Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [41]
1. The morning of the day you want to eat pizza, mix all the dough ingredients in a bowl, knead for a few minutes, cover with a clean, damp dish towel, and let rise for 2 hours or up to all day.
2. If you have a baking stone, put it in the oven 45 minutes before you want to eat. Preheat the oven to 550 degrees F.
3. Generously sprinkle a cookie sheet or pizza peel with coarse cornmeal.
4. Pat the mozzarella dry and lay on a paper towel for a few minutes so it gives up even more moisture.
5. Divide the dough into two balls. Stretch one ball into a round, about 14 inches in diameter, and place on the cookie sheet.
6. Spread with some tomato sauce—don’t overdo it or the pizza will be soggy. Top with half the mozzarella. Sprinkle with oregano and red pepper flakes.
7. Bake for 9 minutes. Drizzle with olive oil. Repeat with the remaining dough and toppings.
Makes 2 pizzas, to serve 8
POTS TICKERS
A friend once said, “We live in San Francisco. Why would you try to cook Chinese at home when there are so many great Chinese restaurants?”
I thought this was very wise until I got a Chinese cookbook and became completely obsessed. I smoked ducks and stir-fried live shrimp and steamed breads and made a beggar’s chicken complete with the clay sarcophagus. Practically everything I cooked was more delicious than what I’d eaten in restaurants. This is partly because most of the restaurants in San Francisco are Cantonese and I like spicier Hunan and Szechuan dishes. There are a lot of great Chinese restaurants out there, but the place you go “for Chinese” isn’t necessarily one of them.
If you have the time and energy, you can do better than a generic Chinese restaurant with a copy of Barbara Tropp’s The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking or Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook and supplies from a well-stocked Asian supermarket. These pot stickers are just one example of the extraordinary Chinese dishes you can make at home. I serve these with a sweetened vinegar manufactured by the Pat Chun company of Hong Kong. It’s an incredible product, a black, tart-fragrant sauce made from rice wine vinegar seasoned with ginger, orange peel, and cloves. Look for it at Asian supermarkets. If you can’t find sweetened vinegar, make a dip by mixing together soy sauce and rice wine vinegar to taste. A dash of sesame oil never hurts.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Wrapping them gets very wearisome and can take an hour or more
Cost comparison: The last time I made these, I priced them to the penny, using ingredients from the Chinese market. This included some very cheap, acceptable $1.29-per-pound fatty ground pork butt. It cost $5.71 to make the entire recipe. Of course, it will cost more if you shop at Safeway, and many times this if you buy pastured hormone-free pork and organic vegetables. But most Chinese restaurants don’t do this, so I was simply trying to compare apples to apples when it comes to price. I eked out about 80 pot stickers, but some of them were a little skimpy, so I priced this for 60 pot stickers and came up with a cost of $0.10 apiece. At Young Can Wok, the pleasant Chinese restaurant nearest to my house (as the crow flies), you pay $6.75 for six pot stickers, which works out to $1.13 per pot sticker, not including tip. When we eat there, we always comment on how cheap it is to eat Chinese. Yes, it is, especially if you cook the food at home.
FILLING
1 pound fatty boneless pork shoulder, ground
¾ pound napa cabbage, finely chopped or shredded
1 teaspoon kosher salt
3 tablespoons minced scallion
3 tablespoons minced cilantro
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1 tablespoon minced garlic
Finely grated zest of half an orange
2 tablespoons Chinese rice wine
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon sesame oil
Pinch of red pepper flakes
½ to 1 teaspoon Szechuan peppercorns, toasted and finely ground
About 80 round dumpling wrappers, homemade (recipe follows) or store-bought
All-purpose flour, for dusting