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Apple Crumble Pizza

There’s apple orchards all around my home town and they’ve been busy harvesting this week. My little tree has usable fruit for the first time too!

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So I have some nice fresh apples, and today I had a spare dough ball after making lunch. Apple pizza? Why not? Here’s what I used:

  • 2 large apples
  • 1 dough ball
  • 2 tbsp raw sugar
  • 1/2 tsp cinnamon
  • 2 tbsp butter
  • 1/2 cup flour

I didn’t have them handy but the pizza would have been even better with

  • walnuts
  • sultanas
  • cream to serve

Not that I need an excuse to use any kitchen gadget but I was glad to get a chance to use my apple peeling machine. When I first saw these I thought they were ridiculous. I was wrong. With this little baby I can peel, core and slice a kilo of apples in a few minutes.

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The apple peeling machine. You pull back the shaft and spear an apple…
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turn the handle, and a blade peels the skin and the apple is sliced and pushed through a corer…
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voila! Cored, peeled, sliced apple in seconds.

I put 1 tbsp butter in a non stick pan over medium heat and sautéed the sliced apple.

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After around 5 minutes it started to look a bit soft so I added 1 tbsp raw sugar and stirred until the sugar was all melted and caramelised. Then I added 1/2 tsp cinnamon powder, stirred and removed from the heat.

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Next I made a little crumble topping by mixing 1/2 cup flour with 2 tbsp sugar and 1 heaped tbsp butter. The trick is to cut the butter into little pieces and just rub it into the flour with your fingertips. It should form crumbly clumps.

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I shaped the dough ball into a base, scattered over the apple pieces and crumbled the crumble on top. If I had them I would have added a few sultanas and walnuts too.

The whole lot went onto a pizza stone, preheated for 30 minutes in a fan forced oven at 250C / 480F.

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I took it out after 6-7 minutes, when the crumble was brown and the edges of the apple nice and crispy. This was one of my best dessert pizzas – just wish I had some cream left to serve it with too!

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Buckwheat Torte

I served this as a birthday cake last week. The recipe is another that I have stolen from FXCuisine. I hope he doesn’t mind but it’s such a delicious gluten free dessert that I think everyone should know about it! I don’t normally love buckwheat but in this dish it adds a very interesting counterpoint to the almond flavour. One of the guests described it as like eating a giant friand, and I agree. I took the liberty of replacing some of the butter in this recipe with olive oil but you can replace the olive oil in my recipe with 50g more butter if you aren’t so paranoid about your waistline.

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Ingredients

  • 250g Almond meal
  • 200g Buckwheat flour
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 6 eggs
  • 200g butter
  • 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
  • 250g caster sugar
  • Icing sugar
  • 1 jar of good jam – your choice but I liked strawberry

Method

  1. Separate the egg yolks and whites
  2. Use a fork to mash together the butter and sugar. Mix in the flours and baking powder. Add the egg yolks and mix very well – a hand mixer helps get the batter smooth.
  3. Clean up the hand mixer and use it (or a whisk if you’re a glutton for whisking) to whip the egg whites until they make stiff peaks when you lift the mixer out. If using an electric mixer, don’t lift it out unless it is turned off or the egg whites will make stiff peaks all over your wall.
  4. Add 1/3 of the egg whites to the batter and stir until they are mixed in. Now add the rest of the egg whites and fold them in more gently until evenly mixed. Adding a little of the egg white first makes it easier to fold in the rest more gently.
  5. Pour the batter into a greased springform pan, or a round cake pan with greased baking paper cut to fit in the bottom. Bake at 180C/350F for about 40 minutes or until the top is golden. You can poke a skewer in to see if it is cooked, but be careful where the hole is, this cake doesn’t spring back as much as usual so the hole will be visible afterwards.
  6. When cooked, let it sit in the pan to pull itself together for 5-10 minutes before you carefully remove it to a cake rack to finish cooling.
  7. When cool, very carefully cut horizontally down the middle and use an egg flip to lift the top off. Spread jam liberally over the cake and put the top back on. Put some icing sugar in a sieve or flour sifter and dust over the top.

I served slices with whipped cream and vincotto… yum!

 More

You can separate eggs quite well by just cracking eggs into your hands and letting the whites fall through your fingers. If you don’t like getting your hands dirty you can get some cool egg separators – I have one along these lines but you have to see this one too. Words can’t describe the awesome.

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Polenta With Vincotto

This is one of my all time greatest desserts. Creamy, buttery wedges of polenta are topped with freshly whipped cream and vincotto. After you mix it around on your plate and get a bit of everything in a mouthful, it is heaven.

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Polenta With Vincotto Recipe

  • 1 Cup polenta
  • 1 Tbsp butter
  • 2 Cups milk
  • 2 Cups water
  • 1/2 Tsp of fresh grated nutmeg
  • 1 Tbsp sugar (optional)
  • Vincotto & whipped cream to serve

*When I’m feeling lazy I microwave my polenta – it isn’t traditional but it beats stirring for ages when you just want to eat! The traditional way is to simmer the polenta, nutmeg, milk, water, butter and sugar over a low heat while stirring regularly for about 20 minuts, until thick and smooth. Otherwise:

  1. In a large microwave safe bowl with a lid or covering, stir together the water, sugar, milk, butter, nutmeg and polenta. Microwave on high for 4 minutes. Remove carefully (wear oven mitts!), open the lid (carefully, the steam is very hot) and stir well to break up lumps. Return and microwave for another 3 minutes, remove and check for done-ness. There shouldn’t be any obvious hard grains – you want it smooth and creamy. Give it another minute at a time if it needs it.
  2. Pour the polenta mixture into a small cake or loaf pan that has a piece of baking paper cut to fit on its bottom. Use a spoon to smooth the top and press it down evenly. Let the polenta set – this might take an hour, a bit less in the fridge.
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  3. To serve, turn out the set polenta and cut into wedges or slices. Put a wedge on each plate and spoon or pipe over whipped cream. Just before serving give it a healthy drizzle of vincotto.polenta with vincotto (1 of 1)

 

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How To Make Vincotto

Every winemaking season we put aside a few buckets of grapes to make delicous syrupy vincotto – also called vinicotto or vino cotto. Although vincotto translates as “cooked wine” the version I’m familiar with isn’t alcoholic – just a sweet reduction of fruit juice. We make a big batch using freshly pressed grapes but we have also experimented with bought, bottled grape juice and found that it works well. I recommend that if you use bought juice, you look for a preservative free one or else you will be concentrating the preservative too. Just 100% dark grape juice. Organic juices seem to give cleaner flavours than the cheaper stuff in plastic bottles but experiment with different brands to see what works best.

To make vincotto all you do is simmer grape juice over a low heat for several hours, until it is reduced to a syrupy liquid. Then bottle in clean bottles and store – it keeps well and improves with age. We found a seller at a farmers market with vincotto that had been aged on oak and tried this ourselves. The oak adds another layer of flavour that is pretty interesting, so I recommend trying it out. You don’t need a barrel, just get some oak chips used for winemaking from any homebrew store or from Amazon here. Tie the oak chips in the end of a stocking or a scrap of muslin. Put this in a big jar, and fill it with vincotto. I’d use about 1tbsp of oak chips per 1 liter/2 pints, and give it a stir every week or so to distribute the flavour. Taste it often and take out the oak when it tastes right.

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This batch was made of Pinot Noir grapes so my mum called it Pinot Cotto. Ha ha.

How To Use Vincotto

Use vincotto anywhere you’d use maple syrup or similar sweet dressings. We eat it drizzled over pancakes or buttered crumpets, or with icecream and stewed fruit. You can use a dash of it in any savoury dish that needs a little sweetening for balance too – sometimes I’ll add 1/2 tsp to a rich pasta sauce or meat stew. My personal favourite though is polenta wedges with cream and vincotto. This would be part of my last meal – the intense sweet/tart/caramel flavour of vincotto powers through soft buttery polenta with cool whipped cream to contrast – I’ll write up the recipe tomorrow!