Crafting a Recipe

“Cooking is like love – it should be entered into with abandon or not at all.”

-Harriet van Horne

That’s my philosophy on cooking as well. It must be done with passion and enjoyment, because if you don’t appreciate, enjoy, and savor the flavors and aromas and textures of your food, no one else will either.

Still, for every bit of passion and art that exists in cooking, there’s also a lot of science {yes, it beautifully fulfills my math geek as well as all my other inner geeks}. You can find out by trial and error what spices blend together beautifully and which ones cancel each other out, what flavors complement each other and which create an exciting contrast and which doom your cooking to mediocrity or worse…or you can study. Read, cook with someone who understands cooking, take a class.

I’m by no means an expert – I’m just a girl who loves food. But I try to combine both passion and study into the recipes I create. Every once in a while, I take a gamble and try something unexpected, but most of the time, there’s a lot of research involved in putting all these recipes together. Since folks have asked where I get my recipes and how I know if something I’m going to try is going to be good or not, let me take you through my process.

Any recipe, like any craft or creation, starts with an idea. Let’s say I get inspired by something I see in a magazine, in a commercial, in a restaurant, on Pinterest – wherever. Let’s say I want to create a flatbread pizza – it’s a good, light summer dish and not only is it tasty, but it photographs well.

So now what?

I have to gauge my comfort level with the dish. Have I ever cooked/prepared it before, or anything like it? Have I at least tasted it? What do I enjoy about the dish?

I make pizza probably a lot more frequently than I should {this is why I run a lot}, but most of the time, I make my basic pizza dough recipe. I’m familiar with that process, but not familiar with making flatbread. That can be daunting. Still, if you know what a good flatbread pizza should taste like, you’re a step in the right direction. Tasting is one of the most important parts of cooking. You’re supposed to taste your food, and taste often. Otherwise you’ll end up plating something that might look nice and taste vile – as those of you who, like me, watch MasterChef and Hell’s Kitchen have seen Gordon Ramsay laying into people over.

So I have a good idea about what a flatbread pizza should look like and taste like. Now it’s a question of selecting ingredients. This is a hard one, because pizza runs a broad spectrum. There are traditional pizzas, barbecue pizzas, breakfast pizzas, dessert pizzas, you name it. And…

Okay, that thought is embedded in my brain. I’m going to have to make a dessert flatbread pizza.

Normally I don’t go so wide on a first swing at a recipe. I do try to stay true to the dish’s origins, and then I branch out later. I don’t feel bad for the flatbread, though – so many people have gone so many directions with flatbread that I’m probably not doing anything that hasn’t been done before. I’m just doing it my way!

First, we need a flatbread. I want a true flatbread, but one that will complement the dessert, so I want a mixture of sweet and savory. After looking at several of the beautiful flatbread recipes out there, I settled on this one that probably most closely mimicks this one from Joy the Baker – which I also want to make because it looks insanely delicious!

Semi-Sweet Flatbread with Strawberries

What you’ll need:

• 4 tsp active dry yeast
• 1 cup warm water
• 3 cups flour
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 1/4 tsp salt

Toppings:

• About 1/2 cup Nutella
• 5-6 large fresh strawberries

Here’s where things get fun. I really didn’t keep track of how I made food until I started blogging about my favorite recipes. Then I realized that I probably needed to do a better job of recording how I prepared things, because if I didn’t make that particular dish often…well, my memory is not the best, okay? And things just didn’t turn out the same way every time. Not a bad thing if it was an off day, but I started wanting to not have off days, and if I got a recipe right, I wanted to keep it that way.

I started writing everything down. Okay, not everything. Most of these recipes are translated from a notepad in my kitchen that holds notes like “handful pecans” and “350F 20 min” and “mix in pot, reduce by half.” Sigh.

How to make it:

1. If you don’t have a mixer, I hope you have strong arms. There’s a lot of mixing that has to be done with pizza dough. This flatbread proves especially troublesome, especially when you’re trying to mix in that last bit of flour!
2. First, mix together the yeast and the warm water. This activates the yeast.
3. Mix in one cup of flour and let it rise for about an hour.
4. Mix in one cup of flour with the olive oil, sugar, and salt. You want to add the other ingredients early so that they get evenly distributed throughout the dough. Then mix in the last cup of flour by pieces. If it doesn’t want to go in, it doesn’t want to go in, so don’t force it. But don’t get wimpy on it either, because sticky pizza dough is no fun.
5. As a note on that, your climate has a LOT of impact on your pizza dough. Depending on the humidity, elevation, or weather going on outside, you’ll need different amounts of flour. I’m trying to come up with a system to figure this out, but for right now, just go with trial and error.
6. Let the flatbread sit for about 30 minutes. Then comes the fun part. You get to punch it, knead it, flip it, toss it, and hopefully you won’t have to peel anything off the ceiling before you stretch it onto a baking sheet. How do you know it’s ready to bake? It should be stretchy and not break apart when you start pulling it. Let it sit on the baking sheet for another 30 minutes.
7. While the flatbread is rising, heat your oven to 375F. Then dent the dough using your fingertips.
8. Bake for 30 minutes. As soon as you pull the pan out, spread it with Nutella and sliced strawberries. There’s no need to cook it any further – the heat of the flatbread will melt the Nutella and nicely warm the strawberries.
9. Lift the flatbread out of the pan and slice into squares with a pizza cutter.
10. Serve with a chilled bubbly moscato!

My food photography has evolved a lot since I started posting recipes. Lately, I’ve taken to mapping out what recipes I’m going to share weeks in advance so that I can prepare them on Sundays during the afternoon – because that’s when the best lighting is.

I also usually don’t blog a recipe until I’ve made it a few times, worked out the kinks, added the twists I want to add, and made it at least look pretty. The pictures here are the work in progress, taken on a Wednesday evening, because I wanted to show you a little more of the process and a little of my creative space.

Hope you enjoyed the insight into my recipe process, and hope you enjoy the recipe, too!

KCS

P.S. The Binker wants your food. Right. Now.