Plate to Plate

Calloo callay, the first of May!

Usually pizza night is Friday. However, this week we’ll spend tonight up in Norwich, Vermont, at the Norwich Inn, after my first day at the Dough Shaping and Scoring Practicum at the King Arthur Baking Center. So, if there’s any pizza, it likely won’t be my own.

A few weeks back, Fran and I were talking about my baking goals. (Surprisingly enough, it turns out I have baking goals.) The first thing I mentioned, skill-wise, was improving my dough handling and shaping. If you haven’t baked much bread, handling and shaping probably aren’t keeping you up at night. There are so many things that go into getting a successful loaf of bread, the way in which you wedge it into the loaf pan or plop it onto the cookie sheet are literally the last things you think about before setting the timer. They never really bothered me much either… until I spent a couple months working in a professional bakery. There, you’re making dozens of loaves a day, in different styles — some baguettes, some braided, some loaves, some batards — and the shapes not only have to look distinct, but they need to be consistent within their style. The crummy loaves can be cut up for samples, but if every loaf is a crummy loaf your bread display looks pretty ragged.

So blah blah blah, it turned out there was a class on just this very thing, up in beautiful (maybe?) Norwich, Vermont. So, this and that, and then I’m going to it.

Thursday night then becomes pizza night. I have a bunch of frozen dough from the batch Fran made a week ago, so the question is: What toppings? No more than four is a good rule of thumb when it comes to toppings but I broke that rule last night. In the most basic way I didn’t, I guess: mushrooms, cheese, onions, ramps — but within that, I went too far.

I felt as though I needed to use ramps. Fran discovered a big new patch of them, and the bag was just sitting in the refrigerator ready to go. Ramps are garlicky/oniony, so what goes well with that? More onion, cheese, and mushrooms? So it was.

As usual, I overdid it. Three kinds of cheese (fontina, pecorino romano, and ricotta) were too many kinds of cheese. This would have been better with just fontina or ricotta because the star of the should should have been the ramps. I’ve never really gotten ramps. I understand that they’re rare, wild, and seasonal — that’s appealing for sure, in the way that anything obscure has a little aura. But, in my experience, there’s not much in ramps that wouldn’t be equally good with garlic. In fact, ramps usually taste so mild in final dishes that the essential rampiness of them is completely obscured — that is, I assume there’s a rampiness I’m just not tasting, otherwise what’s the big deal?

Here’s the big deal: Don’t cook ramps too much.

I cooked two ramp bulbs (and most of the magenta stem part) in about 4 tablespoons of warm oil for about ten minutes (started out hot, then reduced to simmer) adding the greens at that point, and continuing for about 7 minutes. I added a pinch of salt, and removed the lot, cooling until warm to the touch. I put this mixture in the mortar and ground it with the pestle for about 5 minutes, until it was well broken up, but not yet a smooth paste.

Man-oh-man, did that taste good. Lightly garlicky, but mostly sweet and green. It had the sweetness of a roasted garlic bulb without the caramel. Does that make sense? It was sweet and light and tasted like a warm spring night. So good. Compulsively delicious.

Unfortunately, that amazingly great taste was obliterated on the pizza. Too much cheese and overcooked pizza (under the broiler, even 40 seconds too long can kill it) took all the fun and electricity out of it. It ended up cheese and mushroom pizza, when it should have been about the ramps, and nothing else. A fine pizza, but nothing more. If you have something great, make it the star. Don’t fart around, you’re not nurturing a career here, just cooking with something that will be gone tomorrow.

Don’t fuck it up. And if you do, ha ha? But, in this case, we have a few more ramps in the fridge so I’ll just try again next week with a more streamlined recipe and a closer eye to the broiler.