Pizza Pie

I have never made pizza before and, as you all know, the past few weeks have found me in the kitchen, experimenting with recipes/cookbook/forgotten kitchen equipment.  I decided that pizza was an important stop on my journey to learning how to cook.

The other day, on television, I saw a recipe for a pizza dough made with whole-wheat flour and sweet potatoes.  I tracked the recipe down on the Internet and made myself some pretty decent (and surprisingly healthy) pizza. 

The dough is easy, if a little time-consuming.  Peel, chop, and boil a large sweet potato until past fork tender.  This should take between 15 and 20 minutes.  Drain the potato and mash it immediately until smooth.  Put the mashed potato in the refrigerator (or, if you're in a rush, the freezer) to cool.  

While you're waiting, you can always make an easy tomato sauce.  It amazes me how readily most Americans fall back on canned tomato sauce when making one's own is so incredibly easy.  I like to use a combination of diced and crushed tomatoes (crushed tomatoes are close to a puree in consistency) for better texture.  Make a base with olive oil, garlic/white onion/shallot/a combination of all three and once the veggies have become translucent add your canned tomatoes.  Last night, I used only diced because that's what I had on hand.  Add spice.  I ripped up some fresh basil and added dried oregano, salt, course ground pepper, and red pepper flakes.  Add alcohol.  What I happened to have open was Amontillado, a dry and nutty sherry.  Add a dash of balsamic vinegar for depth.  And last but not least, add some kind of sweetening agent to balance the acidity of the tomatoes.  I threw in about a tablespoon of agave nectar, but any sugar or sugar substitute will do.  That's it.  Leave the pot uncovered to thicken for about 10 to 20 minutes and you have a better sauce than Ragu could ever produce. 

Moving on.  Once the sweet potato has cooled, put it in a large bowl and add to it two cups of whole-wheat flour and two teaspoons of baking powder (this will allow the crust to rise slightly).  Also add some kosher salt to taste, ground black pepper, and dried oregano.  Mix this together either by hand or with a wooden spoon.  Once it comes together, add nine tablespoons of cold water mixed separately with two tablespoons of olive oil.  The dough should be moist, but not sticky.  If it is sticky, add a bit more flour.  

You can use the dough right away or you can coat it with a thin layer of olive oil, cover it with plastic wrap, and refrigerate it.  For my pizza, I used only 1/3 of the dough.  Half the prepared dough would yield a large pizza.

Place the dough on a floured surface and roll out from the center.  I like a very thin crust, so I rolled out until it was quite large.  Place rolled dough on a baking sheet that has been oiled or sprayed with non-stick cooking spray.  In order to prevent soggy pizza, I recommend par-cooking the crust first, about five to ten closely-watched minutes in a 400-450 degree oven.  Once the pizza looks slightly brown at the edges, remove it from the oven and top with sauce, veggies (I used red onions and orange and yellow peppers), fresh basil, and thinly sliced fresh mozzarella.  Cook until the cheese melts and the vegetables wilt at 375 degrees.  

You can freeze leftover dough for another occasion, or you can pre-prep a second crust for the next night's meal.  I left my ball in the refrigerator for use later in the week.  The crust didn't taste like sweet potato at all, and although it wasn't quite as toothsome as the pizzeria variety, it went down just fine.  

Is It Possible To Make A Healthy Cookie That Doesn't Suck?

You're all probably thinking that my answer is an unequivocal yes here, but the jury's still out. Fool around with whole-wheat flour for a few days and you, too, will learn that there's a trade off for making things brown. Whole-wheat flour is more dense and will turn even the most delicate of cookie recipes into a scone-like consistency. And I don't mean that in a good way.

My first experiment was an adaptation of a vegan recipe. Vegans, however, don't eat chocolate, since it generally has milk in it, so they supplant chocolate chips with carob chips. That's going too far, even for me, so I used the recipe with real chocolate chips. Three cups of whole-wheat flour (this seemed like a lot; I should have known better) goes into a mixing bowl with a teaspoon of baking powder. Wet ingredients, which included unsweetened applesauce (one cup), agave nectar (one cup), and vanilla extract (two teaspoons) were mixed separately and then integrated into the dry. I used my hands to create the dough and used my hands again to incorporate one cup of chocolate chips and one cup of chopped walnuts.

Wheat flour prevents cookies from spreading, so if you don't spread them by hand (and stupidly, I didn't), what you get is a brown exterior and a play-doughy, undercooked interior. I know that this is more the dough, which seemed too chewy even when I dropped it onto the cookie sheet. I threw the whole batch away.

Pluses of this baking disaster? The batter contains no eggs, which means that you can eat it without fear of contracting salmonella. Also, the dearth of creamable wet ingredients makes this a stand mixer-free recipe, so if you have no dishwasher (yours truly), you'll have fewer things to wash.

Minuses: even if you are a dough-eater, like me, you wouldn't want to eat this gummy concoction. And the cookies were inedible. Truly.

Round two. I decided to adapt the recipe on the back of the Toll House package for healthier purposes. Instead of a combination of white and brown sugars, I used dark agave nectar. Agave nectar is roughly twice as sweet as regular sugar. You have to cream the butter together (yes, in a stand mixer) with butter. Recipe calls for two sticks (otherwise known as 16 tablespoons), so I used 16 tablespoons of Smart Balance, a low-cholesterol butter substitute that very much resembles butter. Smart Balance is salted so I skipped the teaspoon of salt with the dry ingredients. I'm not sure whether or not that was wise. I don't think, however, that salt has anything to do with the leavening properties of baking powder.

Because the agave nectar isn't granulated like sugar, the butter and nectar don't cream together quite right. Oh well. I add a teaspoon of vanilla extract and two eggs anyway. To that, I slowly beat in the dry ingredients that I have mixed on the side: a one-to-one ratio of wheat flour to white flour (two and a quarter cups total) and one teaspoon of baking powder. The dough that forms looks and tastes more like a normal cookie dough. I add the chocolate chips (one cup) and walnuts (one cup) by hand.

I notice, after a few minutes in a 375 degree oven that, once again, the cookies aren't spreading. I guess a cup and an eighth of wheat flour goes a long way. I decided to pull the cookies out and flatten them with the back of a spoon. This worked a little better, but the chips on top got all mangled so that, by the end, they looked more like chocolate chunk cookies than the pictures on the front of the Toll House bag.

They are still a bit doughy on the inside but a vast improvement over my previous attempt at veganism. And by my rough calculations, they come to a paltry 120 calories a pop, worth it if they're yummy and completely not worth it if they suck.

I think my conclusion is this: if you're looking to make pastry healthier, don't. Either eat them or don't, both at your own peril. But making bad cookies is way worse than not making cookies at all.