The Path to Perfect Pizza

26 November 2020

With much of 2020 spent at home there has been plenty of time this year to hone our baking skills here at KCC. Over the past few months we have been experimenting with the base for an old favourite, pide (Turkey’s take on the baked dough and cheese combo), with an eye to creating a perfect pizza base that is soft and springy but with a crispy crust and we’re well pleased with our latest efforts.

KCC’s signature pizza with avocado, mozzarella, artichoke and tomato

After testing bases made from plain wheat flour, wholemeal flour or rye flour but found that these resulted in a denser base so we tried a more finely-milled flour, similar to Italy’s 00 standard, and found that this gave the best results with a fluffy but crispy base.

With tomato supplies running low (and being too lazy to brave the icy conditions outside), we improvised with crushed avocado in place of tomato sauce and hit upon a winning combination. Add some melty mozzarella, chunks of artichoke and slices of tomato to complete the taste sensation!

Ingredients (makes an eight-slice, 30 cm pizza)

150 g pizza flour (00 grade)
30 ml olive oil
Dried yeast (use according to pack instructions)
75 ml water

Toppings

One avocado
One medium tomato
Artichoke hearts
150 g mozzarella
One teaspoon dried mixed herbs (of your choice)

Method

Sieve the flour into a large mixing bowl and add the olive oil and mix with a wooden spoon. Add the dried yeast (according to the instructions on the pack) and then slowly add the water, mixing all the while.
Use your hands to form the dough into a ball and knead gently for ten minutes or so. Leave to rise in a warm place in an oiled bowl with a damp tea towel over the top for an hour or so. After 30 minutes, turn the oven on and heat to 200 c.
Roll the dough into a 30 cm round on a lightly-floured surface and then spread crushed avocado over the base. Arrange strips of mozzarella on top of the avocado. Put tomato slices on top of this and then add chunks of artichoke. Sprinkle with mixed herbs if using.
Bake the pizza on the top shelf of the oven for 10 – 15 minutes or until the cheese starts to bubble and brown and the edges of the crust turn a golden brown colour.

Brush up your Bruschetta Skills

2 July 2020

This week were honing in on a favourite Italian starter, bruschetta – slices of toasted bread served with a range of different toppings. We’ve opted for a heartier version using chunky slices of bread that can double up as a main meal when you add a salad of your choice.

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In Italy the slices of bread are toasted on a brustolina, a device made from sheet metal with holes on the bottom and a wire rack on the top (see pictures below taken from the Grand Voyage Italy website). This is placed over the heat source on your stove top and can be used to make toast, grill polenta and roast peppers, courgettes or aubergines.

Put the brustolina over the flame

A brustolina in action

Being unable to make it to Italy to pick up a brustolina at this point in time due to the pandemic, we’ve had to make do with our oven to toast the bread. Brush your thickly cut slices with olive oil and a rub of garlic and cover one side with a topping of your choice.

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We went for capers, sun-dried tomatoes and black olives with thin slices of courgette and basil leaves for the first option and home-made guacamole, topped once again with thin slices of courgette and basil leaves, for option two. Simply leave in a hot oven (200 c) for ten minutes or so until the bread just begins to burn at the edges. Serve immediately with your favourite salad.

Putting on the Piyaz: Turkey’s Versatile White Bean Salad

2 August 2019

Knidos Cookery Club has just arrived back at its home base on the Datça Peninsula in Turkey. We’re going to soak up some more culinary inspiration from the place where the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas meet around the ancient Greek settlement of Knidos.

To celebrate being back in Turkey, we’ve prepared a piyaz salad, one of the classic dishes of Turkish cooking, that combines small white beans with some readily available staples of the local kitchen; namely tomatoes, onions, green peppers, parsley and lemons.

Turkey’s çarliston peppers aka banana peppers

The secret of this dish is in getting the beans just right – not too mushy but not too firm either. They need a good, long overnight soak and some slow cooking to achieve the required consistency.

The dressing used varies across Turkey from the basic lemon, olive oil and apple vinegar one favoured in Istanbul to the tahini-infused one from Antalya, paying tribute to the Arabian influence from the Middle East on the city’s cuisine. We have opted for the creamy, nutty taste of the latter.

Ingredients (makes 3-4 servings)

200 g dried haricot beans or other small white beans soaked overnight
1 medium-sized plum tomato
1 long, green pepper (e.g. çarliston pepper – see photo above)
1 small onion
2 lemons
Small bunch of parsley
50 ml olive oil
50 ml apple vinegar
25 ml tahini
2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon red chilli flakes
Optional: Two boiled eggs or one avocado

Method

Cook the beans over a low heat until tender but not starting to go mushy. When cooked, drain off the cooking water, reserving 100 ml to make the dressing. Pour the vinegar and sprinkle the thyme over the beans and leave to cool.
After leaving for a few hours, add the vinegar the beans were soaking in to the reserved bean juice and then blend with the olive oil, tahini and the juice of one lemon to make a smooth sauce.
Finely dice the tomato, slice the pepper and onions into rings and chop the parsley finely. Add these to the beans.
Cover the salad and put it in the fridge for a few hours. Serve with wedges of the second lemon and sprinkle the red chilli flakes over the salad.
Just before serving, pour the dressing over the bean salad and season with black pepper and gently mix all the ingredients together with a wooden spoon.
You can garnish with quarters of boiled egg if you wish or, for a vegan twist, you can garnish the salad with slices of avocado.

Lemony Artichoke and Avocado Pasta

4 July 2019

This time round on Knidos Cookery Club we’re serving up a lemony pasta that combines artichoke hearts with avocado slices in a tomato sauce.

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The earthy flavour of the artichoke goes well with the zingy lemon zest in this healthy and easy-to-prepare pasta dish. We hadn’t tried artichoke and avocado in the same recipe before, but, on this evidence, we can assure you that it works perfectly!

Ingredients (serves 3-4)

Two green peppers
Six small tomatoes
25 ml olive oil
One lemon
Four artichoke hearts
One avocado
150 g dried pasta
50 ml water

Method

Heat the olive oil over in a heavy-based pan a medium heat and fry the sliced green peppers for five minutes. Add the diced tomatoes and cook for five more minutes. Add the water and reduce the heat so the sauce is simmering. Place the artichoke hearts on top of the sauce, cover the pan and steam for 30 minutes.
While the artichokes are steaming, cook the pasta according to instructions. Prepare the zest of one lemon by grating the skin. Squeeze the lemon into the pasta sauce. Remove the artichoke hearts when cooked. When the pasta is ready, drain it and mix with the sauce.
Put a layer of pasta and sauce in a bowl, place an artichoke heart in the middle, arrange avocado slices around the artichoke and sprinkle lemon zest over the dish before serving.

Down Home Arizona Kızartma

14 February 2019

This time round on Knidos Cookery Club we’re swinging through Tucson, Arizona on the way back home. Whilst in Tucson, we met up with some old friends from Kazakhstan (via Turkey and the USA) and were treated to Tolga’s kızartma – grilled peppers mixed in with fried aubergines and potatoes served in a garlic-infused tomato sauce and garnished with dollops of natural yogurt.

20190204_191319 — Tolga’s classic down home Arizona *kızartma*

Tucson is located on the edge of the Sonora Desert which stretches up into Arizona from northern Mexico. It’s a surreal landscape of towering cacti called saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea), which can grow to be more than 12 m tall.

20190203_163203 — There’s a lot of cactus….

The desert is a fascinating place populated with bobcats, coyotes, a variety of snakes and scorpions along with hallucinogenic Sonoran Desert toads (if you’re brave enough to lick them… ).

Having observed the master chef at work closely, here’s KCC’s take on the Turkish classic kızartma.

Ingredients (serves 3-4)

Two large potatoes
Three medium-sized tomatoes
Three garlic cloves
one small onion
One large aubergine
One avocado
Four peppers – a mix of green and red
Four jalapeño peppers
75 ml olive oil
100 ml natural yogurt

Method

Heat 25 ml of oil in a heavy-bottomed pan. Cut the potato into 1mm slices and fry in the oil, turning occasionally, until they are a golden-brown colour on both sides. Remove with a slotted spoon and put on a plate lined with kitchen towel.
Prick the peppers a couple of times with a fork and then roast them on a barbecue or over an open flame (here’s some tips on how to do this) until the skin is blackened all over. While the peppers are roasting, put 25ml oil in the pan and cut the aubergine into 1cm cubes and fry until golden brown. Remove with a slotted spoon and put on a plate lined with kitchen towel.
Add the rest of the oil to the pan, heat it up and then fry the finely chopped onion and garlic for five minutes over a medium heat and then grate the tomatoes into the pan and cook for 15-20 minutes. Peel the peppers, remove the seeds and chop the roasted peppers roughly.
In a large bowl put a layer potatoes, aubergine and peppers alternately. Pour the tomato sauce over the top and garnish with dollops of yogurt. Serve with slices of avocado.

Papa Jack’s Refried Avocado

31 January 2019

We’re continuing in our Mexican groove to make a vegetable take on the refried beans concept. It was meant to be a burger, but it didn’t hold together too well, so here is our refried avocado.

Refried beans are a Mexican staple and served on tortillas or as a side dish – the beans are mashed up and fried with garlic and spices. We’ve combined mashed potato, with a smashed up avocado, a diced jalapeño pepper and some yaka, or jackfruit. Potatoes are called papas in Mexican Spanish, hence the name for this dish: Papa Jack’s Refried Avocado.

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Jackfruit, a giant tropical fruit with a hard green spiky shell, that can grow up to 40kg, is widely available in Mexico. The fruit is a strong tasting yellow fleshy bulb that is somewhere between pineapple and banana.

We served the refried avocado on toast with our own salsa made with tomatoes, courgettes, carrots and chilli peppers.

Ingredients (makes 3-4 servings)

For the refried avocado:

Three medium-sized potatoes
One avocado
One jalapeño pepper
One lime
One jackfruit bulb
25ml olive oil

For the salsa:

Two medium-sized tomatoes
One carrot
One courgette
One jalapeño pepper

Method

Cook the potatoes until they can be mashed easily with a fork. Cut the avocado in half, remove the stone and add the flesh to the potato. finely dice the pepper and jackfruit (remove the stone first) and add to the mix, along with the lime juice. Mash everything together with a fork or potato masher.
Heat the oil in a heavy-based frying pan. Heat the mashed avocado through in the hot oil and serve on toast with a salsa made of tomato, carrot and courgette – simply dice the tomatoes and cook the chopped up carrot, courgette and jalapeño pepper in the tomato liquid over a low heat for 20 minutes or so.

Avocado + Egg = Brunch Heaven

9 February 2017

This week at Knidos Cookery Club we have a guest post that combines two of our all-time fave foods: avocado and egg, dished up with olives, beetroot with walnuts and halloumi cheese.

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Avocados love the mild winters of the Knidos region as the shores of the Mediterranean Sea provide ideal growing conditions for this large green fruit that’s packed with nutritious vitamins and healthy fats.

Our guest chef Jasha, who has worked in the hospitality industry in the UK, has kindly agreed to share her favourite way of combining eggs with avocado. Served up with pan-seared halloumi, olives and grated beetroot with walnut, this great dish sent us into brunch heaven!

Ingredients

One avocado per person

Two eggs per person

250 g pack halloumi cheese cut into four slices (enough for two people)

Black and green olives

A few scoops of olive paste

One grated large beetroot (raw or cooked) mixed with 50 g crushed walnuts and two teaspoons of sour cream or natural yogurt

Black pepper and red chili flakes

Method

Slice the avocados in half and remove the stone. Be careful not to stab yourself in the hand as I once did – it’s apparently quite a common kitchen injury. Scoop out some of the flesh to leave a hollow space for the egg.

Place the avocado halves in a baking dish, round side down, and pour an egg into the scooped out shell. Grind some black pepper over each egg and bake the avocados in an oven pre-heated to to 200 c /gas mark 6 for 20 minutes or until the underside of the eggs are cooked. Finish the eggs off under a grill and then season with some red chili flakes and a grind of black pepper.

While the eggs are cooking, fry the halloumi slices in a non-stick or heavy-based frying pan until browned on both sides.

Serve the avocados immediately with the pan-seared halloumi, beetroot and walnuts, olive paste and olives and some doorsteps of fresh bread.