Christmas Dinner

Been a while since I've posted.  I've been using my Nomiku often and loving it!  On Thanksgiving we did a sous vide turkey breast along with all the traditional fixings which all turned out excellent!  We've also been making chicken breasts, steaks and some vegetables sous vide.

For Christmas I decided to use a beef tenderloin that I vacuum sealed and froze last christmas, I've been trying to use some of the stuff that's been accumulating in our freezer.  To make it more "christmasy" I decided to butterfly the roast and fill it with sauteed garlic spinach.  The process was pretty simple, first I sauteed down some spinach by sweating a minced clove of garlic with some pepper, then adding fresh spinach and cooking it down.  Once done the spinach was dumped in to a colander and allowed to drain a bit while I  butterflied the tenderloin.  This portion of tenderloin was already a bit flat due to the vacuum sealing and freezing, so I just cut it about half way down stopping about an inch from the other side.  I opened it like a book, covered with plastic wrap and used a meat mallet to flatten to a uniform thickness.  Salt and pepper was sprinkled on the meat, then a layer of the garlic spinach.  The tenderloin was then rolled up and tied to keep the spinach inside, then I tried to stuff any stuffing that squished out back in the sides of the roast.  I seasoned the outside of the roast and vacuum sealed it along with a few tablespoons of butter.  This was cooked in a 56.7C bath for about 90 minutes, then allowed to cool in the bag for 10 minutes before being debagged and seared on all sides in a hot pan.

For sides we did potatoes dauphinoise, roasted brussels sprouts with smoked roasted red pepper and a salad.  Potatoes dauphinoise is one of the easiest dishes I know of that always gets raves.  It's just potatoes sliced on a mandolin and cooked in cream that's been seasoned with salt, white pepper and minced garlic.  For this time I added some minced onion and topped it with parmesan cheese.  I like to cook it in a shallow casserole to maximize browning.  For the first 30 minutes the potatoes are cooked in a 350F oven covered with foil, then the foil is removed and they cook until the top is nice and browned.  Sometimes I'll increase the oven temp to 400 to speed up the browning process.

The brussels sprouts are based on a recipe I saw on a cooking show earlier this year.  I cut off the stem end of the sprout and then cut it in half lengthwise, then they're put in a bowl of cold water to soak for a bit.  When I'm ready to cook I drain the soaking water, add salt, pepper and olive oil then toss to evenly distribute the seasoning.  The brussels sprouts halves and arranged on a baking sheet cut side down, covered in foil and then put on the top shelf of an oven preheated to 500F degrees for 10 minutes.  At that time the foil is removed and the sprouts are roasted for another 10 minutes until they start to brown.  To add a little christmas color I roasted a red bell pepper, allowed it to steam a bit in a covered bowl and then removed the skin.  The pepper was cut in to 1/2" by 3/4" pieces and placed back in the bowl, then covered with plastic wrap and smoked using my Polyscience Smoking Gun loaded with apple wood chips before being allowed to sit covered for 5 minutes to absorb the smoke flavor.  The smoked, roasted red pepper pieces then tossed with the roasted brussels sprouts.  My original intention was to try and mimic the taste of Brussels sprouts and bacon and this was a pretty good attempt, I'll be refining this recipe and pulling it out for cold weather dinners often.

Next time I'll try to get some pictures!

My first Nomiku meal!

My first Nomiku centric meal.  The chicken breast, carrots and potatoes were all cooked with my new Nomiku.  For the chicken breast, I made a marinade with equal parts ponzu, soy sauce and fish sauce.  To that I added some powdered ginger, granulated garlic and seasoned pepper.  The carrots were peeled and bagged with some dill weed, lemon zest salt and butter.  For the potatoes I just cleaned them and bagged with crushed garlic, butter, salt and pepper.  I pierced each potato with a fork to allow the flavor to penetrate.  The carrots and potatoes were cooked at 85°C for 45 minutes, then allowed to cool for about 10 minutes before being put in an ice bath to chill.  Later in the day, the chicken breasts were cooked at 65.6°C for 45 minutes.  After the chicken was removed to cool the carrots and potatoes were put in the bath to retherm.  To serve the carrots and potatoes were put on a foil lined baking sheet and roasted in a hot oven to dry out a little.  The chicken breast was put over a screaming hot charcoal fire to sear.  Also served was some freshly baked bread (100% flour, 66% water, 2% honey, 0.75% active dry yeast, 2% salt) and grilled portobello mushroom caps that were doused with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper and cooked on the grill.  Since it is fall I grabbed some oak leaves from the patio and threw them on the fire to smoke the mushrooms.  Very nice meal!

Nomiku Immersion Circulator

I was first introduced to sous vide back in culinary school, but it wasn't quite the same technique that's popular today.  Sous vide is french for "under vacuum", and what they covered in class was the "boil in bag" method of vacuum packaging pre cooked items at a central commissary to be reheated on site by immersing the bags in simmering water, unbagging and plating.  The sous vide technique that's popular today is a low temperature cooking method where items are vacuum bagged in a raw or almost raw state and cooked by immersing in a water bath maintained at a precise temperature using rather specialized equipment.

Back in 2009 I first became interested in playing around with the low temperature version of sous vide.  I started lurking around on Ebay until I was able to pick up an old Fisher Scientific immersion circulator in 2010 at a good price.  It was pretty dirty when it arrived and needed a lot of TLC to get working.  I took everything apart, cleaned all the electrical connections, descaled and scraped off a lot of gunk and was rewarded with a (mostly) working immersion circulator.  I say mostly because there is some issue that I haven't been able to remedy which causes the circulator to trip any GFCI protected outlet, like all the outlets in the kitchen.  Because of this I had to do all my sous vide cooking out in the dining room.  I wanted something a bit more reliable and modern, but new immersion circulators suitable for kitchen use were all in the $500-$1000 range.  That changed in June 2012 when a Kickstarter campaign started for a low cost immersion circulator for the home cook called the Nomiku.  For a mere $299 contribution a backer would receive one of the first Nomiku units, which were supposed to ship out by November 2012.  I jumped at the chance, knowing that there was no guarantee I would ever see anything.

The Nomikus were originally estimated to ship in November 2012, but that month came and went with no Nomiku.  The founders of the company had to deal with repeated delays, changes and roadblocks along the way but they persevered, and on October 1st I came home from work to a brand new Nomiku sitting on my doorstep!

The Nomiku is a much more attractive circulator than my old Fisher Scientific model, it consists of the circulating/control unit and a separate power supply.  In the box is a user manual, an illustrated "getting started" sheet and a sous vide primer.  The circulator feels solidly built, the only thing I noticed was that the green ring that you rotate to set the target temperature seems a bit loose but that seems to be by design.  I grabbed a large stockpot (about 28 quart capacity), attached the Nomiku and started filling until the water level reached the "Max" level indicator on the stem of the Nomiku.  That took 14 liters of water.  Normally I would fill the bath with hot water from the tap, but since I wanted to stress the unit to shake out any bugs I used cold water (about 20°C).  The reason I like to stress new equipment is that it allows my to find any faults early on that may require the item be replaced while still under warranty.

As the inaugural dish I decided to make sous vide carrots, this required a 90°C water bath that should be the hottest I'll ever need.  After filling the bath with the 14 liters of 20°C tap water I plugged in the Nomiku and tapped the screen to turn it on.  The desired bath temp is set by rotating the green collar around the screen, which I did until the display showed 90°C.  It took a LONG time for the bath to heat up.  At the 2 hour mark we were just getting up to around 76°C, so I tried to improvise a lid to help reduce the effects of evaporative cooling.  That helped, but I needed something a bit more effective so I ended up covering the pot with s sheet of aluminum foil and covered that with a dish towel.  That turned out to be effective and by the 2 hour 40 minute mark the bath had reached the desired 90°C temperature.  I made a simple preparation of carrots, just the vegetable, some butter, a little cumin and salt.  This was bagged using a Food Saver Vacuum Sealer and dropped into the bath for about 20 minutes.  As long as I had the foil top on the pot the Nomiku was able to maintain the bath temperature within +/- 0.1°C of the target point, I could see the light over the stove dimming as the heating element cycled.  Once the 20 minuted was up the bag was removed from the bath and I lowered the set temperature on the Nomiku to let it start cooling down.

If you've never tried sous vide carrots I suggest you give them a try.  The technique allows all their natural sweetness to some out and they retain an intense flavor.  The Nomiku performed like a champ, I think I can definitely get by with a smaller bath size for most applications and finding a bath container with a cover that I can cut to accommodate the circulator unit will help reduce the energy spent maintaining temperature.  Since I will be able to use my Nomiku in the kitchen I'll be able to pre-heat the bath water rather than let the circulator do that extra work on its own.  Now that I have a circulator that is so much easier to set up that my old one I'm going to be able to really play around with sous vide cooking.

One of the things I often hear from people is that sous vide cooking of meats is dangerous because you aren't raising the internal temperature to what the USDA recommends.  People need to understand that the USDA recommendations are based on a short exposure time at that temperature while pasteurization is a function of both temperature AND time.  A longer exposure at a lower temperature will kill pathogens just as well as a short exposure at a higher temperature.  Douglass Baldwin has an excellent sous vide guide including pasteurization tables located here.

Visit the Nomiku website for more information.

Edit:  I heated up another bath of 14 liters from 20°C to 90°C with the pot covered in foil and a dish towel from the start, this knocked almost an hour off the heating time (1 hour 45 minutes down from 2 hours 40 minutes).

New England Style Split Top Hot Dog Rolls

Chicago has several "gourmet" sausage spots, like Hot Doug's and Frank 'n Dawgs.  Frank 'n Dawgs in particular uses these awesome split top buns that are buttered and toasted on the sides giving a nice crunchy exterior, and while they are supposedly available on the east coast I've had little luck finding them around Chicago.  So after seeing an article in the King Arthur Flour mailer I set out to make some for myself.

The first thing was to source the proper pan to bake the rolls in, naturally I went to Amazon.com first and found what I was looking for.   This pan  was just what I was looking for.  Since I was about to go down to visit my parents, I just had it shipped to their address so I could try it out before I made the return trip home.

There are several recipes to find on the internet, the first one I tried was here.  The buns were tasty, but the first batch was a disaster.  I think it was just a case of bad yeast, the rolls didn't rise at all even after an overnight ferment.  I tried to dissolve some fresh yeast in a little water and knead it in which did get a little rise, but the final buns were small and dense.  I set the pan aside for a few months before trying again, this time I just went to the original source of inspiration for the recipe, King Arthur Flour.  The recipe can be displayed by volume, ounces or grams (which is my preference).  This is what I used for 10 rolls...

AP Flour          361 grams     100%
Water               222 grams       61%
Sugar                 25 grams       6.9%
Yeast (IDY)         6 grams       1.6%
Salt                       7 grams         2%
Dry Milk             28 grams       7.8%
Potato Flour        43 grams        12%
Large Egg            47 grams       13%
Butter (soft)          28 grams        8%

I put the sugar in the bowl of my Kitchenaid stand mixer and poured in 200 grams of water to dissolve it a little bit, then the yeast was added and allowed to hydrate a little.  Next I added the egg, dry milk powder, potato flour and topped it with the flour.  The salt was added on top along with the soft butter.  The bowl was placed in the mixer and the bread hook attached.  After a few minuted of kneading it was apparent that more water was needed, so it was added little by little until a smooth dough ball formed.  The kneading continued for about 4 minutes longer.  I weighed the dough ball after kneading and determined that 22 additional grams of water had been needed, good to know for the next time.  The dough ball was placed in an oiled bowl, covered with plastic wrap and allowed to ferment for about 2-3 hours.

The finished dough ball weighed 767 grams, so I scaled it in to 10 76 gram balls.  Each ball was flattened and rolled up as if it were a tiny baguette and placed in the bun pan that had been pre-sprayed with Pam.  I also sprayed Pam on a sheet pan and placed it over the buns with some stainless steel bowls on top as weight while they were rising.  The total rising time took about 65 minutes, toward the end of this time I preheated the oven to 375°.  The buns were placed in the oven with the weighted sheet pan still on top and allowed to bake for about 18 minutes, the the sheet pan was removed and the buns baked uncovered for another 6-7 minutes to brown.  They were allowed to cool in the pan for 5 minuted before turning them out on to a cooling rack.  Since I had to put the rack pretty far down in the oven, just above the Baking Steel, the bottoms weren't as brown as I would have liked, so I put them back in the oven (this time set for convection) to give them a little more color.

This is the final result, the rolls filled the pan up to the sheet pan cover, are full size and fluffy.  They also smell great!  Just before the sausages are ready I'll cut the rolls apart, butter the sides and griddle until crisp.  I think they will go great with the assorted sausages I picked up from Gepperth's Market yesterday.  I know it's a lot of trouble to go to to make something that play a supporting role for the sausage, but if you're going to spend the money on a premium sausage you might as well serve it on a premium (and home made) bun!  These are also the style of roll you would use for lobster rolls, but that will have to wait for another day!

Sriracha-Honey "Caviar"

I've read about the process of spherification for a long time, but never tried to do it myself.  It always seemed to much trouble to order the sodium alganate and calcium salt by mail order and set up all the baths, but on a recent visit to The Spice House in Chicago I was pleased to find that they are now selling everything I needed to give it a try.  I had to wait a few weeks due to a planned vacation, but this morning I made my first attempt at spherification.

My first thought was to make something that looked similar to beluga caviar, those very expensive salted sturgeon eggs that can go for hundreds an ounce.  But I really didn't have any ingredients to pull that off (although I think a reduction of concord grape juice would probably work), so when I started to think of other similar things I could replicate I finally hit on hot sauce salmon roe.  Of course, this has already been done but it was a good place to start.  There wasn't any fresh hot sauce in the house so I decided to go with Sriracha sauce as the base, cut with some honey for sweetness.

The recipe I came up with for a first attempt was...

15 grams Sriracha sauce
10 grams honey
15 grams water (plus an undefined amount to thin the mixture)
2 grans sodium citrate (as a buffer)
3 grams sodium alginate

I wasn't using a particularly accurate scale so I may have added a little too much sodium alginate since the mixture seemed to gel up immediately.  I started adding water and mixing it in with an immersion blender until the mixture was a little thicker in consistency than maple syrup.  Then it was allowed to sit in the fridge for about an hour before I placed the container in a Food Saver Canister and applied a vacuum to pull out any residual air bubbles.  After several cycles we were ready to go.

I mixed 9 grams of calcium salt in 1 liter of water until everything was dissolved for a calcium bath and poured most of it in to a tall glass.  Using a 10 ml luer slip syringe I "borrowed" from the office I pulled up some of the sriracha mixture and while holding it about a foot above the bath slowly depressed the plunger so the sriracha would enter the calcium bath in drops.  The alginate in the sriracha drops instantly gelled when they came in to contact with the calcium ions in the bath to form spheres.  After a few syringe fulls of sriracha mix, I strained out the spheres, rinsed them in a water bath and then dumped them in a second water bath for holding.  This was repeated until all the sriracha-honey mix was spherified.  Here is the result...

I mixed a little olive oil and grape seed oil in with the sriracha/honey spheres to keep them separate, they really do look like salmon roe and have the same pop in the mouth feel to them but a completely different taste.  Since this was direct spherification I'm not sure if they will eventually solidify or remain liquid in the center, reverse spherification would certainly retain the liquid center.  I have a decent supply of the required ingredients so I'm sure I'll be messing around with this technique quite a bit in the coming months!

"Melty" Queso Dip

Prior to Cinco de Mayo Modernist Cuisine posted a recipe for a Melty Queso Dip consisting only of pepperjack cheese, beer (or water) and sodium citrate.  The only ingredient that I had to order was the sodium citrate, which I eventually bought from Amazon.com and was delivered shortly before I left for a weeks vacation.  While I was down south visiting family I thought I'd give it a try.

At a nearby grocery store I picked up a pound of pepperjack cheese, the brand chosen mainly because it was on sale.  It was a little below the weight listed in the recipe (285 grams) so I threw in some Land o' Lakes white american cheese I found in the fridge to make up the difference.  The only beer that was available was some Sam Adams Boston Lager, which in hindsight wasn't the best choice for this application.  The 265 milliliters of beer was warmed up to a simmer and 11 grams of sodium citrate was added and dissolved.  Now the fun part, the cheese was added to the simmering beer in batches while using an immersion blender to fully incorporate each addition before the next was added.  There was some foaming here so if you try this be sure to use a big enough saucepan and stop occasionally to let the foam subside.  The result was a smooth cheese dip with a silky texture and great cheese flavor.  The downside was the strong hop flavor contributed by the Sam Adams beer, it distracted from the cheese which should be the star of the show.  When I do this again (and I will since I bought a full pound of sodium citrate) I'll be sure to use a much less hoppy beer, like the wheat beer they suggested.  A Goose Island 312 should fit the bill nicely!

The Polyscience Smoking Gun

Last week I bought a new toy on Ebay that I've coveted for a while, a Polyscience Smoking Gun.  The Smoking Gun allows you add smoke to foods without adding any heat, so you can "smoke" delicate things that you don't want to cook like fruits and cheeses.  Obviously this isn't smoking in a traditional sense as there is no cooking and no penetration of the smoke in to the food, it just settles on the surface.  Two small cans of sawdust come with the Smoking Gun, hickory and apple wood, there are several other varieties available from Polyscience but they seem a bit expensive so I ordered this from Amazon which looks to be the correct grind for the gun.  Once I've had a chance to try them out I'll add the results to this post.  Other smoke sources people seem to be using are tobacco, tea and dried herbs, so many things to burn and so little time!  For my first foray in to cold smoking I used some hickory sawdust to smoke strawberries and sharp cheddar cheese...

Charlie Trotter's in the wayback machine

I graduated culinary school in May of 2004 and my reward for this was to visit Charlie Trotter's world famous eponymous restaurant for dinner, at the time the restaurant was #32 on the list of the top 50 restaurants in the world and considered one of if not the best restaurant in Chicago.  We had made reservations for 4 people on June 1st and three of us arrived a few minutes early.  While we were waiting for our fourth the hostess came up and informed us that the party who had reserved the kitchen table had cancelled and if we would like to enjoy our dinner there instead of the dining room.  The kitchen table usually required a minimum of 6 guests so we jumped at the chance.  I need to dig around and find the menus, but I believe it was 18 or 19 courses and the meal was absolutely amazing.  Everything from the plating to the service to the courses themselves were flawless.  As a recent graduate I was most interested in watching how the kitchen at one of the worlds best restaurants operates, so didn't take many pictures.  In fact, I only managed to get one photo of a plated course.  I wish I could go back and kick myself, but there ya go!

That was almost 9 years ago, so why am I bringing it up now?  Charlie Trotter closed his restaurant last August after 25 years, back in December they started to auction off the furnishings, fixtures and equipment from the restaurant but that auction was cut a bit short for various reasons.  So last week they finished selling off most of the remaining lots of items via an on-line auction.  As a food nerd I couldn't stay away.  When the auction was over and the dust had settled I was the high bidder on three lots.  One was some square bowls along with a bread plate and saucer.  The second lot included 5 art glass and 2 pottery vases.  The final lot was the one I was really after, it was seven large white porcelain rectangular serving dishes marked "Ola".  Besides sharing the name of my recently deceased grandmother, these dishes are the same pattern as the one shown in the photo above.  Probably not the actual same dishes, but you never know!  I was able to find the plates online and they are quite expensive, the only retail price I could find had them for $140 each.  That seems a little high to me but in any case I got an extremely great deal!  Next thing I want to do is find the menu from our dinner in 2004 and see if I can recreate the course shown in the photo at home!

Rosewill RHIC-11001 Induction cooker with Stainless steel pot

Lately I've been trying to eat a little healthier during the day by NOT going to the hospital cafeteria.  With the exception of the salad bar, most of the choices each day are fairly large portions and many seem loaded with salt and fat.  I'd rather save my "bad" eating for after work.  Lately soup has been the option of choice, but the only thing in the office to heat it up in is a commercial microwave.  I'm not a big fan of nuking food in the first place, but this particular microwave presents more issues than most because of its power.  Each time I heat a bowl of soup in this microwave some portion becomes super-heated and erupts all over the interior.  Not only does this make a huge mess I have to clean up but some of the liquid hits the dirty top of the chamber and drips back down in to the bowl. Covering the bowl would seem like a good idea, but the eruptions are often strong enough to kick off the cover and send even more of my lunch out of the bowl.  Additionally, I could only get the soup lukewarm in the center before the sides would start to boil over.  I decided to buy a hot plate to put in my office so I could make lunch the way I want to make lunch.

Since this is the office a butane burner is out of the question, so the choice was of a model with an electric coil heating element or an induction cooker.  I ended up looking for an induction cooker from various sources and eventually decided on this particular one for a few reasons.  First, it's cheap.  I didn't want to spend a lot of money on something that I'll be keeping in the office.  Second, it came with a pot so I wouldn't have to hope I would have something laying around that would be compatible with induction.  Finally, I had an Amazon.com gift card from Christmas that I could apply towards the price.  A few days before the cooker arrived I saw another induction cooker at Costco (Aroma model AID-506) for $49.99. It doesn't come with a pot but I probably would have bought it if I hadn't already spent the money at Amazon.  Oh well.

  The cooker arrived yesterday afternoon and the first thing I thought when unpacking was that it is BIG!  Overall dimensions for the cooker are 12 1/2" x 15" x 2 3/4" high.  The pot supplied is pretty chincy, very lightweight but does work with the cooker.  I brought everything in to the office this morning, heated up some soup for lunch and was very satisfied with the results.  I was able to quickly heat up the soup to a uniformly hot temperature without making a mess in the microwave and without any crusty bits of dried soup around the rim of the bowl to be scrubbed off.  The pot was a little big for one can of soup, so tonight when I get home I'll go through the tote of old pots and pans I have in the garage to look for something more appropriate for the job.

As usual, I took a little spare time to do a test on the cooker.  1 liter of water from the tap was placed in the pot, the temperature recorded at 51.5 degrees Fahrenheit and the lid put on.  The cooker was turned on full power and I timed how long it took for the water to start boiling.  In 6 minutes the water was boiling, my guess would be that a pot made of thicker gauge steel would give better results, once I find something better I'll repeat the test and post the results.  I'm looking forward to better, healthier lunches at work!

Pizza on a Baking Steel

I've been making pizza for a long time, usually on a pizza stone in the oven but when weather permits I'll sometimes pull out the 2Stone Pizza Grill and make some pies outside on my Weber Grill.  The char you can get baking at 800-1000 degrees adds a lot of flavor in my opinion, but it takes a LOT of extra effort and several days to pull off properly.  I have found a relatively nearby source for the '00" flour I like to use for Neapolitan pies (Caputo's Cheese Market) but on more than one occasion my well laid plans were thwarted by bad weather.  I had read in "Modernist Cuisine" about using a sheet of solid aluminum instead of a pizza stone but really didn't think too much about trying it until reading about a Kickstarter project for a new product called a Baking Steel on the Serious Eats website.  I must have dropped hints t the right people because lo and behold, a new Baking Steel was waiting for me under the tree on Christmas morn.

A Baking Steel is basically what it sounds like, a sheet of steel (14" x 16" x 1/4" thick) you put in the oven to bake your pizza on instead of a stone or pan.  Some of the advantages are a greater thermal mass and better heat transfer properties than a pizza stone.  I thought it would be easy for me to just have a piece of steel cut to the same dimensions, but the cost of materials and shipping would have made it about the same price and I would have had to pay extra to have the edges ground down to make it safe to pick up without leather gloves.  The Baking Steel seemed a better option.  A recipe for NY style pizza dough was included in the box so that's where we start.

The NY style Pizza Dough recipe included with the Baking Steel was originally posed on the Serious Eats website by J. Kenji López-Alt but is based on one from Peter Reinhart's Pizza Quest blog.  One thing I don't like about the recipe is that it's in ounces.  My scale has a 1 gram resolution, but when weighing in ounces the resolution is only 1/8 ounce (about 3.5 grams) so I can get inconsistent results when trying to measure small weights in ounces.  Here is the recipe, expressed in the original ounces, converted to grams and in baker's percentages for those so inclined.

22.5 oz     637.9 grams   100%   Bread Flour
0.5 oz       14.2 grams      2.2%   Sugar
0.35 oz     9.9 grams        1.6%   Salt
0.35 oz     9.9 grams        1.6%   Active Dry Yeast
1.125 oz   31.9 grams      5%      Extra Virgin Olive Oil
15 oz        425.2 grams    66.7% Water

The recipe calls for using a food processor to pulse the ingredients together for 15 minutes or until it comes together, then for an additional 15 seconds and finally finishing off by kneading by hand a little bit before splitting in to 3 parts, putting each ball in to a zip-top bag and in to the fridge for at least 1 and up to 5 days.  I prefer using a Kitchenaid mixer with a dough hook set to low for about 4-5 minutes, then scaling in to 375 gram balls and bagging for the fridge.

On pizza day I removed a dough ball from the fridge, rounded it on the counter and placed it under a bowl on a floured surface to warm up to room temperature (I gave it about 75 minutes).  For the bake I placed the pizza steel on the bottom shelf as the instructions...well...instructed and set the oven temperature to 550 degrees.  I let the steel preheat in the oven for about an hour while the dough rested.  When ready, I opened op the dough in to about a 12" pizza skin and placed it on a well floured wooden peel (I find wooden peels are best for loading the pies in to the oven).  I used a basic marinara sauce topped with some thinly sliced red onions, green peppers, kalamata olives, fresh purple and green basil and finally some slices of fresh mozzarella.  The pizza baked about 5 or 6 minutes before being removed from the oven using a metal peel (which I like to removal over the wooden one) and placed on the counter on a large brown paper bag.  After a few minutes of cooling a small drizzle of white truffle oil was added.  Here is the final result.

Everyone liked the final result!  I think the top of the pie didn't cook as fast as the crust so there are a few things I might try differently next time.  The easiest thing would be to place the steel on a higher rack in the oven which should increase the radiant heat hitting the top of the pizza. The other option would be to decrease the amount of sugar in the dough which would slow the browning.  I don't have a pic of the bottom of the crust but it was uniformly well browned.  Not the char you get at ultra high temperatures but much less work to get an awesome result!  I'm going to have a lot of fun with this!