Lockdown with Milk Bread

It's lockdown situation and I need to go office for essential services. So most of the time worried about health of my 2-years old and everyone's mental peace.

So cooking and feeding my folks with something tasty and something they are missing eating.

Today it was a simple one. Milk bun

Ingredients:

Flour or Maida 1.5 cup
Milk 1/2 cup
Salt 1 tsp
Oil/Soft butter 2 tbsp
Powdered or Castor Sugar 2tbsp


Instant yeast 1 tbsp
Warm milk 1cup
Powdered or Castor Sugar 1tsp

Procedure:

Soak yeast and sugar in milk for 5 min.

Sieve flour, salt and sugar. This will make the flour airy and will help in rising the dough.

Add milk, yeast mixture to flour. And knead into a soft dough.

Add oil or softened butter. Knead again.

In a deep bowl add oil and keep your flour dough. Cover your bowl with a tissue paper and keep it air tight. Keep in a warm place for 1-2 hour.  Let it rise and become double in size.

After that, knead again, you can use a little flour. Repeat the procedure of keeping in a covered bowl in a warm place. Let it become double in size again.

After 1 more hour, knead the dough again and you can make a few small balls from the dough. Roll each ball and give it a shape of a small ball again. If you want to make bread, no need to make small balls. You can knead and keep in the baking bowl.

Keep your baking tray ready, spread oil. Now keep the flour balls in the plate, keeping a gap of 1 inch. Cover it again and keep in warm place for 1 hour and let these balls rise again.

Preheat the oven. Bake at 180 degree for 20 mins. Depending on your plate and oven, you may need to adjust time a little. So try with 15mins. Then test once. If required, bake for another 5mins.

See it's so easy. Have your home-baked hot bun. See its so soft. Enjoy the lockdown with this hot bun and tea. You can spread butter or cheese, to increase the taste.

Stay at home. Stay safe. Keep visiting my blog and my Facebook page for lockdown recipes.

P. S. You can make  pizza from this same bread dough.

My 2-years old's FIRST pizza, he was super excoted

Home Made Pizza- No oven

A rainy evening always has its spicy influence on us. We all want to have some hot & spicy food. But that day, my friends wanted to sleep & enjoy the rainy evening (how!!!). But I did not want to waste such a lovely evening alone, watching cartoons. So I planned to make something which will help me to wake up my sleeping friends. 

After preparing this, when I brought that to the drawing room, all my friends started to come one by one & we really had a great chit-chat-laugh evening.

This is my 1st time work on pizza & also without an oven. It was crispy & good. I did not know that without an oven we can make a pizza so well. So if you do not have an oven or your oven is not working for some reason, you can still enjoy your pizza :)

Hope to get some feedback if you like the recipe :)

Here's the recipe.

Ingredients:

For Pizza Dough: 

1 1/2 cups warm water

1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder (you can use dried yeast)

1 1/2 cups refined flour

1 Tbsp refined oil

1 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon sugar

1 teaspoon ginger paste

(Home Made) Pizza Sauce:

1/2 cup Tomato puree

Black pepper powder

salt to taste

1/2 teaspoon sugar

2 cups tomato chopped fine (blanch & peel, remove seeds & chopped)

6-8 black pepper, crushed

1 small onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves, chopped

1 tbs refined/olive oil

dried oregano

2 fresh basil leaves

For toppings:

Mozzarella or Parmesan cheese, shredded

Mushrooms, thinly sliced

Bell peppers, stems and seeds removed, thinly sliced

Chopped fresh basil

Onions, thinly sliced

Method:

Making the Pizza Dough

1. If using yeast, in the large bowl add the warm water. Sprinkle on the yeast and let sit for 5 minutes until the yeast is dissolved. Stir to dissolve completely if needed at the end of 5 minutes.

2 Mix in the olive oil, yeast mixture (in my case I used baking powder), flour, salt and sugar and knead into a soft dough. If the dough seems a little too wet, sprinkle on a bit more flour.

3. Cover the dough with a damp cloth & leave to rest in a warm place for about 45min or until the dough is approximately double in size.(If you don't have a warm spot in the house you can heat a pan for 6min on high flame and then turn off. Let the pan cool till it is just a little warm, then place the bowl of dough in this warmed pan to rise.)

4. Knead the dough again & cover with a damp cloth & leave to stand for 10-15mins.

5. Divide the dough into two portions & roll out the dough into 6inch rounds. Prick all over with a fork.

6. Sprinkle some cornmeal on the pan. Gently place one pizza on the pan & bake for 3-4min on medium flame.

Preparing Pizza Sauce:

1. Heat oil in a pan. Add garlic & a large pinch of oregano & saute for 1/2 min.

2. Add the onion & saute till translucent. 

3. Add chopped tomato & mix till all the moisture has evaporated.

4. Add tomato puree & cook for another 5-8mins.

5. Add roughly torn basil leaves, salt, sugar, half crushed peppercorns & mix well. Set aside to cool.

Preparing the Pizzas

1. Preheat the pan for at least 30 minutes, preferably an hour.

2. Prepare your desired toppings. Note that you are not going to want to load up each pizza with a lot of toppings as the crust will end up not crisp that way. About a third a cup each of tomato sauce and cheese would be sufficient for one pizza. One to two mushrooms thinly sliced will cover a pizza.

3. Spread the sauce evenly over pizza bases & sprinkle with mozzarella cheese and place your desired toppings on the pizza.

4. Sprinkle some cornmeal on the pan. Gently place one pizza one the pan, cover & bake for 10-15mins or until the cheese melts. If you want, toward the end of the cooking time you can sprinkle on a little more cheese.

5. Remove from pan, cut & server immediately.