Tag Archives: cast-iron

Dinner, Figs, Lunch, Pizza, Prosciutto

Prosciutto (fig) pizza with arugula and pine nuts

This is my new favorite pizza, inspired by one I had in Finland a few months ago. I love the way the fresh figs play off the prosciutto in spite of the fact that I’m generally not a fan of sweet and savory things. But fresh figs are hard to find, so more often than not, we end up making this pizza without them.

It’s made with the same no-knead dough recipe I’ve posted before, but this time you don’t need to make a big batch of it. This recipe will give you exactly the amount you’ll need for a pizza that fits in a 12-inch round cast iron pan. The dough takes very little effort to prepare, but it does take a long time to rise and then chill to a manageable temperature. But! It lasts two weeks in the fridge, so once you get past the two long waiting periods, you have two weeks to prepare homemade pizza in a pinch!

I added cup measurements for the flour, but the weight measurements are much more accurate so use those if you have a scale. If you do end up using the cup measurements, withhold some of the water and add it using the wet hand method described in the recipe until there are no more dry patches.

Since the tomatoes are freshly cut and do not simmer for very long, the tomato sauce does not taste quite the same as the tomato sauce you get on pizzas you order at restaurants. We sometimes replace one of the tomatoes with crushed tomato sauce and that gives it a more similar taste. It is nice with just the fresh tomatoes, too, you might just find that it’s a more acquired taste. We still add red chili pepper flakes to the tomato sauce so that the spiciness is evenly distributed. We also started adding red wine to the sauce and it adds a very nice sweetness so we almost always add it now.

As always, I’ve preemptively answered more questions you may have in the tips section. If you decide to make this or a version of this, I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to let me know so I know that this blog isn’t just my own personal recipe book. Who knows, maybe hearing from you will motivate me to post more regularly.

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Berries, Blackberries, Breakfast, Brunch, Fruit, Nuts, Pancakes, Peaches, Pecans, Quick, Raspberries, Vegetarian

Dutch baby with summer fruit, pecans, and Nutella

Dutch baby with summer fruit, pecans, and Nutella

Summer has come and gone and now that our apartment no longer turns into a sauna everyday, I have free rein over the oven again, which means that I can restart my tradition of weekly dutch babies. It has been a little over two years since I posted my first recipe on here and two years later, my dutch baby obsession is still going strong. This one is large enough to share, unlike the first one, which has not served two people since we got our larger cast iron pan.

When we’re feeling fancy, our favorite toppings are summer fruit and Nutella. I sometimes add chopped pecans to the dough, but I’m not always in the mood for them. I have also made a few changes to my technique. I don’t cook the fruit in the oven anymore. Instead, I prepare it while the oven is preheating, put it in little porcelain bowls, and place the bowls on the warm potion of the stovetop until the dutch baby is ready to come out of the oven. This warms the fruit up a little bit. If the fruit is not very ripe, I also sprinkle some powdered sugar on it to sweeten it up a bit. The Nutella goes in a little porcelain bowl as well because my stovetop gets warm enough that it would melt the plastic jar if I tried to heat it up directly. I learned this the hard way, by mutilating our immersion blender.

The dutch baby lessons I’ve learned since my first post is that it’s a pretty failproof recipe as long as I use whole milk, and that it absolutely has to be eaten right away. If you don’t eat it right away, my obsession with this pancake will baffle you, as it baffles me the few times it ends up cooling on me before I can dig in. So if the person you’re sharing it with ends up needing to do their bathroom activities as soon as the dutch baby is ready to come out of the oven — does this happen in other families or just ours? — then turn off the oven and keep the dutch baby in there until they’re back because slightly burnt dutch baby is better than cold dutch baby, trust me.

Also, if you’re feeling lazy and can’t be bothered with the fruit or pecans, it is still delicious served the traditional way, with just the powdered sugar, some drizzles of freshly squeezed lemon juice, and maybe some maple syrup.

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Berries, Breakfast, Brunch, Fruit, Raspberries

Dutch baby with berries

Dutch baby with berries

A dutch baby, otherwise known as a David Eyre’s pancake, is a cross between a pancake and a crêpe and much, much easier to make than either. I love them so much, I even make them during heat waves, when the inside of our air-conditionerless apartment feels like a car that’s been sitting in the sun, and I never regret it. The other great thing about them is that you can be sloppy with the ingredients and still get a perfect dutch baby every time, unlike with its unbaked sisters.

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