Pizza... Troubles With Bubbles

You can't beat a pizza for tea... tangy tomato sauce, meltingly golden cheese and as many toppings as you can cram onto the base before it's too high to fit in the oven.

Home-made is always best (we use our bread machine to mix and prove the dough while we're at work, so we can be eating pizza 20 mins after getting home from work).

However, done properly (with a blisteringly hot oven and a paper-thin crust) you can sometimes end up with bubbles popping up in the base... personally I quite like them but for professional pizza chefs they are a definite no-no.

Although this is probably the absolute definition of a first-world problem, the internet can supply a solution to your pizza-bubble woes.

The best option is to "dock" the dough... essentially pricking it all over with a fork or similar spikey implement to allow any air trapped between the dough layers to escape during cooking; if you are making pizzas in bulk you can even buy a machine to do it for you.

If your docking technique is not up to much and you still end up with bubbles - and especially if you're cooking in a full-size pizza oven - you can also buy a long-handled bubble-popper, designed specifically for this problem.  Alternatively a garden fork would probably do the trick.

So there you go... if your pizzas are plagued by bubbles do not despair, with a credit card, more money than sense, and a 3-4 week wait for transatlantic shipping your troubles could be at an end!

As for me I'm going to stick with my bubbly pizzas... there's something about the gentle rise-and-fall of the dough's undulations that puts me in mind of landscape around the southern fens where I grew up (that piece of parma ham totally looks like Ely cathedral too).

"Perfect" Jerk Chicken

Despite the relentless rain this summer it's still nice to eat food that tastes of sunnier shores.

This week we tried a Jamaican jerk chicken recipe from the Guardian's "Perfect" series by Felicity Cloake... a mouth-tingling mix of chilis, all-spice, lime juice and thyme slathered over chicken and served with rice and peas.

I ended up going slightly off-piste... time constraints, the limits of my fridge and biblical levels of precipitation outside meant that we used chicken breasts (ideally you'd use legs with the bones left in), only gave it 30 mins to marinate (overnight is better), and cooked it in the oven (rather than on the BBQ).

I also avoided the scotch-bonnet chilis in favour of milder versions... the next time I cook it I'll increase the chili heat slightly, the flavours of the marinade are strong enough to cope with more chili without being overpowered by it.

Still, even with those tweaks it still made an excellent mid-week supper... the addition of soy sauce to the marinade (apparently an authentic Caribbean ingredient... who knew!) means you're left with extra sauce to serve it with, rather than just a dry rub which can take some of the moisture out of the chicken.

And I guess rice and peas doesn't generally mean basmati and birds eye, but it did the job!

This would work brilliantly on the BBQ or for large numbers of people so definitely one to try if the sun ever appears this summer; alternatively with a bit of pre-planning and 30 mins preparation the night before this makes a quick and easy post-work dinner.

Final top tip: if you buy packaged chilis from the supermarket keep any spare ones in the freezer in a bag so they don't go mouldy; give them 10-15 mins to thaw and use them as normal.