(AW) "It's not just" pizza! The only dough recipe you'll ever need!

Adie's best ever pizza dough!

Ingredients:

500g 'OO' type flour
375ml warm water (275ml cold plus 100ml boiling)
2 tsp salt
1tsp dried yeast

Add the salt to the warm water, whisk until dissolved. Add yeast to the water and mix well. Add the water to the flour and fold in. Work this together until a big ball of dough is formed. Rest the dough for 20 minutes.

Turn out dough onto floured surface then stretch and knead the dough for 30 seconds until it starts to resist then form it into a ball. Place the dough ball, seam side down, into a bowl that has been oiled with olive oil.  Cover with cling film and rest the dough for 2 hours.

Tip out the dough on to a floured surface and divide into 4 portions. Stretch and fold each portion five times without tearing it then form into a ball and place, seam-side down, onto a floured plate. Sprinkle the dough balls with flour and loosely cover with cling film. Rise for a further 3 hours until it has doubled (no more than trebled) in size.

Set your egg for indirect, with a pizza stone to reach the highest temp you can. You will need nice, clear vents at the bottom of the firebox and top up with fresh lump charcoal to achieve this. Top and bottom vents can be wide open and don't forget to burp the egg when opening lest you lose eyebrows and arm hair!  

Use your hands to mould each dough ball into a circular shape on a teflon baking liner before loading with toppings. Cook for 12 minutes at 600degF until the base is golden and cooked and the toppings are browned.

(ZA) Zero Alpha's impressive rack

Today we did something a bit different but it was more out of necessity than design! The Epic Eggers'  cooker is up the spout until later on this month so it means we can't use the oven indoors, even if we wanted to. Thank heaven for the BGE as we were able to create delicious herb-crusted rack of lamb with garlicky leek & potato bake with the minimum of effort.

serves 4

Whizz a slice of wholemeal bread with 2tbsp chopped fresh parsley, 2tbsp chopped fresh thyme and the chopped zest of 1 lemon.

Take 2 racks of lamb (6 bones per rack) and french-trim of all visible fat. Brush the meaty side with dijon mustard and coat this side with the breadcrumb mixture.

Thinly slice 500g new potatoes, slice and wash 1 leek and chop 1 clove garlic. Place all this into an ovenproof dish with 2tbsp plain flour, 150ml semi-skimmed milk and 250ml vegetable boullion (I used Swiss marigold) salt and pepper the mixture and then sprinkle over 15g grated parmesan cheese. We baked this on the egg, indirect at 400degF, for 30 minutes with foil on and then uncovered for a further 20 minutes. 

Once the potatoes had started to brown and were almost cooked, we placed the lamb racks on the grill and cooked them to 140degF medium rare with the crumb having gone crispy. I rested the lamb in a cool box, wrapped in foil and a towel for 15 minutes while the veg was steaming and carved into cutlets before serving. 

(ZA) Big Green Egg demos : info cards

Since last year, Adie Webster & I have been part of the Big Green Egg "Eggspert" program. The group comprises a number of BGE owners who go to food fairs, BBQ shows and distributors premises to show what the BGE can do. We cook some incredible taster food and talk to new and potential egg-owners. 

We're not employed by BGE, we don't act as salespeople and we don't work on commission - we simply love the BGE so much that we have run out of friends and family to wax lyrical to about it! To that end, we have had to expand our audience by raving to perfect strangers about how epic it is and this is the perfect way to spread the news! 

Our smart new business cards have arrived today with a picture of our lamb stack kebab and, on the reverse, a luscious ribeye steak. At the demos we do, these will be a much more professional way of giving prospective Eggers our blog and Facebook page information, than writing it all on a paper napkin!

(ZA & AW) Lamb-stack kebab and all the trimmings.

Friday night always used to include a meat kebab complete with some rather manky-looking salad and lashing of hot chilli sauce after a night on the booze. We never really wanted to know what the "meat" actually was, if we're honest, but this recipe uses top-quality lamb and the results are outstanding!

Firstly we took a boned-out lamb shoulder and marinaded in a spicy paste. To make the paste, toast 1tsp each of cumin seeds, fennel seeds, coriander seeds in a dry frying pan until they start to smell aromatic. Coarse grind the seeds with 1/2 tsp black peppercorns in a pestle and mortar and add 2tsp sweet smoked paprika, a good pinch of cayenne pepper, 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, leaves from 2 sprigs fresh rosemary finely chopped, 1tsp garlic granules, 2tsp malden sea salt. Mix everything into a paste with approx 3tsp olive oil and then coat the meat with the paste. Leave to rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

We loaded our custom-made kebab stand with layers of the marinated lamb but you can always use normal kebab skewers.

We heated the BGE to 300degF indirect and smoked the kebab for 40 minutes over hickory wood smoke until the meat was at least 135degF internal temperature in 3 or 4 places across the kebab and had a smokey bark at the edges of the meat. 

I like a yoghurt sauce with my kebab which is made with a small tub of natural yoghurt with a chopped clove of garlic and a pinch of salt stirred in. 

Served the whole lot with manky salad (shredded iceberg lettuce, chopped fresh tomatoes and finely sliced white onion), lemon wedges, pickled Basque hot chillis, yoghurt sauce and the chilli sauce of your choice (AW has Marie Sharp's green habanero and nopal cactus sauce* and I had green chilli sriracha*) Mega-epic!

* Marie Sharp's green habanero sauce and Sauce Shop Green Sriracha both available from Amazon UK

(ZA & AW) New Year smokey lasagne

It's a slightly chilly 5 degrees C outside but we still decided smoking a lasagne was still a really good idea. The benefits of the smokey flavour outweighed the slight discomfort of cooking outside on the first day of the new year! 

The meat sauce was the first for the BGE treatment. two sausages removed from their skins, browned with 300g minced beef, a chopped onion, a grated carrot, a chopped clove of garlic, 1/2 tsp celery salt, a dash of red wine, 1tbsp tomato puree, one beef stock cube and a tin of tomatoes. We smoked it, indirect at 350degF over hickory, for 30 minutes until the meat was cooked and a smokey flavour had been absorbed by the food. I had coated the exterior of the cooking pot with a thin layer of washing-up liquid which makes the pot a lot easier to clean after use.

I brought one pint of milk to the boil with 1/2 an onion, a bay leaf and 1tsp black peppercorns and then remove it from the heat to leave it to infuse for ten minutes before straining. I melted 40g butter in a saucepan and added 40g plain flour. I cooked the flour for a few seconds and then, removed from the heat, gradually added the milk, little by little, stirring constantly. Once all the milk was added, I heated the sauce over a low heat, stirring all the time, until the sauce thickened. 

I place a layer of no-soak lasagne sheets on the bottom of a greased oven dish, topped with a layer of meat sauce, then a layer of béchamel sauce, more lasagne, meat sauce, then béchamel. I continued building until I finished with a layer of béchamel and sprinkled the whole thing with some grated fresh parmesan cheese.

We placed the lasagne back on the BGE, with the hickory smoke still billowing, indirect at 350degF, for 40 minutes until it was golden and bubbling. The smokey flavour that the BGE imparted to the rich, beefy tomato sauce was amazing and took a favourite meal of ours to another flavour level!

(ZA & AW) Amazing, hickory-smoked Spag Bol

Today we are cooking a classic dish and, rather surprisingly, one we have not done on the egg before...Spaghetti Bolognese! I think every family has their own recipe for this meat sauce to go with pasta and this is ours with the extra dimension of hickory wood-smoke and BGE magic.

This recipe serves 3 hungry people. 

First, set up the egg to cook indirect at 300degF and put hickory chunks in water to soak. 

When the egg is at temperature, soften a chopped onion and a grated carrot in some olive oil. Take two, good-quality pork sausages and remove the meat from the skins, break it up and add to the pan to seal. Next, add 500g minced steak and sauté until the meat is browned. 

Add a splash of red wine and de-glaze the pan before stirring in a tin of chopped plum tomatoes, 1 tbsp tomato puree, 1/2 pint beef stock, 2tsp dried oregano, 2tsp dried basil, 1tsp dried thyme, 1tsp dried parsley, a good grind of black pepper and 1/4 tsp celery salt (you can add more of this to taste as it is very strong!) Stir well and add 1tbsp tomato ketchup and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. 

Add a few soaked hickory chunks to the egg and leave the casserole uncovered to absorb all the wonderful, smokey flavour. Check and stir after 30 mins and again after a further 30 minutes then put a lid on the casserole to simmer for a further 30 minutes. 

Serve with spaghetti that has been tossed in extra virgin olive oil and top with fresh parmesan cheese. Goes down a treat with a glass of red and some crusty garlic bread!

(ZA & AW) Feeling chilly? Spicy peri-peri boerwors pizza

Ir's chilly evening in Stotfold UK but November temperatures never stop us from cooking outside and making some epic grub!

We ramped the egg up to over 500degF for this cook. The rib rack means the ceramic stone placed on top, indirect on the grill, is at the perfect height in the dome to cook epic pizza. We shaped our pizzas on the baking sheets that are cut to the size of the pizza stone, spread tomato sauce and grated mozzarella evenly over the dough and then put on our toppings.

Peri-peri boerwors is a delicious, speciality beef sausage from our local butcher (who have links with South Africa) and it is perfect as a spicy beef topping. I simply took the boerwors out of it's skin, broke up the mince and fried until it was caramelised and crispy. This was sprinkled over the prepared base, along with roasted red onion pieces and a roasted, chopped green chilli and sliced, fresh cherry tomatoes.

 A light sprinkling of  little more mozzarella, and pizzas were ready to go in. We were VERY careful to slowly "burp" the egg as the temperature of the dome was a blistering 550degF. Flames were licking through the open daisy wheel on top and through the vent at the bottom! The pizza went in for 12 minutes and came out golden and bubbling with a crisp base and caramelised topping. We enjoyed them with citrus olives and a fresh mozzarella, tomato and basil salad drizzled with balsamic vinegar and olive oil. A touch of the Mediterranean in sleepy Bedfordshire!