Picking olives by hand takes a while, but there is a trick to doing it efficiently. We spread large pieces of shade cloth and tarpaulins on the ground, and then attacked the trees with olive rakes – small handheld plastic rakes that slip easily over leaves and branches but catch the fruit. When each tree was bare, we carefully gathered up the shade cloth and tipped olives into waiting buckets. The olives go to a local plant for pressing. Olives can yield around 10-15% of their weight in oil; I’d be very happy if my share is 20 litres.

Using an olive rake

Collecting the olives

My uncle also has a stand of plump Kalamata olives, so I picked some for curing. Preserving olives isn’t too hard but there a lot of variations – some recipes use lye, some dry salt, some brine and some fresh water. I don’t love the idea of using lye (sodium hydroxide) and in the past my fresh water cured olives have tended to go off more easily, so this year I tried wet and dry salt curing. If they taste as good as I hope these will end up on pizza in tapenade, salads and foccacia among many other uses!

Kalamata olives for curing

Brined olives

Rinse olives, discarding any soft or shrivelled ones. Fill a clean jar or crock pot with the olives.
Make up brine with 5% cooking salt by volume –half a cup of salt in 10 cups of water. Pour this brine over the olives until covered.

Olives need to stay completely submerged while curing so that mould doesn’t get a chance to grow above the level of brine. A helpful trick I picked up a while ago is to place a loose piece of cling wrap over the vessel, press it down to the surface, then pour a little more brine on top.

Change this brine every day or two, until the olives are no longer bitter – this might take a few weeks. Taste regularly after the first week so you know when they are done.

Finishing brine

Once the initial curing is complete, the olives are marinated in a finishing brine mixture. This mixture helps preserve the olives and can also add other ingredients for flavour. I use one third of a cup of salt to 5 cups of water and 2 cups of red wine vinegar. Other common ingredients are bay leaves, rosemary, garlic, oregano, chilli or basil – add any of these to your own taste. Fill clean jards with the olives, top up with finishing brine and then add a layer of olive oil which will float on top of the jar and prevent air contact. Olives preserved in this way should last for up to a year in the fridge, but will likely be eaten long before that!

Dry cured olives

Half fill a large jar or crock pot with olives. Pour over coarse sea salt until the olives are covered.
Every day, carefully tip out any liquid that has collected in the bottom of the vessel. Taste the olives every week or so until they no longer taste bitter, then preserve with finishing brine as above.

Dry salt cured olives

Resources

Great guide to everything olives (PDF)

Cooking with olives

Pickling olives – includes lye methods

Olive oil from tree to table

Salt cured olives recipe

Note: The first step of making mozzarella is to acidify the milk. This method uses food acid to speed up the process, but if you prefer you can use a little yoghurt instead of the food acid. If using yoghurt, you would add it to the milk and allow it to sit overnight until fermented.

Tools and Ingredients

pH tester

I’m lucky to have access to a digital pH meter. These are great, but I recommend getting a waterproof one for kitchen use, like this one. If you don’t want to spring for a meter, pH strips will do the job just fine, but get some like these – they are more accurate than the type with just one or two colour squares. To be honest, you can probably skip the pH testing completely if you aren’t scientifically minded or don’t mind taking a chance. I don’t like my cheese to be more acidic than necessary as I feel that it affects the taste, so I do check the pH of the milk while adding acid and stop as soon as I’ve reached my target.

Tartaric Acid

In the past, I have followed recipes that called for citric acid. I have decided to use tartaric acid as I found that the citric acid left a slightly more pronounced bitterness in the finished cheese. You can substitute the tartaric for citric acid if necessary or preferred though.

Rennet

Being a little squeamish, I use this non-animal rennet and have not had any problems with it. If you prefer, traditional rennet is just fine too.

Milk

It’s important to use non homogenised milk to make mozzarella – homogenised milk does not work well if at all. Interestingly though, it is possible to use milk powder. I’ve done it, and while the cheese wasn’t as good as with fresh milk, it was better than not having any Mozzarella at all. Source your milk from a local dairy if possible, the taste of the finished cheese will reflect the quality of the milk you use.

Thermometer

You will need an accurate probe thermometer. I use an analogue one out of habit but I also have a digital version that is more accurate.

Mozzarella Recipe

Makes around 400g/1lb

1. Pour the milk into a large saucepan or stock pot. Dissolve the tartaric acid in half a cup of water, then add to the milk. If using a pH tester, make up more acid solution than needed and add a tablespoon at a time while stirring well, until the milk reaches pH 5.6.
   

   Checking pH with a meter

2. Heat the milk to 32C/90F. I find the best way to do this is to put it over the lowest heat possible while stirring, and monitor the temperature. If it isn’t warm enough after 10 minutes or so, increase the heat slightly and continue to monitor. Once at 32C/90F, turn off the heat.
3. Check the instructions for your chosen rennet and add the appropriate amount. With the one I used, I added 5 drops per litre of milk to a tablespoon of water, which was then stirred into the milk.
4. Cover the pan and leave to sit for several hours. You are looking for the milk to set to the point that the curd breaks cleanly when pressed or cut.
   

   Clean break, the curd is ready to cut

5. Cut the curd into cubes about 1cm (½  inch) apart.
   

   Cutting the curd

6. Return the pan to the heat, and slowly increase the heat to 105C. Leave at this temperature for half an hour, stirring occasionally.
7. Line a colander or large sieve with cheesecloth. My guilty secret is that I never have cheesecloth handy in my kitchen – I use a clean tea towel. Don’t tell my missus! Pour the curds and whey into your lined sieve, and allow the whey to drain out for 10 minutes. Turning over the curds halfway through lets a little more whey drain out, but there’s no need to squeeze or press them. TIP: save the whey and you can make ricotta later!
   

   Straining the curd

8. Tip your strained curds into a mixing bowl, and add the salt. Work it through, breaking up the curd as you mix.
9. At this point you will have salted curd, ready to be stretched!

Stretching Mozzarella

Before it can be stretched, the curd needs to be melted. I have seen two different methods of doing this. One is to take one cup of curd at a time and microwave it for 45 seconds. The other is to tip the curd into a large bowl of hot water. Both have the potential to cause owies, but I think the hot water method is safer as the microwave can sometimes heat things more quickly and hotter than you might realise, which makes the curd dangerous to handle.

For the hot water method, boil a pan full of water, remove from the heat, and let it cool slightly. 70C/160F is enough to melt curd for stretching, but if it is a little hotter you won’t have to work so fast before it cools too much. Tip the curd into the hot water. Use tongs or a slotted spoon to pull out some curd ready to shape. It will be hot, so keep a bowl or sink full of cool water handy to dip your fingers into. If it’s too hot to handle, wear rubber gloves.

Stretch the curd out and fold it over itself a few times. You will see it start to look shiny as you work it.

Stretching the curd

Shape it into a ball by making a ring with your thumb and forefinger and holding the piece in between. Continuously tuck the curd up inside itself until you have a neat ball, Squeeze your thumb and forefinger together to seal the end.  You can shape either big or small balls as desired. When shaped, drop each ball into a bowl of cold salt water – I use 1 tbsp per litre of water.

Shaping the balls

Finished! You can store your mozzarella balls in the salt water, or remove them when cool and store in a bowl or bag. For pizza use it’s probably more sensible to store dry, to avoid soggy bases. Fresh mozzarella should keep for a few days in the fridge, or longer frozen.

To Make Ricotta

Boil the strained whey vigorously for a few minutes. Pour into a cheesecloth lined sieve. Tie the ends of the cloth with string and hang from something overnight.

My Battle Scarred Zyliss Pizza Cutter

There’s a few different methods of cutting pizza, with the pizza wheel being the most traditional. Wheel cutters are suitable for most pizzas, with the exception perhaps of pizzas with toppings that can easily be disturbed – things like whole prawns and so on. For those pizzas I use scissors or a single rocker blade style cutter, but for everything else I use a Zyliss cutter, one of the best pizza cutters I have used!

You can see the difference between this and a more traditional wheel cutter – the large handle lets you get a really good grip, and because the blade is supported on both sides it feels more sturdy that the old fashioned cutters.

To clean, the plastic part is hinged on one corner, so the blade can be removed. It seems to be dishwasher safe after many cycles, which is a bonus if you eat pizza often (I do).

I use a diamond stone to sharpen the wheel, but I have to say it’s trickier than sharpening a knife (as are all pizza wheel cutters). More to come on that as I figure out the best technique. To be honest, it might be easier to just buy a new wheel every year or two!

Ready For Cleaning

You can buy the  Zyliss cutter here for around $10 on it’s own but it also comes in a kit with a peeler and a disk grater. I have not yet tried these other products but the wheel is certainly good quality so I would be interested to try them – I am always on the hunt for a better vegetable peeler! If you try them, let me know what you think.

A note on ingredients – most commercial bacon is made by injecting pork with a solution of brine and phosphates so that it retains water and weighs more when it’s sold. They use liquid smoke and other additives for flavouring. While any bacon can taste good, I prefer to buy bacon from smaller producers who care about the quality of their products and minimise the chemicals they use. If you can find such a producer at a farmers market or specialty store, or even direct from the farm, stock up – the taste of traditionally cured and smoked bacon is worth the hunt!

You could vary the ingredients to include other breakfast favourites but I chose to keep it simple with onion adding some crunch and tomatoes contributing acidity and richness that goes well with smoky bacon. I chose to dice rather than slice the onions, to give a layer of texture underneath the bacon. Tearing the bacon adds to the presentation a little and makes for more interesting, varied mouthfuls.

This recipe allows for topping 2 small or one very large pizza.

Bacon and Egg Pizza

• 1/2 a Brown Onion, diced finely
• 1 ripe Tomato, coarsely diced
• 3 Rashers of bacon, torn into manageable pieces
• Fresh herbs to garnish
• 4-6 Free range eggs
• Pizza sauce
• Mozzarella
• 1 Quantity dough of choice
• Olive oil
• Salt & Pepper

Tearing off crust to dip in the egg yolk was delicious!

Shape the base, and place on a floured peel. In a bowl, sprinkle the tomato with a little salt. Place the pieces in a sieve and allow to drain. This will remove some moisture from the tomatoes and give them a little flavour kick as well. Drizzle olive oil over the base, then add tomato sauce followed by a thin scattering of mozarella.

Scatter the onion and tomato over the base. Add a little more cheese, then the bacon pieces.

At this point you need to make a decision about when to add the eggs, based on how well you want them done. I cooke my pizza in a wood fired oven for a minute before I poured on the eggs. This resulted in quite a runny yolk which was great to dip pieces of the crust into. If you are cooking in an indoors oven with a pizza stone, allow a few minutes for the eggs to cook to runny or put them on at the start if you like well done.

When adding eggs, you can choose to beat them in advance or pour them on whole. Whichever approach you take, have all of your eggs cracked and ready so you can get them on quickly and the pizza back in the oven. If using whole eggs, think about the position so that you can give guests an egg on every slice. The next improvement I will be making to this recipe will be to use large egg rings on the pizza – it is quite hard to get them to land where you want! I think egg rings will allow a little white to leak out around the edges and look nice, but hold the eggs roughly where I want them.

Once cooked, scatter with some fresh herbs. It’s hard to go past parsley for a classic egg pairing; I used basil from my garden as well. A final note – you could easily make mini pizzas following this approach, and I bet kids would love having their own breakfast pizza with an egg in the middle!

As always, don't overdo the toppings - leave room for the crust to breathe. This is before adding the bacon.

Enjoy! Yes, I burnt the crust... just a little.

This book has been out for a few years now, but is well worth tracking down.

American Pie is subtitled “my search for the perfect pizza”, and true to the name the first part of the book tracks Peter’s travels around the world, hunting down great pizza at some well known international destinations. I enjoyed reading about the different pizza styles and toppings in different cities and continents, but if I have one criticism of the book it is that as travel writing, it is a little ‘tame’. Not many great adventures, but I guess that’s not really the point. Many American locations are also featured, with some great descriptions of well known pizza joints like Pizzeria Bianco and their techniques.

The second section of the book is where it gets good though. Peter dedicates nearly 40 pages to different dough styles alone, including many of the recipes described in the first section of the book. This focus on dough is in line with Peter’s statement that for him, a good crust is 80% of the enjoyment of a pizza. For me, it might be a little less than 80% but it’s certainly the most important factor! Delayed fermentation doughs are introduced together with standard enriched doughs, thick and thin crust, and so on. A good recipe for sourdough pizza dough is included, with instructions on raising and maintaining a sourdough starter from scratch.

Following the dough recipes, there is a good range of sauces and other toppings like pesto, flavored oils, purees and so on. The sweet and sour onion marmalade sounded good to me but my first attempt was a mess!

Rounding out the latter section of the book is a large collection of pizza recipes, with most of the recipes from the earlier travel section of the book recreated.
American Pie is available on Amazon for under $20.

We got around this problem by ‘borrowing’ a tomato press from a relly – I say ‘borrow’ because they haven’t asked for it back yet, and it’s far too useful to get rid of it unless we have to!

This machine is a pretty simple design, consisting of a large suction cap mounted base (very useful, pasta machine manufacturers please take note) with a funnel for the tomatoes, a tray to catch the pulp, and a spring loaded handle.

It all hinges on the white part of the handle that you can see, which sits under the funnel. There are two small spring loaded paddles protruding from the side, and these press the tomatoes against a wire screen which is just fine enough that seeds and skin slide past while the pulp and juice pass through. Here’s the tomato mill in all it’s glory (excuse the photo) together with a shot of the inside with the handle/scraper mounted:

To start processing tomatoes, you just briefly simmer them in boiling water to loosen the skins, and start dropping them into the funnel. It’s not a bad idea to cut larger tomatoes in half once they have been simmered, but mind your fingers – they are hot. Alternatively, squish them down into the machine with the handle of a wooden spoon as you go. A word of warning – remove any protruding stems as they will block the machine up.

Here’s the tomato strainer in action, you can see a bunch of skins being pushed out the side and lovely tomato sauce being produced. Don’t throw the skins out straight away though – I have found a good quantity of extra tomato pulp can be produced by running the skins through the machine a second or even third time. My one criticism, at least with the machine we have, there is a bowl supplied to catch the pulp but nothing to catch the skins. You can manage with any bowl though.

When you are finished, the whole thing comes apart neatly to clean up (and it will be messy). Make sure to pull apart the I-shaped plastic blades, as sauce gathers in between them.

The good news is that a tomato machine like this one can be found cheaply online, Amazon have the exact model here for under $50 last time I checked. I highly recommend a similar version if you’re planning on processing any amount of tomatoes.

My Homemade Tomato Sauce Recipe

First, find some good quality fresh tomatoes. Homegrown tomatoes are always amazing, but store bought will still make a great pizza sauce. I often buy a carton of sauce tomatoes, and make enough pizza and pasta sauce for weeks.

Simmered tomatoes, ready to be pulped

Bring a large pan half full of water to the boil, and carefully add as many tomatoes as will fit. Allow the pan to return to the boil. Watch the tomatoes, and as soon as the skin starts to loosen and crack remove them from the pan. We are just aiming to gently cook the tomatoes and soften the skin. Repeat this until all of your tomatoes are cooked.

Pass the tomatoes through a tomato press or a mouli (food mill) with the smallest holed disc. The aim here is to pulp the tomatoes while removing as many of the skins and seeds as possible. You can also press the tomatoes through a sieve, but it is hard slog to do a big batch that way.

If you don’t have access to a food mill or tomato press, just peel the skins and process the tomatoes in a food processor.

Separating the tomato pulp from the juice

At this point, you will have  a large quantity of runny tomato passata. Taste and smell it – you should notice a delicious fragrance that is missing from commercial sauces! The sauce is too runny to use on a pizza without turning the base into a soggy mess, so we need to remove the moisture. I have tried simmering the sauce down, but found that the tomato overcooked and lost a lot of its subtle flavor. The better method is to gently pour your tomato pulp into a large sieve, set over a bowl. Leave it to sit for a minute and you should notice that the tomato flesh stays in the sieve, while a clear juice drains into the bowl.

Rather than discarding this juice, here’s my trick for adding an amazing kick to your pizza sauce. Take the juice, and simmer it over low heat. Unlike the pulpy part of the tomato that we sieved out, long cooking doesn’t seem to affect the flavour of the juice at all. Simmer gently until most of the liquid has evaporated – watch carefully or it will burn.

Once you have reduced the juice as much as possible, stir it back into the tomato pulp. You will end up with a pizza sauce that has the best of both worlds – thick enough to use on even a thin pizza base, and with an acidic kick from the reduced juice together with the great smell of fresh tomato from the pulp. Give it a try!

I spent the day starting a big batch of Shiraz though. Leaving early, we drove to nearby Willunga and picked up 350 kilos of nice grapes, perfect in fact. On the way down, I read in the paper that 2010 is said to be one of the best vintages for years, which was very fortuitous!

After spending hours and hours manually destemming a trailer full of grapes (hiring a crusher with a de-stemmer next year!) we ended up with 300 litres of grape must, ready to add potassium metabisulphate before pitching the yeast tomorrow. Incidentally if anyone is into wine-making, I found the most useful collection of calculators ever at this site.

We are making the main batch a bit lighter by leaving it on the skins for just 4 days or so – this should be quite drinkable in 18 months or less. I am also doing a small batch using a technique called extended maceration, which means leaving the wine on the skins for longer. The idea is that this produces a more full bodied wine, but the drawback is that it will need longer cellaring before it is ready to drink. I think though that this will be wonderful in 2-3 years from now, and I am already thinking about what pizza flavours to match it up with

I wanted to match this up with some ingredients that would complement the sweet cheese as well as something to contrast with the sweet flavours. This is what I came up with. The sweetness of cooked leeks is nice with this cheese and the contrasting texture of slightly crunchy/slippery leek with the smooth melted Stracchino worked well. Pieces of tomato and mushroom are little bursts of intense flavour to contrast with the smooth sweetness of the cheese and leek.

Ingredients

• Pizza dough (I made one massive pizza with a 500g dough ball, you could also make 2 smaller ones with these quantities of toppings)
• Pizza sauce
• 2 Leeks
• Good handful of button Swiss brown mushrooms
• 2 Ripe tomatoes, diced
• Paprika
• 300g or so Stracchino. You could use mozzarella if you absolutely can’t find this, it will still work well with these toppings

Method

1. Cut the green tops off the leeks and discard. Wash the leeks well. Dice and saute in olive oil with one crushed clove of garlic until translucent.
2. Tip the mushrooms into a hot pan, and leave them to cook until starting to brown, shaking to stop them burning.
3. Shape your pizza base and spread with a thin layer of sauce.
4. Scatter a few pinches of paprika over the tomato sauce. It’s amazing how much of a difference there is between a good quality paprika versus the ones I have tried from supermarkets!
5. Scatter the leek mixture evenly over the base.
6. Slice the cheese and tear each slice into chunks.  Scatter evenly over the pizza. Make sure to leave some gaps so that the crust doesn’t get too moist.
7. Now scatter over the mushrooms and diced tomatoes. Don’t overdo it – a good guide is to end up with around 2 pieces of each per slice, on average.
8. Cook on a preheated pizza stone or any other cooking method of your choice.

Wondering how I could feed the hungry hordes without even having a pizza stone preheated in my inside oven, I remembered something else I read on the net a while back and thought I’d give it a try. It worked so well that I wanted to share it so that you too can have a backup plan if you need to cook some emergency pizzas one day!

You will need

• Pizza dough, sauce, other toppings (obviously)
• A cast iron skillet (frying pan with a metal handle)
• An oven with a grill (broiler)

How it works

1. Put your skillet on your stovetop burner and preheat it on high heat for 15 minutes
2. Turn on your grill and leave it long enough that you can see it glowing (if using an electric grill, gas versions won’t need to preheat)
3. Prepare your pizza on a floured peel, making sure that your base is not larger than the base of the skillet
4. Using oven mitts or a tea towel, take your skillet off the burner and turn it upside down. Slide your pizza onto the skillet.
5. Quickly place the pizza + skillet on an oven rack below the grill. The top of the pizza should be 2-3 inches below the grill.
6. Watch the pizza as it cooks, you can easily overcook if you aren’t careful. The pizza should take 2-3 minutes to cook. You may need to rotate your pizza 180 degrees half way through cooking.
7. Before cooking your next pizza, return the skillet to the hotplate for a few minutes to reheat the base. Or use 2 skillets, alternating so that you don’t have to wait between pizzas.

This method works because the pizza is cooked evenly at a very high heat from above and below, similar to a wood fired oven. The pizzas were actually quite close in appearance to those from my wood oven, although the sides of the crust did not cook quite so evenly. But this trick is absolutely worth adding to your home made pizza arsenal!

NOTE: be very careful as the handle of the skillet will be very hot. Wear oven mitts and use a tea towel when lifting te pizza. This should only be done under adult supervision.