Preparation May Be As Much Work As Application

It is now Monday & I'm blogging about Friday...me-oh-my where has the time gone? I actually have an answer to that question. Friday was a very chill day in class. We made pizza dough in the morning, took our written test on our bread section & spent the remainder of the day making pizza sauce and baking off pizza. Not so bad...it felt so relaxed.

At the end of class we were given an outline of our practical exam, three days, 13 recipes...go! OMG, I was in complete & utter overwhelm. Along with making sure I had everything organized in my head Chef wanted an hour by hour time schedule of what we were going to do for the next three days!?!?!?! Are you kidding...great tool I'm sure but putting it together was somewhat difficult.

I spent the weekend typing up all my recipes, creating my time schedule, putting together a to-do list for each recipe and making sure I knew all baking temps, baking times, intricacies of each dough and recipe which we'll be making, and now its Monday and I am hoping I'm ready.

We ended up getting a three day weekend because I asked to switch our scheduled day off from Thursday to Monday...the extra day made such a significant difference in planning out my exam. I was able to rest some this weekend, play some this weekend, work some this weekend & get everything ready & organized for the exam.

Our pizza's Friday were great. I made the sauce for my "team" and completely over salted the onions but didn't realize until they were added to the tomatoes...Chef tasted my sauce at my request to help me fix it, and turns around & asks, "don't you cook?"...uh, does it taste like I cook? NO.....I wish, sometimes I did, but I'm definitely a recipe follower and if left to free form cooking then my prayers go straight to those who are about to chow down on whatever I've made :(

We tweaked the sauce somewhat but not enough though once it was on the pizza and baked you really couldn't tell. Everything worked out great!!! This is the pizza I made with sliced bell peppers, caramelized onions, sauteed zucchini, & either shredded mozzarella w/ parmesan or the shredded gruyere:


I stuffed my face full of these for about 30 minutes straight. Topped one, baked it off, stuffed my face, topped the next, baked it off, stuffed my face...in total I probably ate three of these small ones. The dough was the perfect amount of crispy, cooked all the way through so it wasn't doughy but it wasn't like a cracker either. The dough also tasted really clean...nothing fancy or annoying in the dough, just a clean, well made pizza dough. I was very pleased with how these turned out.