Monday, March 28, 2011

Dutch oven bread

It is super easy: mix yeast, some salt and flour with warm water. Make it like a heavy pancake butter. Cover with wet towel and let it work for 12-24 hours. Heat oven to 500F and put your Dutch oven in. Season it with oil. Form a bread while you do it: use some non stick surface or extra flour. Put some oil. Let it rise a bit: do not work the dough: it should be a very wet kind. Flip it in to oven, close lid. After 15 minutes open lid and reduce temperature to 350F. Bake for 20 more minutes or till ready. Enjoy :-)

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Taratoria Piano in Nara

Located in the center, in arcade near Lake exit. Try it. Pizaola trained in Italy and he use all the right ingredients, he also nice, smily dude. Place looks cool, and oven shaped like a piano ;-). But he seems to put too much cheese last time we been there and his pie still lack some thing (soul? If it exist, or may be salt? - go figure) how sad it is, it was still less than our expectations even so we love eat there and kids love pizza, I wish pizaola master the last step and bake his technically excellent pizza with more soul. I will be happy to have him on our next pizza party: our technique is not as polished, but I think we manage to do it on a good sunny day :-) anyway, real pizzerias are rare in Japan, so please try and be your own judge. May be it will go better with wine and music they have some times ;-)

Best pizza in Japan

You will be surprised, but the best I eat so far was from Hakone backery: train station cafe. The do not even advertise as pizzeria, but they have brick oven (gas) and made a delicious pizza. Tomatto souse is fantastic and there are Italian behind, but pie was made by Japanese dude. If you happened to travel to or from Hakone(not anytime soon so) try it!

Picking fresh mushrooms for pizza

Good shrooms make a hell od a difference. These from Microsoft campus, I would not use, despite a very cool look :-)

My coffee cup v2.0

This is my year 2011 take on espresso cup design. It is similar to V1.0 I made a while ago (cups were productized by Japanese artisan Muzutane-san). The difference is 3D. No secret is that 2011 is a year of 3D, so I made coffee beans 3D, not just painted, but made from clay. It is much cooler this way.

Healthy Mexican food?!

You betcha! Beans is what you have to eat between pizza party weekends. This is a secret from 4 hours body book :-)

Is pizza a healthy food?

Of course, per this illustration anyway :-)