We think you might like this show about pizza

Rach has been waxing lyrical about the new series of Chef’s Table: Pizza which came to Netflix last month. Take it away Rach!

Over recent years Netflix has done some pretty incredible food documentary shows. Chef’s Table is one of those series and if you haven’t watched any yet, you’re really missing out. Their new series on Pizza offers a great insight into the minds of those dedicated to making the very best pizza with the very best ingredients.

From Rome to Arizona, this series uncovers the stories behind the world’s best pizza chefs. Not only does the show focus on each chef’s rise to fame and recognition in the industry, but it also highlights the struggles with mental health issues, the long hours building a business and the ways in each chef they overcame them.

It’s truly inspiring to see how people so dedicated to their craft spread their messages and vision through their baking. Past series cover a broader range of famous chefs — a particular favourite being Pastry, which highlights some bakers who truly changed the game in their vision and creativity. We love it, and we’re sure you’ll love it too.

Earth oven Building Course – 15 & 16 June

Sunny weather this weekend certainly brought the whiff of BBQs and outdoor cooked food in the air. For us this means firing up our wood fired oven in the garden and inviting friends and family round for a relaxing evening. Whilst we often make wood fired pizzas, and enjoy a glass of wine in the garden, we’ve been know to prepare a slow cooked roast too, plus sweet treats as the heat of the oven cools down, and even leave a meringue cooking overnight, ready for the next day.

If the idea of cooking in your own garden takes your fancy, our next weekend Earth Oven Building course is coming up on Saturday 15 and Sunday 16th June in Stirchley at the home of our baker Dom.

As well as choosing suitable materials, you’ll learn how to build the oven floor, and construct and shape  the thick oven walls using cob,  cut a door and decorate the outside. You’ll also learn how to cook in and maintain your oven. Top notch grub will be provided for lunch and snacks on both days as well as drinks throughout the day.

For more information visit the Loaf Cookery School pages on our website.

Earth Oven Course

 

Earth oven Building Course – 15 & 16 June

Sunny weather this weekend certainly brought the whiff of BBQs and outdoor cooked food in the air. For us this means firing up our wood fired oven in the garden and inviting friends and family round for a relaxing evening. Whilst we often make wood fired pizzas, and enjoy a glass of wine in the garden, we’ve been know to prepare a slow cooked roast too, plus sweet treats as the heat of the oven cools down, and even leave a meringue cooking overnight, ready for the next day.

If the idea of cooking in your own garden takes your fancy, our next weekend Earth Oven Building course is coming up on Saturday 15 and Sunday 16th June in Stirchley at the home of our baker Dom.

As well as choosing suitable materials, you’ll learn how to build the oven floor, and construct and shape  the thick oven walls using cob,  cut a door and decorate the outside. You’ll also learn how to cook in and maintain your oven. Top notch grub will be provided for lunch and snacks on both days as well as drinks throughout the day.

For more information visit the Loaf Cookery School pages on our website.

Earth Oven Course

 

Pop-up Pizza Takeaway

SORRY WE ARE NOW SOLD OUT!!! 

You’ve been waiting a long long time for this, but the rumours are true, Loaf will be holding another pop-up pizza takeaway! And it’s very soon. We’re getting super-organised this time doing an online booking system, we even have proper pizza boxes too, and we’ll have three ovens running to limit any delays! It’s happening:

SUNDAY 22ND JANUARY, 6.30PM-9.57PM

SORRY WE ARE NOW SOLD OUT!!! 

To reserve a pizza you have to do two things:

1) Choose the time slot(s) you want to collect your pizza’s, using the doodle link below. We’ll be pushing out a hot pizza every 2-3 minutes from 6.30pm til 9.57 pm! You MUST choose multiple consecutive time slots if you want multiple pizzas. If you only pick one time slot but want more than one pizza, we won’t be able to accomodate your order due to oven capacity, sorry.

Here’s the doodle: http://www.doodle.com/99k4bagzhw6p9znb

2) Email us immediately after you have your time slots at ohcrumbspopups@gmail.com and let us know which pizzas you’d like, and the time slot you have reserved on doodle. If you don’t email us your choices within a few hours, your order will be cancelled. And if you change your mind please email us so that someone else can take your spot. We’ll email you the exact address for collection on Sunday, but for now it’s Dell Rd in Cotteridge.

Pizzas cost £5 each, they’re about 9-10″, and you can choose from these tasty options:

Pizza Fiorentina (spinach, egg, black olive, staffs organic cheddar)

Quattro Formaggio (four cheese: mozzarella, shropshire blue, federia, staffs organic)

Roasted Vegetable and Halloumi (olive oil and white onion base [no tomatoes], roasted peppers, artichokes and halloumi – can be made vegan)

Please note this event is raising funds for South Birmingham Food Co-op who are opening a shop in Stirchley soon, and the brilliant team are all working as volunteers. Look out for more Oh…Crumbs pop-up’s coming your way soon! Cheers to Jack Adams for the photo.

New Course: Earth Oven Building Weekend

Just a brief post to notify you of a brand new course that we’re offering this summer which we’ve just advertised on our cookery school pages. Our Earth Oven Building Weekend will take place on the 16th and 17th July, and is a unique opportunity for you to come and learn how to make an earth oven for outdoor cooking and bread making in your own back garden. We’ll be making an oven together over the weekend in the very same style of the oven that we use to run our bread courses and community bakery from. You can see all the details of the course over on this page, and if there is enough demand for the first course we may run a second course this year before the weather turns.

Cotteridge pop-up pizza club round-up

pizza signSaturday night saw Loaf do it’s first ever (and perhaps the first ever?*) pop-up pizza takeaway. After the disastrous start to Saturday morning, the day turned fairly rapidly into one of the craziest and most fun of my loaf life. On the way back from the Jewellery Quarter towing our trailer of rubble, Jane and I tossed around ideas of how to use up all our ingredients ranging from making loaves of bread to sell the next day, to making quiches for sale at some local shops, to what we finally settled on doing – a pop-up pizza night. Over a calming cup of tea, we devised a flyer, wrote a blog post, and got the word out on Twitter about the pizza marathon, then headed out to pound the pavement and deliver some flyers to our  neighbours. Twitter went absolutely crazy during the day, in a large part due to Jenny Drew’s hardcore retweeting and social networking on our behalf (thanks Jenny!). We were the most talked about thing in Birmingham for most of Saturday and the top trend in the UK for about 15 minutes – google analytics showed visitors to this website tripled on Saturday, so thanks to everyone who helped get the word out there.

The tension was building here at Loaf HQ ready for the 6pm start – the fire was lit in my earth oven, friends were drafted in to man phones and door, ingredients and rolling pins were laid out, and aprons were donned. We had a few pre-orders via twitter and other means, and the phone went crazy for the first hour of service, meaning people had to wait a little longer than the advertised ten minutes, so thanks everyone for your patience. pizza 3The pizza’s were great on the whole with great feedback on twitter and text, although in the hurry a few may have come out overly ash-laden on the bottom (sorry if you got one of those!). By the end of the night I had met lots of amazing people, neighbours I never knew I had, and cooked about 70 pizza’s. I think we just about clinched victory out of the jaws of defeat!

A couple of special shout-outs to finish this post then. A massive sorry to everyone at the 24 Carrots Market for letting you down – I hope to return at a later date and do something extra special. A huge thank you to everyone who came and bought a pizza or seven (you know who you are). And finally massive thanks to my helpers on the night – the cool, calm, and collected Mike ‘Hello Loaf Pizza’s!’ Skinner, the charming host Martin ‘Martino Evano’ Evans, and my beautiful wife Jane, the fastest pizza maker in Cotteridge – I couldn’t have done it without you!

Finally, shall we do it again, whaddayarecon?

Cheers, Tom.

* I expect the first pizza’s were sold pop-up style in Naples all those years ago, so it’s nothing new really!

Dell Road Pizza Night Tonight!

Loaf were due to appear at today’s 24 Carrots farmers market in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, serving hot sourdough pizza’s from the mobile wood-fired oven. All was going well, up at 5am to hand-knead 20kg of dough, an hour of cheese grating last night, lots of kindling chopped and ready, oven looking fine. Having borrowed a van from local organic butcher Steve Rossiter, we hooked up the trailer and headed to the JQ at 8am. I drove really carefully, but sadly when we arrived at the market we were greeted by this sorry scene:

mobile pizza oven

After a few moments of confusion, Jane and I had a cup of tea and came up with an idea to turn disaster into adventure…

So for one night only, Loaf will be hosting the first ever* pop-up pizza takeaway restaurant!

Here’s the deal:

Local artisan baker Tom Baker is firing up his wood-fired oven for one night only (Saturday 16th Oct) to offer amazing hot sourdough pizza’s to takeaway tonight.

only £5 for a 9” pizza

(collection only)

Choose from organic Gloucestershire ham and mushroom, or red onion, black olive and basil.

Call Tom on 07811 178272  between 6pm & 10pm with your order & collect 10 minutes later from 7 Dell Road, Cotteridge!

* It might not be the first-ever, but we’ve certainly never heard of one. We’re making history people… 🙂

Psuedo-Sourdough Pizza – Recipe

I received an interesting email the other day from a fellow foodie tweeter, Sarah from Brock Hall Farm (lovely goats cheese – check it out if you’re lucky enough to live anywhere near an outlet), based in Shropshire. Sarah was abroad, within easy access of a wood-fired oven, and indebted to some friends to whom she had promised sourdough pizza from the wood-fired oven. So in popped the email, asking me for a magic recipe to make psuedo-sourdough pizza in one day. Now for any bread-heads out there you’ll know you need at least five days to start a sourdough starter from scratch, but a psuedo-sourdough, that’s definitely a possibility if you’ve got 24 hours. Below are my instructions to Sarah to make the dough for her psuedo-sourdough pizza, and below that Sarah has kindly shared her recipe for the tomato sauce reduction – enjoy!

Psuedo-sourdough pizza dough (makes 6)

Day before baking

150g strong white flour, or ’00’ if you can get it
3g fast action dried yeast
130g tepid water
2 tablespoons of natural yoghurt

Combine the ingredients in a bowl, stir thoroughly. Cover with a plastic bag and leave overnight, or for at least 8 hours (the longer the better for a nice sour flavour from the yoghurt). This called a ‘sponge’.

Day of baking

300g sponge from above
460g strong white flour or ’00’
240g tepid water
10g salt
15g Extra Virgin Olive Oil (Optional, I prefer to add olive oil on top of the dough when rolled out, but you could add it now as Sarah did)

Mix the ingredients together in a bowl and than knead on a clean work surface for around 10 minutes. Don’t add any extra flour, that’s cheating. Place the kneaded dough back into an oiled bowl, cover it with a plastic bag, and leave to ferment for up to 2 hours, depending on the ambient temperature. It will roughly double in volume. Divide the dough into 6 150g pieces, and roll each one out to a round a few millimetres thin. Add your tomato sauce, toppings and some nice cheese and bake in a hot hot (250C, gas mark 10) oven for 10 minutes (directly on a pizza stone if you have one), or in a wood-fired oven for about 2 minutes.

Sarah’s tomato reduction

1.5kg vine ripened tomatoes, (the more aromatic the better), skinned, deseeded and roughly chopped
4 tbsp olive oil
3 cloves garlic
Freshly chopped oregano
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat the olive oil and garlic in a large saucepan, without colouring the garlic. When translucent, add the chopped tomatoes and simmer quite vigorously for about 10 minutes until they have reduced into a firm and fragrant sauce. Add salt, pepper and fresh oregano and continue simmering and tasting until you are satisfied with flavour and consistency. It should be more of a thick paste than a thick pasta ‘dressing’. You may need an extra glug of olive oil to emsulify it nicely. Click on the thumbnail images below to see how Sarah’s pizza’s turned out.

@loafonline 'sponge'/semi-sourdough made the most sublime, ta... on Twitpic Absolutely delish home made pizzas using @loafonline blinding... on Twitpic