prawns which is a shame because, when cooked right, they’re just melt in your mouth delicious. I can never cook them to perfection as well because I’m always scared of them actually being undercooked. I am proud to say though that I was able to cook these prawns to melt-in-the-mouth perfection. I have never been happier. Plump, firm but tender, succulent, fresh prawns. Truly foodgasmic. Also a quick and simple dish that requires probably less than 10 minutes to cook. The only down side is that prawns are never cheap. Here at least that is…the ones I used here were almost $30 per kilo while I know I can get even fresher prawns back home for less than $10 per kilo.

PREP TIME 5 MINS | COOKING TIME 20-25 MINS | SERVES 2-3

INGREDIENTS

400g fresh tiger prawns, shelled and deveined (to save time, you can buy prawns that have already been shelled and deveined)
2 salted duck egg yolks, steamed and smashed
2 sprigs fresh curry leaves (dried leaves can be used as well if not available)
2 red bird’s eye chillies, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
1 can (350ml) evaporated milk
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Ground salt and pepper

METHOD

Heat oil in a large frying pan over high heat. Sauté the garlic, curry leaves and half of bird’s eye chillies until fragrant. Stir in the egg yolks until they start to foam. Add the evaporated milk and bring to a boil until the sauce has slightly thickened. *This recipe calls for 350ml of evaporated milk, if you want a drier dish, then use less milk
Season the prawns with salt and pepper and then add to the sauce mixture. Turn the heat down to medium and let the prawns simmer for 3-4 minutes. Once the prawns have turned pink, remove from the heat and garnish with remaining chillies. Serve immediately with steamed rice.

BON APPÉTIT

-Ally xx

Fried Chicken with Salted Duck Egg Sauce

May 20, 2014December 28, 2018 amcarmen2 Comments

Hello Everyone! Today for lunch I decided to pull out an old recipe that I have been making for a while now. I first came across a similar dish back in 2009/2010 maybe, at a restaurant back home, Mangrove Paradise Restaurant, where one of the waiters recommended the stir fried prawns with salted egg sauce. I am so glad that they made that recommendation because the dish was simply divine! I never tried to recreate this dish at home because, if you read my story on My Kitchen Journey, I was never really into cooking until 2 years ago really.

I was looking up recipes online one day figuring out what to make, and then I remembered this dish. I searched and searched online but could not find the one that I specifically had. I came across variations of the dish, but it wasn’t what I wanted to make. I then came across this recipe from yummylittlecooks which was close enough. I tweaked the recipe and method a bit, but I actually haven’t tested this recipe out with prawns, which I should definitely do next time, with some fresh curry leaves (I couldn’t find any this week so I resulted to used dried ones). They go so well with fried chicken though!

PREP TIME 1 HOUR | COOKING TIME 20-25 MINS | SERVES 4-5

INGREDIENTS

1/2 cup canola oil for shallow frying

For the marinade

15 pcs chicken mid-wings, washed and cleaned
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sesame oil
2 tbsp water
2 tbsp cornflour
2 tbsp plain flour
Dash of ground black pepper

For the sauce

3 salted duck egg yolks, steamed and smashed
2 sprigs fresh curry leaves (dried leaves can be used as well if not available)
3-4 red bird’s eye chillies, chopped
1 can (350ml) evaporated milk

METHOD

Combine all the marinade ingredients in a large bowl and mix the chicken around until well coated. Cover the bowl with cling wrap and leave to marinade for 1 hour. Do not refrigerate it to bring the meat down to room temperature before cooking.
Preheat oven to 180C. Heat up oil in a large frying pan an working in batches, shallow dry the chicken until skin is crispy and golden (about 4-5 minutes per side). Remove from the heat and place on a baking tray lined with aluminium foil.
Place the wings in the oven for a further 8-10 minutes to finish off in the oven. *In the past I have found that my wings were still a bit raw on the inside after frying, and frying them longer in the pan would either burn my wings or make it go dry, which is why I added this step in to finish cooking the wings without burning, and the wings remained crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside
Meanwhile, drain some on the oil from the pan and sauté the egg yolks, curry leaves and half of bird’s eye chillies until fragrant. Add the evaporated milk and bring to a boil until the sauce has slightly thickened. *This recipe calls for 350ml of evaporated milk, if you want a drier dish, then use less milk
Place the chicken wings on a shallow serving bowl and pour the sauce over the top. Garnish with the remaining chillies and curry leaves. Serve with steamed rice.