The pizza fiasco.
09 March 2011 | San Blas Islands, Panama
Mark
Most days here start pretty slowly. I am usually up by 7:00 and most often it is sunny, then shortly it will cloud up with maybe a shower. The showers are always brief, but can be pretty heavy while they last. Eventually, by 9:00-10:00 the skies clear and the sun returns. Trade winds blow constantly and although they are predicted to fade, we haven't seen it yet. Windy (our trusty wind generator) has never been happier! Unless it is really blowing, he doesn't put out many amps (3-4 usually), but he does it 24-7. The batteries like that! This morning we decided to have pizza for dinner and I decided to try the no knead pizza dough from the Cooking for Geeks cookbook. I've actually done similar before. My semolina pizza crust is kneaded a bit, but it, too, sits for all day to develop the gluten in the hard semolina flour. Also my sourdough bread gets kneaded only very briefly and then sits overnight in the fridge to develop. So I mixed up the dough and set it aside. I also decided to try the ginger beer recipe (really a soda, not a beer). I diced up some ginger and boiled it with sugar and water then let it steep while we went to shore to check out the little stretch of beach we were anchored behind. It gets very shallow very quick. The kayak would have worked better than dink, but with my bum arm still pretty tender and useless we decide dink was safer. We pulled dink up on a sand bar and tied her off to a big driftwood stump and waded in the ankle deep water to shore. Shore was not very interesting.Deb found some pretty flowers she had never seen before (and took cuttings of course). Lots of flotsam, but no treasures. While Deb as exploring further, I went back by dink and found a nice spot on the soft sand where I could wiggle by butt to create a perfect seat and then sit there with only a small section of my anatomy touching the sand and the rest sort of floating. With the sun on my back, I focused on a little spot of driftwood that was just breaking the surface in the distance and meditated. It was wonderful. I had to have a homebrew for lunch as I used the yeast in the bottom to seed my ginger beer. Gee life is hard. After lunch, Deb took a nap in the tramp and I read in the hammock. Then we got in dink again and went to explore the other end of the island. It almost looked like we could get through to the other side, but again we ran out of water. I also discovered the dink does not pole worth beans! I had found the perfect bamboo pole and tried to pole us across the shallows, but dink has so much surface area above the water that we constantly were blown sideways. The pizza was an absolute unmitigated disaster! The dough looked good. A bit slack, but easy enough to fix by kneading in a bit of flour at the last minute. I had forgotten to bring the pizza stone, but hd brought my big pizza pan so I spread the dough out on it. The Geek book called for prebaking the dough which I have done at times, but this pan has perforations over the entire bottom and cooks the crust real well without prebaking, so I went ahead and put on the toppings black bean with bacon, onion, pepper, garlic, and thyme over a tomato sauce and topped with cheddar delicious. Oven preheated to 550. Pop it in. IT DOESN'T FIT. The pan was too big for the oven. Oh my god, what now? The dough is no where stiff enough to lift off the pan with all the toppings on it. And what to put it on? Wait. If I fold the dough over like a calzone, I can make a shape that will fit on my heavy aluminum square fry pan. Careful, careful, now flip. It worked. I'm a genius. Wait. This pan won't fit in the oven either! Well, the pan will but the handle won't. I had broiled things in it before but then it was OK for the oven door to remain open a bit. Tonight it is not. Curses, foiled again! OK, if I mush it just a bit more, I can flip it again into a lasagna pan that I know will fit in the oven. Done. In the oven. What a circus. For some reason whenever we have pizza, we always end up doing pizza and a movie so by a process of elimination (Deb chose 3, I threw out 1, she threw out 1) we chose Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider. The good thing about pizza and a movie is that the room is dark and we could not see the mess the calzone came out. It actually tasted OK, but the crust was too thick in places and too thin in others (big surprise there) and it really was a disaster, but one we could eat at least some of. Not worth saving the rest. The fish will enjoy it. Tomorrow we will probably move to a place we can snorkel / hookah, but not sure where yet.