Wood Fired Fanatics

Recipes

UPDATE! The BEST Pizza Dough Recipe

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This recipe is truly the best and gets rave review from our guests.  We have tweaked it a little since the original post. Look for the highlighted areas to note the small adjustments, that believe it or not have made a difference in our dough.

Have you ever heard the phrase , “sometimes you can’t beat a man at his own game?” Well, it seems in this case we couldn’t beat a woman at her own game. After the ups and downs of the many recipes we have tried, I think we have landed on a keeper (at least for now). We are in love with a slight variation on Mugnaini Pizza Dough, Large Batch recipe. This dough has knocked everyone’s socks off!  I should start by saying that Mr. Fanatic cuts the recipe in half so as not to have so many dough balls.

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New Pizza-“The Bailey”

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Inviting friends to share in your pizza obsession is a great way to try new things. Ask someone what they would like on a pizza and you never know what they might come up with. Let me take you back to earlier in the day…

What’s the first question a guest asks when you invite them for dinner? “What can I bring?” My standard response is…”Just yourselves.” Last Saturday I was running behind when my sweet friend posed this question. So I said, “An appetizer, a light snack before pizza would be great.” Man, am I glad that I did because a new pizza was born from this simple request.

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Easy Amazing Bread

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Bread.  I know there are lots of feelings about bread these days.  People love to eat it.  Others are not eating it.  But let’s be honest…bread is DELICIOUS!  It is a staple food that can stand alone, be eaten with oil or butter, turn simple ingredients into a terrific sandwich.  Good bread is a thing of wonder for me.  We have been dreaming about making bread.  Reading about starters and leavening agents and how to make the perfect crusty bread we love to buy has been overwhelming.  The focus of our time and effort has been on perfecting our pizza dough.  Although the work is never done, we are very satisfied with what we have achieved with dough.  Our pizza gets rave reviews from our families and friends.

Now you may notice that we do not go out to eat a lot.  We tend to love to make food at home so we know what is in our food and can make it perfect for our tastebuds. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE a meal out, but I find these days that as we are enjoying our meal, we are also analyzing the dishes to figure out how we can make them at home.  We have been very successful in learning how to convert many restaurant meals into easy homemade recipes.  Today’s bread is no different.

This bread is born from our dining experience at Roland’s Cafe Market in Phoenix. I love the open kitchen concept at Roland’s  and immediately spotted their wood fired oven. We love to patronize restaurants that have wood fired ovens.  Food made in a wood fired oven just has a special quality, rustic yet refined and often bursting with flavor. Mr. Fanatic quickly learned that they use the pizza dough from Pizzeria Bianco to make their sandwich bread!  STOP RIGHT THERE! Pizza dough can be used to make BREAD???  This I had to see.  So I ordered the ham and cheese breakfast sandwich per our server’s excellent suggestion.  The bread was delicious.  Who knew it was just pizza crust.

Last night we had pizza and I knew we would have the oven fired up this morning for Cast Iron Skillet Pancakes, so we reserved two dough balls to experiment with this morning.  After breakfast we let the temperature drop and pulled some coals out of the oven so it was around 400-450 degrees.  The dough balls were gently flattened out to make rounds.  This was done much like you would for a pizza but not turning out and making it as large or thin. Just a few gentle pushes and we had a round of dough to place in the oven.  They slid into the oven like a pizza would and baked for about 5 minutes.

The bread came out looking like a whoopie cushion.  We sliced one round in half with excited anticipation.  Once opened up it looked delicious, one smell gave the hint of sourdough, and it looked airy and light.  A dab of butter and WOW!  It was amazing.  We were in shock.  We made bread!  The inside was light, airy and soft. The outside had a bit of crunch but was not at all tough.  It is not traditional, rustic, crusty wood fired bread but it is delicious nonetheless.  My mind was immediately spinning and dreaming up a sandwich party with fresh baked “bread” rounds and various ingredients to make cold or toasted sandwiches.

So the moral of the story is this…don’t throw away extra dough.  We have talked about freezing dough in the past which is still an awesome option!  However, now with one batch of dough you could have a pizza night and then use remaining balls for bread to make a meal on another day.

The Lazy Baker’s Wood Fired Apple Crisp

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I love dessert.  Often times I will look at a dessert menu before I decide what to order in a restaurant.  As I said, I love dessert!  I also love to make dessert but often times dessert takes a lot of time and makes a really big mess.  As much as I love dessert…I hate doing dishes. So this dessert is really quite perfect!  There are few ingredients and few dishes.  Plus this recipe gets a fabulous response from everyone who tries it!

My mother-in-law makes this with cherry pie filling and calls it Cherry Crunch.  I am not a big fan of cherries so I thought why not switch out that cherry pie filling for apple.  It doesn’t get more all-American than Apple pie…or in this case apple crisp.

The ingredients in this dish are store bought.  This is very rare for me. I am a farmers’-market-shopping, make-it-from-scratch cook.  But sometimes after I make a full meal I want a simple dessert that will knock their socks off!  There is truly something magical about Bisquick.  Bisquick can make savory dishes and sweet dishes.  It can be pancakes, sausage balls or biscuits. However, it is especially delicious in the topping for this Apple Crisp.  It just needs a little doctoring up in the form of sugar and cinnamon.  Butter is the glue that holds this crumbly topping together.

Homemade apple filling would be amazing and if you have the time to prepare it by all means you should go for it.  When I make this, I am typically looking for something fast and easy that will wow a crowd.  I use canned apple pie filling. The more cans of filling you use the more fruity it will be.  I like a moderately fruity filling with a LOT of crunchy cinnamon topping.

For the wood fired oven, I like to use a cast iron skillet.  I lightly buttered the inside of the pan before adding the pie filling. This time I used almost 2 cans of pie filling. The apples were spread evenly over the bottom of the pan.

The dry ingredients and melted butter were mixed in a bowl to form a crumb topping.  If you like more crunchy cinnamon-y goodness, use all of the topping.  If you are more of an apple fan, discard some of the topping.

I used every single, solitary crumb that was in that dish…I can’t imagine not using every morsel as it is like the most amazing crumbly churro.  I have to admit I sometimes just pick little balls of crunch topping off and eat them when my family and friends aren’t looking and even sometimes when they are!

Slide the pan into a wood fired oven that has a small active flame to keep convection going and an oven temperature between 400 and 500 degrees.  The pan was kept to the far side of the oven opposite the fire but completely inside. It took approximately 15 minutes to get golden brown on top and just a little bubbly on the inside.**Note: Keep a close eye on your apple crisp because if your oven is too hot it will burn quickly. We learned this the hard way after trying to make our dessert too soon after pizza this week.

Remove the pan from the oven and let it cool for several minutes to allow for the filling to set up slightly.  Scoop into individual dishes and serve with a large scoop of vanilla ice cream.  This would also be really cute in individual cast iron dishes for serving with a scoop of ice cream on top.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, my mother-in-law makes this with cherry pie filling.  So keep in mind, if apple is not your thing, you can use other fruit fillings as well.  If you have extra time, you could certainly make filling from scratch and take this easy dish to the next amazing level.

If you love wood fired cooking like I do, please like me on both Facebook and follow on Instagram @woodfiredfanatics.  Please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or would like to see specific topics on this site!

 

The Lazy Baker’s Wood Fired Apple Crisp
Ingredients
  • 2 1/2 cups Bisquick
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 Tbsp. cinnamon
  • 1/2 cup butter, melted
  • 1 1/2 cans apple pie filling (use two cans if you like more fruit)
Instructions
  1. The oven should be around 400 degrees with a small flame to maintain convection.
  2. Combine first 3 ingredients in a large bowl. Pour melted butter over dry ingredients and combine to make a crumble topping.
  3. Coat the inside of the cast iron skillet or baking dish with butter.
  4. Pour in the desired amount of pie filling. Top with crumble and bake for approximately 15 minutes.

Epic Buttermilk Biscuits

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I love biscuits!  I haven’t always loved them…when I was young, I thought they were dry hockey pucks.  Biscuits were hard, dry, floury, tasteless. Well, I was apparently being served the WRONG biscuits!!  As I tried more biscuits, I discovered they weren’t so bad.  Then, I went to Nashville.  Well, biscuits in Nashville are incredible, moist, buttery, flakey and scrumptious.  It became my mission to learn how to make great biscuits back home in Phoenix.  In the Nashville airport, I grabbed a package of the biscuit mix from the Loveless Cafe and it makes some pretty tasty biscuits.  They just didn’t feel like homemade…they were like a box of brownies: use the biscuit mix, add buttermilk and stir.  I found a Nashville Hot Chicken and Buttermilk Biscuit cooking class at our local Sur La Table store.  I had to sign up and luckily had a good friend willing to go with me.  The recipe they taught was mighty tasty and adaptable to many different biscuit variations.  The biscuits in this post were made with that Sur la Table recipe but baked in our wood fired oven rather than a traditional home oven.

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Knock Your Socks Off Short Ribs and Asparagus

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The first time we made Mugnaini’s Mustardy Glazed Short Ribs, we were new to wood fired cooking.  Despite making some improvisations and having less than beautiful results we were pleased with the tender meat and flavor.  Since that first attempt, it has been on our list of recipes to try again. This was the weekend we put it in the rotation.  However, I did not thoroughly read the recipe and about the time we needed to start dinner, I realized I should have rubbed the ribs the day before or at the very least early that day.  So I rubbed the ribs and fortunately Mr. Fanatic was able to braise them the next afternoon for dinner.  This is an easy recipe that just takes time. There is not a lot of technical skill required and if you have a good handle on temperature management in your oven, it is a piece of cake!

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How to Roast a Delicious Wood Fired Turkey

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Why do I love Thanksgiving so much you ask?  Food!  In my mind the most food oriented holiday of the year is Thanksgiving.  The entire day revolves around one delicious meal.  A juicy, golden brown turkey surrounded by rich, comforting side dishes are the stars of the show. A show that begins with yummy snacks and closes with pumpkin in the form of pie with whipped cream or bars with cream cheese frosting.  It is meal I start planning for weeks (or in the case of my favorite cookies from AZ Cookie Love, months) in advance. The past couple of weeks have been spent watching cooking shows, searching online and Pinterest-ing about Thanksgiving.  As much fun as I have learning new recipes and and ideas, there are always the traditional dishes that we serve every year. I will share a couple of oven appropriate recipes for those sides over the next few days.

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Deliciously Simple Pizza Dough

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What’s your favorite part of a pizza?  What’s one element that can make or break your pizza experience? What’s got the perfect blend of crunch and chew? What tastes best with a little char and bubble?  What pizza component should have leopard spots?

If your answer was CRUST for all of the above…we should be friends!

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Cast Iron Skillet Pancake

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Long before a wood fired brick oven pizza was even a thought in our minds we visited a restaurant one Sunday morning for brunch as a family…St. Francis. Although, it was a fair distance from our home, we had seen it on the Food Network’s Diners Drive-Ins and Dives and had to try it. The menu had many things we wanted to try but the iron skillet pancake was impossible to refuse. It lived up to every expectation we had and then some. We have gone back many times since that initial experience to eat it again and told countless friends about it. I have dreamed of learning how to make them.

Easter Sunday seemed like a good time to try to figure it out since it seems decadent and like a special occasion dish. I will admit, I googled the segment from the tv show and watched it. It doesn’t give St. Francis’ specific recipe but at least some guidance as to where to start.  We had never made buttermilk pancakes from scratch so back to my friend Google for a starting point.  The New York Times had a five star recipe, that was the base for this recipe. St. Francis did not use butter in their pancakes so that was omitted in ours as well and replaced with a lesser amount of olive oil.

A second video from that episode indicated that the oven in the restaurant was a little over 600 degrees so we aimed for that temperature to cook the pancakes. Once that temperature had been reached the various cast iron skillets were placed in the oven to heat up for about 15 minutes. While they were heating the dry ingredients were mixed.  Just before the pans were hot the wet ingredients were incorporated.

Each pan was pulled to the entrance of the oven one at a time and olive oil was added to each. The amount varied in each pan. We had three different sizes as we weren’t sure how much batter each would require. We learned it is better to have a little more oil in the pan than you think necessary. Batter was scooped into each pan to cover the bottom and to about 1/2 inch deep.

The pans immediately went back into the oven. Cook the pancakes until the tops are golden brown.

We found that they should be somewhat dark with a bit of char to them. The best part is there is no need to flip them! The bottoms cook in the hot olive oil and are crispy perfection when you remove them from the pan.

Turn each cake out onto a plate upside down and serve with the charred crusty bottoms up. (By the way, the black edges are supposed to be there and enhance the flavor.) Drizzle with olive oil while warm and top with your choice of fruit, whipped cream and a little maple syrup.  The variations are endless! The strawberries were good but a caramelized fruit would be better (that is how chef Aaron Chamberlin tops them at St. Francis). We used canned whipped cream out of pure laziness today but fresh whipped cream or creme fraiche would definitely up your game.

For more delicious wood fired fun, follow us on Facebook and on Instagram @woodfiredfanatics

Cast Iron Skillet Pancake
Recipe Type: Breakfast
Prep time:
Cook time:
Total time:
Serves: 4
Ingredients
  • 2 c. all-purpose flour
  • 3 Tbsp. sugar
  • 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1 1/4 tsp. kosher salt
  • 2 1/2 c. buttermilk
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil plus more for the pan
  • 1/2 tsp. vanilla paste
Instructions
  1. Place cast iron skillets in a hot wood fired oven with a temperature around 600-630 degrees. Leave in the oven approximately 15 minutes.
  2. While skillets are heating, whisk together first five ingredients through salt.
  3. Make a well in the dry ingredients and stir in the buttermilk and eggs. When nearly combined add olive oil and vanilla paste. Stir to incorporate, do not overmix. Some lumps are alright.
  4. Add olive oil to skillet. Pour in batter to cover the bottom and about 1/2 inch deep. Immediately place skillet back in the oven. Watch for the tops to turn golden brown with a slight char, approximately 4-5 minutes. Remove from oven and loosen with a spatula. Turn out onto a plate with bottom up. Drizzle with more olive oil and your choice of toppings: fruit, whipped cream, maple syrup, etc.