Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television

This week on Milk Street, we finally uncover the secrets to great homemade pizza dough. Then we make a very simple shaved zucchini salad. And, finally, we travel to Rome to uncover the secrets of the mother of all pasta sauces. That would be cacio e pepe, cheese and pepper. Stay tuned for the Roman classics right here on Milk Street. Funding for this series was provided by the following. Ferguson's proud to support Milk Street and culinary crusaders everywhere. For more information on our extensive collection of kitchen products, we're on the web at fergusonshowrooms.com. Cooking happens in the kitchen. But life happens around the kitchen table. The 1919 Collection-- celebrating yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Visit us at www.1919cookware.com. For 25 years, Consumer Cellular's goal has been to provide wireless service that helps people communicate and connect. We offer a variety of no-contract plans, and our U.S.-based customer service team can help find one that fits you. To learn more, visit ConsumerCellular.tv. Now, I've been making pizza for 40 years. That's a really depressing statement. Anyway, so about a year ago, I was making pizza... I would grill it sometimes. It was a July day, it was very hot and humid, in the 90s. And the pizza was fabulous. It hit the grill, and it bubbled up, had a great chew. You know, wasn't tough-- terrific pizza. And so the thought went across my little tiny brain that maybe the hot day had something to do with the success of the pizza. But it was your job to figure out if that was actually true or not. Yeah, that's right. And so the first thing we did trying to, you know, get to things quickly, was, you know, front load the dough with heat. So we used really warm water, we mixed the dough in a food processor, got it really warm, we let it rise in a really warm place. And, of course, it rose very quickly. But, you know, the end result wasn't that great. So we knew that wasn't the secret. Really, the best way to get flavor in a dough is a really nice long, cold fermentation. And then we're going to introduce the heat a little later. Wow, a little anticipation. Let's go ahead and mix our dough. Here we have four cups of bread flour, which has a nice high gluten content, which is great for pizza dough. And we're just going to add a tablespoon of white sugar. And then we're going to add three quarters of a teaspoon of instant yeast. We're just going to put this on low and let it mix for about 15 seconds. Okay, and now we're going to add a cup and a half of water. And this isn't a whole lot of water. This dough is not very hydrated. It's only about 60, 62%. And while it's true that wetter doughs do produce, like, a more bubbly crust, it's actually really, really difficult to handle, and it's very difficult to roll out. So I'm going to add this water. And then we're going to go ahead and let this mix until we have a lumpy dough. And that's going to take about five minutes. Okay, so this looks great. It's just lumpy. We're not looking for a smooth dough. Now we're going to let this rest for 20 minutes. We're going to give it a nice, long hydration period to really allow the flour to, you know, absorb all of that water that we added. So I'm going to cover it with plastic so it doesn't get dried out on the top, and I just leave it right here in the mixing bowl. Okay, Chris, so the dough has been resting for a good 20 minutes, and it's really well hydrated, and we're ready to add our salt and finish mixing. I would be the kind of person who might cheat this and let it sit five minutes. So is 20 minutes really essential? It really does help, and makes a difference. And I can show you what the dough looks like just after resting. Before, it was all lumpy, and now you can see it's really smooth, and it's really absorbed that water. And now when we go to mix it, we don't have to mix it nearly as long to get the same amount of gluten development. So I'm going to go ahead and add two teaspoons of kosher salt. And again, mix this on low for about seven minutes. Ooh, that does look smooth. - Right? And because there's a good amount of dough in the bowl, sometimes you'll notice that the dough might start to climb up the dough hook. It's no big deal-- you just stop the mixer and scrape it back down. I have another solution to that problem. I put it on high, and it just whips it around so fast, it falls off the dough hook. Flies out of the bowl and onto the wall. Well, it gets it off the dough hook, if that's your objective. Okay, so you're going to mix the dough for five to seven minutes. Okay, Chris, so our dough is done mixing. You can see it's nice and smooth and elastic. Okay, we're going to turn this out onto a well-floured countertop. Now, instead of just going ahead and putting this whole mass of dough into the fridge, we are actually going to divide it up right now. And I'm going to go ahead and divide this to four equal pieces. And then we're going to shape each one into a ball. And it's okay to use some flour on the dough if it's sticking to your hands, but you do want to have a little resistance on the counter to roll against, so you can just leave yourself a little extra space. And I'm just pushing the dough round with the edge of my hand against the counter. That looks great. You know what's really annoying about that, is you do it so well, and it looks so easy to do, but normal humans, it's not going to be that easy-- look at that. Well, I'm going to let you try one. Ugh! - Are you... You know, you consider yourself a normal human? I don't know-- am I? And then once I form the ball, I'm going to ahead and put it into a well-oiled pint-size deli container. So I'm going to go ahead and cover these, and we're going to put them in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours, and up to 72 hours. If you go any longer than that, then the structure will start to suffer. And the great thing about this, if you're not going to bake these pizzas within that time period, it does freeze very well. And the way to freeze them is you're just going to put the container without the lid on into the freezer until it's frozen, the dough freezes, then put the lid back on, and then you can keep it in the freezer for up to a month. When you're ready to use it, you just need to pull it out and put it in the fridge to thaw overnight. - So one question-- do you let it sit for 24, 48 hours in the fridge before you freeze? - You do, yeah. You don't want to go longer than 48 if you are planning to freeze the dough, because it will have that extra day when it thaws in the fridge. - Got it. Okay, Chris, so here I have a round of pizza dough that's been in the fridge for 48 hours. And I want to show you all the little bubbles. You can see it's risen beautifully. You take the top off, it's going to be, like, one of those, like, snake things that come out of the can. Is this under pressure, or what? So this is where our heat aspect comes in. Because we found when you just let the dough sit out, it never got quite warm enough. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to put this dough into a bowl of very warm water. So what that's going to do is it's going to actually relax the gluten, and it makes it really easy to shape the pizza, which is something that we really liked. It's also... it gets the yeast going again so we get really nice bubbles formed in the pizza crust. So warmth at the last, with the last bit of the rise. Yeah. So we're going to just sort of jump start that last rise. And we're going to put it in 100-degree water. And we're just going to let this hang out for about 30 minutes, until it comes to 75 degrees. So while that is warming up, we're going to go ahead and make our topping for our roasted mushroom pizza. Now, here we have a pound of Portobello mushrooms. We do remove the gills first, as you can see. And that's really important, because not only do the gills sort of break down and make all the mushrooms kind of murky, but they're a little bit slimy, and kind of off-putting in the texture. We're going to add a third of a cup of extra virgin olive oil. And a half teaspoon of kosher salt. I'm going to stir this up. And I should mention that before we started, I heated the oven up to 550 degrees. And you want to make sure that oven is heating for at least an hour before you bake your pizza. Now, do you put the stone in before you pre-heat? You do-- I have a rack set in the upper middle position, and also a rack set in the lower middle position for the mushrooms. I put the steel on the upper middle rack for the pizza. So I'm going to spread these in an even layer on a baking sheet. And we want to roast these for a good 15 minutes. And what we want to do, make sure we get all the water out of the mushrooms, and they just start to brown. I'm going to take them out, I'm going to add... we have three cloves of minced garlic here and one tablespoon of finely chopped fresh thyme. And we're going to add that in and let it go for another three to four minutes, until the mushrooms are well browned, and the garlic is just starting to toast. Okay, so while the mushrooms are roasting, we're going to go ahead and make the sauce for the pizza. And I absolutely... - Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I mean, like, pizza toppings are a couple of things here. We're doing a sauce, we're doing mushrooms... This is a really easy sauce, and it's totally worth it. This sauce was inspired by Nancy Silverton. And it's a fontina, parmesan, and cream sauce, and it takes, like, literally three minutes to make. And you can make it ahead and leave it in the fridge for up to three days, and you'll see, it's really... it's worth it. It's got three quarters cup of heavy cream, and we're just going to whip that up to stiff peaks on medium speed. It's going to take about two and a half minutes. (mixer running) And that's it. Going to take it off the mixer. And now to this, we're going to add one cup of shredded fontina. A quarter cup grated parmesan. We have a tablespoon here of finely chopped fresh rosemary. And then a half a teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper. So I'm just going to fold that together, and that's it-- it's easier than red sauce. I take back everything I said. There you go. Looks easy and it looks delicious. Okay, so we're going to let our mushrooms finish roasting. I'm going to add that garlic and thyme. And then we're going to let the mushroom cool. And then we're going to be ready to make our pizza. Okay, Chris, you can see our dough is ready to go. Remember when I used the term "explode"? Yeah, I do. It does look like it's kind of pressing up here. It's ready, it's ready-- it's warm and it's ready to go. So we're going to take it out of the water and flour our countertop here. (laughs) - I'm standing back. That wasn't so bad. Wow, okay. Oh, this looks great. I floured my fingers to just sort of ease it out. But we oiled it well, so it's going to slide right out. Okay, now I'm just going to flip it over so it's, again, seam side down. I like to sort of press it out a little bit, and then I pick it up with my hands. I'm just going to put some flour on the back of my hands here so it doesn't stick. And then I'm just going to gently stretch. You don't want to stay in the center, because then you'll end up with a hole in the center. Well, that's true. When I first started doing that, the center, you know, just broke apart. Yeah, you want to kind of work around the edges, kind of use my thumbs and sort of push. So this actually uses gravity to do a lot of the stretching. The one time that gravity is your friend. (laughs) Well, I guess nobody's 19 years old around here anymore, that's... - It's true. So I keep going around. We want this to get to a 12-inch circle. And you can see I'm not totally at the edge, so there's a rim that's forming naturally. And you can see it's so nice and relaxed, because we let it warm up to 75 degrees. Well, you gave it a warm bath. Who doesn't relax in a warm bath? Who doesn't relax in a warm bath? That looks about good. All right, now I'm going to grab the peel. And before we put this on, we're going to use semolina, which I think is the best thing to use for baking pizza, because they act like little ball bearings. You know, flour enough just isn't going to let it slide out of... you know, into the oven. And cornmeal's too crunchy. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, when you eat it. This is nice-- you don't even notice it. Then I'm just going to carefully slide this on. Okay, and now we're going to top it. We have one cup of that fontina parmesan cream sauce that we made. The recipe does make enough for two pizzas. Going to scrape this out. I like to use the back of a spoon. You don't want to press too hard down on the pizza. You just want to gently work it out. And you don't want to take it all the way to the edge. You want to bring it up to that border that we made. You want to leave about a half inch around the edge of the pizza so that the sauce is contained. I always order white pizza, and I never knew it was this easy to make. Well, a lot of white pizzas, though, you know, Pepe's in New Haven, where I used to go many, many years ago, it was just a white pizza with clams-- there wasn't... there was no cream sauce on it. It was just plain. Did it have cheese? Yeah, a little cheese and clams and salt, but it didn't have garlic, didn't have a cream sauce. All right. And now we're going to add our mushrooms. You can see these roasted. They let up all their moisture, and they're nicely browned. So these will not sog out our pizza. So that's why you roasted them, among other reasons, to get the water out. Oh, definitely, yeah. So we're going to sprinkle this around. Doesn't take long to cook. That's good. And then one last little sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper. Finish it off. Okay, Chris, so we're going to go ahead and put this into that 550-degree oven that I have had heating for at least an hour. Before I go towards the oven, I like to give the pizza a nice shake to make sure it's not stuck. Because there's nothing worse than when you get to the oven and it flops over and... What are you talking about? Never happened to me. Oh, lucky. - That's a good tip. So that's ready to go. I'm going to go ahead and put it in the oven. It's going to bake for seven to nine minutes. Okay, Chris, this has been cooling for a couple of minutes. It looks amazing. Can I just point out that everyone in Milk Street... there's a lot of people surrounding us right now. They've all... they keep getting closer as this recipe is getting close to coming out of the oven. I have noticed that. - Yeah. Okay, before we slice into this, we're just going to do the last finishing touches. We've got two scallions here that have been thinly sliced on the bias. And sprinkle those on. And then just a quarter teaspoon of red pepper flakes. And we're ready to eat. - Mmm. I mean, that crust just looks great. I know-- you can see the bubbles, and you can see how nicely it browned there on that... in that oven position. (crust crunches) Did you hear that? Yes, I did. I am proud of myself. You going to hand me a plate? Do I need a plate? I don't need a plate. You want to just eat it? Okay. Why would I need a plate? - All right. Mmm. - This looks amazing. Look how thin that crust is. Oh, man! - It's really amazing. It's crispy, it's light, still has a little bit of chew. Unbelievable. This is unbelievably thin. - It is. Yeah. - And it's... but you still haven't... you can see how bubbly it is on the edges. I'm going to do the crust now, the edge. (crunches) Mmm. - That's the best part. My kids always leave the crust. And I'm like, "Well, you're not going to eat that?" All I can say is you're not getting my crust-- sorry. So my pizza story about in the summer in Vermont on the grill... it was very good. This is actually better, because the crust is actually a little thinner, and the topping's just phenomenal as well. So I started out thinking the secret to great homemade pizza was heat. It turns out it's actually hot and cold-- cold with a ferment that's one to three days, and then for the second rise in that little plastic container, you put it in 100-degree water to get the yeast going again and getting the dough nice and relaxed so it's easy to roll out. So our roasted mushroom pizza with fontina and scallions, it's a winner. You're a winner-- nice job. - Thank you. But I'm going to eat your crust now. Here at Milk Street, we're always on the lookout for a new simple summer salad. Of course, the Italians have used zucchini in salads for centuries. But we had two specific recipes in mind. One is from Ruth Rogers at the River Cafe in London. She does a zucchini carpaccio. And Francis Mallmann. He wrote a book called Seven Fires in Argentina. He's a grillmaster. He also did a simple salad like this with some hazelnuts and mint. So we combined the two ideas to come up with a great shaved zucchini salad. We start with the dressing, which is a teaspoon of lemon zest, three tablespoons of juice, lemon juice. Three tablespoons of olive oil. And we use just a quarter teaspoon of honey. Just a little bit of sweetness there. A quarter teaspoon of cracked ground black pepper. And a half teaspoon of kosher salt. And whisk that up, and that's the simple dressing. Then we have two zucchini with the skin on. We've already shaved one. You can do this with a mandoline, you can do this with a Y-shaped peeler. Now, we're going to do this down to the core. And we're going to leave the seeds and just throw out the center of it. You can see the seeds starting to show up, so I think we're pretty much done with that. And now we have the dressing. And we'll put the dressing in. We also have one ounce of grated parmesan cheese. The mint, of course. Half a cup of the mint. And half a cup of basil, which goes nicely. Now I'm simply going to toss the salad. And we'll put that in a platter here. And finally we toss with a little bit of extra shaved parmesan. And as Frances Mallmann did in Seven Fires, he also has a quarter cup of toasted chopped hazelnuts. So that's our fabulous summer salad, inspired by the cooking of Italy-- a shaved zucchini salad, flavor of lemon, basil, mint, shaved parmesan, and toasted hazelnuts. You know, over the years, I've been to Rome a few times. And I have discovered you can get bad pizza and bad pasta. You really have to seek out the right place. So we went to the Piazza Trinita dei Monte, and went to Sora Margherita, a little hole in the wall. That's a place where they make egg pasta in the morning, they dry it on the backs of chairs, and they have a handwritten menu, which, of course, nobody ever asks for except a tourist. So we had a great dish there called cacio e pepe, which means cheese and pepper. It's made with pecorino romano, lots of pepper, and some of the water used to cook the pasta. In fact, it's the mother of all pasta sauces. So we got a quickie lesson from a guy called Mario, and he showed us how it was done. He cooked the cacio e pepe, again with the pepper and the cheese, and then he said, "Look, let's add a little guanciale to it," which is cured pork jowl. You can use pancetta or bacon. Add that at the end, and all of a sudden you have another dish called gricia. And, finally, if you make gricia and add four egg yolks at the end of that, you have carbonara. In fact, he said, cacio e pepe is like the trunk of the tree-- it's the mother of all pasta sauces. So let's start making a cacio e pepe here the Milk Street way. You know, when we went to Rome and had cacio e pepe, it was fabulous-- cheese, pepper, pasta, a little cooking water. We brought the recipe back here, and it didn't work. It didn't work because the pecorino romano in Rome is very different than the cheese we get here. So that required us to re-engineer the recipe, and that's why Catherine's here, to figure out how to make that great recipe here in the States. That's right, Chris. And the cacio e pepe is a very simple recipe. The problem we ran into is that we weren't getting a nice, smooth cheese sauce. When we melted the cheese in with the pasta water, it was a little bit grainy and kind of clumpy. So we started with the cheese, of course. And if you can find imported pecorino romano, this is the time to spring for it. But even if you can find a great imported pecorino romano, it's probably a little bit older. So because of that, it doesn't melt the same way. So we're going to start by grating the cheese ourselves. If you buy the pre-ground stuff, no good, forget it. Forget it. - I have six ounces here. And I'm going to grate it pretty finely on the small holes of the box grater. If you use the large shreds, it goes a little bit quicker, but unfortunately, it doesn't melt down the way that you want. (whispers): It's worth it. Okay, Chris, so we have our six ounces of freshly grated pecorino romano. But even using the best quality cheese, even grating it ourselves, we still are a little bit nervous about clumping, right? Because we want a very smooth sauce. And so in order to make sure that we get that very smooth sauce no matter what, I'm not going to rely on the reserved pasta water. I'm very sorry to all the Italian grandmothers in the room. We're going to make our own starchy water. So I have one and a half cups of cold water. I'm adding two teaspoons of corn starch. And we're just going to stir this up. And you know, Chris, starch is a stabilizer. So that's why so often in these Italian recipes, you just reserve a little pasta water, you add that to the sauce, and that kind of binds everything together. But again, because we have the instability with the cheese, We want to make sure that we have an insurance policy. And we're making our own starchy water. And now we're going to add the cheese in. And we are still going to reserve a half a cup of that pasta water. That way, if our sauce isn't the perfect consistency at the end, we can add a little bit in at a time. So first, I'm going to moisten this. And then I'm going to turn the heat to medium low. And it's very tempting to turn up the heat. But, again, this is a dry cheese, it's a salty cheese. It's not a melting cheese like mozzarella. So you want that low, even heat, and you want to whisk it pretty constantly in order to let it really melt down gently and emulsify. So this is going to take about five minutes. And it should be about the consistency of heavy cream when we're done. And we're not looking for a super-thick sauce like a roux. It is going to thicken up a bit while it stands here. And then more of it's going to get even more absorbed into the pasta. So you can see, Chris, this is just starting to come up to a really gentle simmer. We don't want to take it any farther than this, because we don't want the sauce to break. So I'm going to take it off the heat, and we're just going to let it set up over here while we cook our pasta. So we have four quarts of water. We're going to add two tablespoons of kosher salt. And then we have 12 ounces of pasta. We're using linguini. And then we just want to cook this to al dente. And then we'll drain it and come back and combine our sauce and our pasta. Okay, Chris, so we drained our pasta. And you do want to drain it really well, give it a good shake, because we're going to add our sauce, and then we also have some of that reserved pasta water in case we do want to thicken it up at all. Have you ever broken a sauce making macaroni and cheese before? Never. Of course. So I have, and it's heartbreaking. And it happens especially if you're not using, like, the really processed orange stuff. When you use the hard, grainy cheeses like what we have in the pecorino, And you add heat, that's when you get into trouble. So even though we've made a fairly stable sauce here with our corn starch, we want to let the noodles sit for just a minute, cool down, and then we add the sauce. And Chris, you can see this sauce has thickened up a bit just in the time that it sat here while we cooked the noodles. I'm going to add it to the pasta. And you can see it's really nice and smooth. There's no clumps. And toss this thoroughly. And then I'm going to add two teaspoons of freshly ground black pepper. What I also like is there isn't, like, a gallon of sauce on the pasta. I mean, in Rome, you never have a lot of sauce. It's a modest amount of sauce. Right, you want it to cling to the strands. You don't want it to drown it. And you can see, it looks a little loose here. But we're going to let it sit for two to three minutes. And that way the pasta's going to soak up even more of that delicious sauce. And then if we need to loosen it at all, we have that reserved pasta water. We just want to add a tablespoon at a time until you get the perfect consistency. Look, when my pasta's ready, I just want to dive into the pot. I've got to sit... well, I can drink wine. Something I can do and enjoy myself while I'm waiting. I'm not going to stop you. I'm not... it... I mean, why don't you go ahead and serve it up for us? So we learned this in Rome. I'd never seen this done before. They just take a ladle. This is for serving individual plates. Take a large fork, take a modest amount of pasta, and then we'll put it in the ladle and twirl it up. And then we'll just transfer it to a plate. It's like a pretty little nest. I did something pretty! It's almost too pretty to eat, Chris. No, it's not-- it's definitely not too pretty to eat. We'll do a little more here. And also, you don't have a huge plate of pasta normally. Right, I mean, I might go back for a second nest or a third nest, but this is a good place to start. I'm going to eat your whole nest in one bite. No, you're not. Oh. It's like what I always wish fettucine Alfredo was, right? It's not drowning in sauce. It's cheesy, but it's not overly cheesy. There's good balance. And the sauce is nice and smooth. I love this, too, because it's such honest food. Like, there's nothing to hide behind. You have your good pepper, you have your good pecorino, and then you have our little secret trick with the enriched pasta water. So we went to Rome and had the best cacio e pepe of our lives. Very simple recipe, four ingredients. We brought it back here, and a little bit of cornstarch solved the problem. So great cacio e pepe, four ingredients, simple to do, perfecto. You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season of Milk Street at our website, MilkStreetTV.com. All episodes and recipes from this season of Milk Street Television are available for free at our website, MilkStreetTV.com. Please access our content, including our step-by-step recipe videos, from your smartphone, your tablet, or your computer. The new Milk Street cookbook is now available and includes every recipe from our TV show. From Roman carbonara and chicken couscous to Thai stir-fried spinach and French apple cake, the Milk Street cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes. Order your copy of the Milk Street cookbook for $23.95, 40% less than the cover price, and receive a Milk Street tote with your order at no additional charge. Call 855-MILK-177, or order online. Funding for this series was provided by the following. Ferguson's proud to support Milk Street and culinary crusaders everywhere. For more information on our extensive collection of kitchen products, we're on the web at fergusonshowrooms.com. Cooking happens in the kitchen. But life happens around the kitchen table. The 1919 Collection-- celebrating yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Visit us at www.1919cookware.com. For 25 years, Consumer Cellular has been offering no-contract wireless plans designed to help people do more of what they like. Our U.S.-based customer service team can help find a plan that fits you. To learn more, visit ConsumerCellular.tv.