Transcription
So today I wanted to share seven different cooking skills that I personally wish I had learned sooner. I'm gonna show you these in action as we make an incredible pizza recipe together from start to finish.
A brief thanks to our friends over at Audible for partnering with us on today's video; we're gonna chat more about them at the end. For now, let's get started.
There's nothing worse than being partway through a recipe and realizing that you're missing a key ingredient that you need, or something is burning on the stove because you're too busy looking for one of your spices. This has honestly happened to me way too many times.
So mise-en-place is a French culinary term which means "everything in its place," and it's a concept that just encourages planning and thinking forward. Making sure that we have all of the ingredients and appliances out and at the ready is essential. This means having everything washed, peeled, and even chopped, which is going to be especially true if you're new to cooking. But as you get more experience, you know you can start to multitask to save time and chop some things while other things are cooking. But at the very least, we just want to have everything out on the table before we begin.
For today's recipe, we're going to be making a caramelized onion and fruity pizza with our own homemade vegan feta and a balsamic reduction. We've got all of our ingredients out here on the table, so now we're ready to begin.
An essential skill to have as a cook is understanding which type of flour to use for the particular dough or batter you want to create. A lot of this comes down to understanding gluten, which is a protein that's in wheat that helps to bind and gives it its strength and shape.
This particular flour that we have here is all-purpose flour, or soft flour, and traditionally we use this when we're making things like delicate pastries, cakes, or cookies. In these sorts of recipes, we usually want to mix the wet and the dry ingredients until the flour is just combined, and what we mean by that is we want to minimize over-stirring. We want them to stay light and fluffy, and the more we mix, the more rigid and tough the cake becomes. That's the gluten starting to tangle up into this elastic network, which can be quite tough.
But that's a quality we do want with this flour, which is bread flour or hard flour. If you're making pizza dough, if you get your hands on type zero zero flour, that'd be great. All of these flours just have more gluten in them, and that's going to give more strength and elasticity to our pizza dough, which is great. It's going to let us manipulate it later on.
So we're first gonna begin with three quarters of a cup plus two tablespoons of lukewarm water, which we're gonna dissolve about a teaspoon of active yeast into, and we're gonna let this sit for about five minutes.
Meanwhile, to a bowl, we're gonna add in two and a half cups of hard flour, or type zero zero flour, with a teaspoon of salt, and we're gonna give this a mix.
Next, we can add about two tablespoons of olive oil to our yeast mixture, and then we can pour this liquid in with the flour. Once we've given it a stir, feel free to get in there with your hands, and we're going to roughly knead this until we've collected all of the flour into a coarse little ball. Then we can cover this with a damp cloth and let it rest for about 15 minutes.
When we've returned to the dough, we're then going to want to knead it on a floured surface for about three to five minutes. In the process, we're going to be trapping little air pockets in the dough that the yeast is later going to inflate with the carbon dioxide that they produce, and that's what's gonna give our pizza base a very light and fluffy consistency.
I'm gonna make about three small pizzas with this, so once I've divided my dough, I like to pull it along the table just to tighten it a little bit. Then we can cover it with a damp cloth for about three to four hours at room temperature, or you can store it in a lightly greased container with an airtight lid overnight in the fridge.
This dough we've had in the fridge overnight has doubled in volume, which is the yeast having worked its magic, which is incredible. One tip though: let this sit at room temperature for about an hour. That's just gonna let the gluten strands relax a little bit, which is gonna make it easier to manipulate the dough later on.
Here's another thing I wish I had learned sooner: that flavor is not only taste, but it's actually in part taste, but mostly smell. It makes sense, right? Our taste buds can perceive five different tastes, but our odor receptors at the top of our noses can perceive thousands of different scents. It's the smell of food that helps us distinguish, you know, what we're eating. Is it an apple, or is it a pear, or radish? Because if you were to plug your nose and close your eyes and try to guess, chances are you wouldn't get it right just by the taste.
The best way to unlock the scent and the flavor of food is through heat, and my favorite reactions are caramelization and the Maillard reaction. Caramelization happens when sugar is heated, like when you're making caramel sauce, for example. But the Maillard reaction occurs when foods with both sugar and protein are heated.
It's the Maillard reaction that gives the incredible color and smell when we toast bread. It's what makes roasted coffee so aromatic; it's why roasted nuts tend to taste more delicious than raw nuts. So try to utilize these reactions when possible by letting things get toasted or lightly golden. This is going to release so much aroma into the air and boost the flavor of your meal.
Another thing that also helps to improve the flavor of your meal is spices. Many of the compounds that are in spices are volatile, which means that they'll easily evaporate into the air, which the receptors in our nose can pick up. You'll often see in videos when we add spices to a dish, we always like to toast it for a little bit first, right? And that's to unlock the aromatics that are in the spices. It's just going to make the dish so much more flavorful.
So now that we know all of this, we can return to our pizza and apply these tips. We’re going to begin by cooking two thinly sliced onions on medium-high heat, which over the course of 25 minutes are going to undergo both caramelization and the Maillard reaction, transforming them from having this sharp and pungent smell and taste into something deliciously sweet.
Then in the last five minutes of cooking, we're gonna boost the flavors even more by adding two teaspoons of Italian seasoning, which we've actually just made ourselves by combining a few different spices together, like oregano, basil, parsley, rosemary, and thyme. You can find the breakdown for this on our blog, along with other spice mix recipes that we have, so I’m going to link those for you below.
Now that we've cooked the mixture for a few minutes, we can remove it from the heat. I like to transfer it to a small food processor to lightly puree the onions, although this blending step is definitely optional.
For so long, I was intimidated by so many things in the kitchen. Even making our own homemade dough just seemed really overwhelming and complicated to me, and I was afraid I was going to mess it up. But one thing I really wish I had learned sooner was just to take it easy, to relax my shoulders and my jaw, and just to learn to have fun with it.
On that note, when we've transferred our dough to a lightly floured surface, we can start to shape it with our fingers, working from the center towards the perimeter and just kind of gently pulling as we go along, leaving a centimeter of dough untouched around the perimeter, which is going to end up being our crust. We might not do this perfectly, but that's okay; there's no chef marking our work, and if we make any mistakes, we're going to learn from them and do better next time. Chances are it’s still gonna taste great.
It doesn't really matter. Keep challenging yourself to try new things in the kitchen and have fun with it.
Now that our pizza base is ready, we can lather some of the caramelized onions on top of it. Then I'm going to be adding some purple grapes over top of it as well. We can bake this in a preheated oven at 250 Celsius, or 480 Fahrenheit, for about eight minutes.
Part of being a good cook means learning to be adaptable in applying the directions of a recipe to your particular situation. I've said to let this cook in the oven for about eight minutes, but it's really important to know that ovens are incredibly inaccurate. It's not uncommon for an oven to be 20 degrees above or below what you set it to, and this can change even more every time you open the oven doors.
So just use recipes as a guideline, but never as a strict rule. Keep an eye on it, especially close to the end, just to make sure things don't burn.
Another example of being adaptable is understanding certain ingredients, like salts and spices, because these are not all created equal. Flaked salt versus table salt, for example, have different densities. So if a recipe says to use a teaspoon of salt, and you choose to use one over the other, you're going to end up with a different level of saltiness in your food.
The same holds true for spices. The potency of spices is altered when they're exposed to oxygen, moisture, or light. This means that old spices tend to be a lot less potent. It might not be unusual, for example, if a teaspoon of fresh curry powder packs in as much flavor as a tablespoon of old curry powder.
So you always want to make sure that you're taste testing when you're making a recipe; that way you can always make adjustments when you need to, and you know you're going to end up with a dish that you’re going to enjoy.
When you're constructing any recipe, if you want to take it from being good to being great, you want to appeal to texture in addition to taste. Crispiness, crunchiness, creaminess—these are textural qualities that most of us can't resist. It's why we love crispy French fries with a creamy sauce or crunchy croutons with a creamy soup.
I already know that a lot of the crunch in this recipe is going to come from the pizza base itself, so I want to introduce some creaminess, which we're going to get by making our own homemade vegan feta.
Just seven ingredients—we’ve shared this with you before, but I'm going to briefly walk you through it now. So to a small food processor, we're going to add 60 grams of firm pressed tofu, two tablespoons of melted coconut oil, half of a tablespoon each of nutritional yeast and apple cider vinegar, half of a teaspoon each of onion powder and salt, and an optional pinch of dried dill.
Now that we've blended this, we can pop it in the fridge for a few minutes to harden, but it's already ready to add this delicious creamy mouthfeel to our pizza. It's also going to offer a little bit of salt and acid, which actually takes us to our next point.
You might remember that our taste buds can perceive five different tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (or savory). In my opinion, the best recipes are the ones that combine most, if not all, of these tastes right into them.
For our pizza, we're going to try to achieve this combination with the toppings that we're going to be adding. So to our savory onion base, we're going to add some fresh pear slices, some fresh arugula, and we're going to drizzle on some thick and sticky balsamic reduction. Ours is store-bought, but if you want to make it yourself at home, I'll link your recipe for you below.
We're gonna crumble on some of our creamy feta over top, and an optional topping is to add some roasted walnuts if you'd like.
Even though our pizza taps into all five primary tastes, you definitely don't need to hit each one when you're constructing your own meal at home. But if you're taste testing and you feel like something is missing and you don't know what, chances are it's one of these five.
In my own personal experience, it's usually the saltiness that's missing, or the acid—that sourness that usually comes from things like vinegar, lemon or lime juice, or even plant-based yogurts and tomatoes.
This is what I love so much about cooking; it feels like you can never stop learning. Sometimes it can be challenging, but it also makes it really rewarding when you look at something and you're like, "I did that; I made that." It's just such an incredible feeling.
I again wanted to thank our friends over at Audible for partnering with us on today's video. I want to let you know about this audiobook I'm listening to right now that is so incredible—so full of amazing insights that, frankly, I also wish I had learned sooner.
It's called *The School of Life*, and it's by the philosopher Alain de Botton. It's his philosophy that growing up, a lot of us just aren't taught about life. We learn really important things like chemistry, math, and literature, but we often aren't taught things like self-esteem, self-confidence, and how to navigate relationships.
Through *The School of Life*, he tries to fill this gap in traditional education by teaching us about emotional intelligence. I find his approach to be super direct, but in a really supportive and caring way. I highly, highly recommend it.
If you'd like to get this or any other audiobook that you'd prefer instead for free, you can with the link in the description box below, or visit audible.com forward slash pickuplines. You're also going to get a 30-day free trial of Audible, and when you're trying it out, make sure to also browse the Audible Plus catalog, which is where you can get thousands of different popular audiobooks but also podcasts and guided fitness and meditation programs included right there in your membership.
Again, the link is in the description box below to learn more, and I'm curious to know if there are any cooking skills that you wish that you had learned sooner. If you'd like, share those in the comments; I'm sure everyone will benefit from learning about it.
Thanks so much for hanging with us today; I really appreciate it. Pick Up Limes signing off, and we'll see you in the next video!