Chicago Style Pizza and German Chocolate Cake

Last weekend I made two new recipes in one night and it proved to be too ambitious. As a result, the German Chocolate Cake frosting suffered from my lack of focus. I suffered my first injury which highlighted to me the importance of safety in the kitchen and in buying kitchen products. I also rediscovered Garden of Eden grocery store, which did not disappoint. Finally, and most importantly, the Chicago Style Pizza recipe turned out to be a winner and a great reward for my 9 mile run on Saturday.

I’m finding that each recipe has one problem ingredient. This is the ingredient that prevents people from making it, or leads to poor outcome in the substitution process. Upon first glance the Chicago style pizza recipe looked to have a cinchy list of ingredients. All of them seemed to be available through freshdirect.com, which made me both happy and a bit disappointed that I wouldn’t have to go to Dean and Deluca this week. Upon closer investigation, I noted one important difference between the yeast in my online shopping cart is active dry yeast and the recipe calls for instant or rapid rise yeast. I googled it and discovered this interesting debate on chowhound.com, which references this article in Cook’s Illustrated. Essentially, they are not the same but with slight modifications they can substitute for each other in recipes. Cook’s test kitchen favors the flavor of instant yeast, so it looks like I get to go to Dean and Deluca after all. I absolutely do not trust the local Gristede’s to have fresh yeast. I was also please to find that the top two recommended brands of crushed tomatoes are available from freshdirect.

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A few days later I found myself in Union Square with some time to kill. I decided to check out Garden of Eden and possibly pick up my few remaining items. When I TA’d cooking courses at the New School this is where they got their ingredients. The only other time I had been to this market was to pick up a missing ingredient before class. I still needed the instant yeast and I also decided to bake a cake for my mom’s birthday so I needed a few ingredients for that as well. I read CI’s product tests and decide to try and find the top rated chocolate and cocoa for the German Chocolate cake (I’ll have to tell you about our hot cocoa taste test next time).

When I walked in the first thing I noticed, just past the shelves of organic fruits and vegetables, was a huge selection of dark chocolate bars.

The chocolate selection at Garden of Eden. This is just half: the other side of the display is all chocolate too.

I got the impression that whoever picks their chocolate selection had read the product review in CI, because they had in stock each of the top 5 recommended brands from the magazine (and then some). In fact they sell the top ranked chocolate, Callebaut, in bulk. (Unfortunately the recipe calls for 4 oz, and the standard size for most chocolate bars seems to be 3.5 oz and the smallest block of Callebaut is 1lb.) I was also happy to find one of the 3 recommended brands of Dutched cocoa (Droste), though not the top brand (Callebaut again). They also had the yeast I needed for the pizza.

A few other observations about Garden of Eden: The cheese selection and cured meat selections looked just great. Also, the bulk fresh pasta looked really good. They have a pretty good selection of prepared food as well. The prices are, well, normal Manhattan gourmet grocery store prices. I did notice a few days later that the $10/lb chocolate I bought at Garden of Eden was $6.99 at Amish Market on E. 45^th.

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I have to admit, Saturday night I was a bit anxious about the baking part. Baking is a bit more difficult than cooking per se. There is more science to it. More to potentially go wrong. Not to mention that fact that the recipe instructions call for the use of a stand mixer which I don’t have, and I don’t think I’ve ever made bread by hand. I used a bread machine for years but it finally died. I considered buying a mixer, but I just couldn’t justify the expense and the space it would take in my kitchen considering I have probably only once before in my life actually wished I had one. I decided I would do it by hand then wait and see how the cooking goes this year and I might buy myself a mixer as a reward at the end of it.

As it turns out, I like hand kneading bread. It’s kinda fun. There is also something very satisfying about wait for dough to rise, and very rewarding to seeing something I made double in size in 40 minutes (also confirmation I hadn’t done anything terribly wrong). This recipe was a bit time consuming with two long rising periods, I started the dough a total of 4 hours before we were actually eating.

The end result was pretty amazing. The crust was delicious, filling was a bit heavy on the cheese as far as pizza goes, but I like cheese. I used pre-grated cheese and I was so glad at that point not to be grating 4 cups of cheese, especially after cutting my finger grating and onion on the box grater for the sauce (after I laughed at the suggestion to wear a glove in this video… in the end I threw out my box grater and vowed to order CI’s top rated box grater for safety… the OXO brand). Of the three varieties (cheese, sausage and kalamata olive and arugula) the olive and arugula was everyone’s favorite.

Chicago Style Pizza. Yum. 

I don’t think I’ve ever actually had Chicago style pizza before. I’ve been to Chicago a few times, mostly for conferences, I’m sure I must have tried it then. Anyway I don’t have knowledge of what authentic Chicago pizza should be like, so I evaluated this pizza based on intrinsic attributes. I made a few mistakes. I forgot the basil and olive oil in the sauce, so I just put it on top. I might experiment with toppings next time.

The German Chocolate cake was another story. It was more complicated than I expected: the frosting is a bit more work than regular frosting. I heated the pan too early and some of the egg yoke cooked before it was mixed with the milk sufficiently. I also burnt some of the pecans while toasting them, and didn’t get all the burnt pieces out. The frosting was pretty much a disaster. Funny thing though, despite the burnt pecans and chunks of cooked egg yoke, the frosting actually tasted pretty good. You can’t really go wrong with all that sugar and butter (that being said, my 2 year old ate around the frosting for the first time in her life so it couldn’t have been that good) The cake itself was, I don’t want to brag, but it was perfect so that kind of made up for it.

 If you look closely you can see chunks of cooked egg yoke and burnt pecan in the frosting. 

Take away lessons

• Not all yeast is the same. When you have a choice, choose instant or rapid rise. If the recipe calls for active dry, you can substitute ¾ the amount of instant yeast (see this video for details).

• The Chowhound message board is a great source for cooking information.

• A few burnt pecans can spoil the bunch.

• Don’t try too many new complicated recipes at once. You are much more likely to mess one of them up. If you are going to try a new or complicated entrée recipe, stick to a simple dessert.

• Buy a safe box grater!

• If you've got something on your mind you want to stop thinking about for a while, cooking is a great distraction.