Building a Billy
Last weekend was my dad's birthday and our family converged on the 'Norf' to celebrate. By conventional standards this was one of those 'big birthdays' although given my dad insists he stopped counting when he hit 40 we'll call this his '40th'. My brother and I had...
Sticky peel
I'm writing this on the train home from Dorset, turns out South West trains don't have plugs by the seats and with the battery on my laptop fading this could well be brief. I wanted to write a post with some basic tips on using a peel, you know, the flat metal plates...
Top Toppings – what the chefs go for…
A couple of weeks ago I was asked what my favourite topping is: "Well you can't beat a well made sourdough margherita, then again, I'm a sucker for anchovies and find it hard to look past them on a menu..." some time later "...recently I've been making more white...
Topping tasting
Less of a post, more a set of pictures from the weekend's tasting session. A couple of good friends came over on Saturday and we used the excuse to test out a few toppings we'd been wanting to try. I'm not going to ramble on about which was our favourite, not just...
Due Sardi
It'd been ages since we'd made pizza, too long, ages since we'd even had pizza. But a Friday night in recovering from the dreaded lurgi seemed like the perfect excuse to try out some of the delivery places in the area. The restaurant of choice was Due Sardi,...
How the leopard got his spots
…not from an Ethiopian as in Kipling's version, or in the usual fashion for Neapolitan pizzas but get them he did and we were pretty proud of last night's pizzas. Yesterday was another day of tests, tweaking and perfecting. We were using Caputo Tippo 00 flour...
D-Day
Saturday was D-Day, Dough-Day to be clear, we didn't venture to Normandy. The aim was simple, to try a variety of dough recipes with a view to finding our favourite. We were sticking to classic Neapolitan pizzas which happen to be both our personal favourites and...
Outdoor food tastes better
My girlfriend and I are spending Christmas apart this year which seemed like a perfect excuse to hold our own mini Christmas beforehand. We weren't tempted by the traditional affair, much as we're both a fan of turkey, but liked the idea of an Aussie style meal and a...
Introductions – Part 2
Moving on to the next members of the family, this time the little ones, Sanj and Clare. These are our sourdough starters. Sanj, I made from nothing more than flour and water in my old flat, and he takes his name from my old flatmate. Clare, Sanj's more sophisticated...
Introductions – Part 1
Everyone meet Bertha, Bertha meet everyone. Here she is, our outdoor oven, handmade in the UK from Sheffield Steel and a bit of a looker even if we do say so ourselves. I was originally planning to build myself an outdoor oven, I'd even downloaded plans from the...
In the beginning…
So here it is, my first blog post, can't help feeling this is anti-climactic. Perhaps a good place to start is to outline what I'm trying to achieve with this. This won't be your usual food blog, and I won't be out each week sampling new restaurants to post my...