Buncombe County Government, NC Healthy Cooking Programming, 7 Nov 2011

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From YouTube: Cooking for Your Health - Pizza

Description

Cooking for Your Health is a nutritional series from the Nutrition Division of the Buncombe County Department of Health. Join Margit Strout as she teaches you how to make healthy, inexpensive pizza from scratch! The goal of Cooking for Your Health is to promote the WIC nutrition program by providing recipes for low-cost and healthy meals for participating families.
In this video, Margit cooks up multiple healthy pizzas using lots of WIC approved healthy ingredients. For more information on these or more recipes, visit buncombecounty.org/health, or call the Department of Health WIC Nutrition Division at 828.250.5172.
Each episode of Cooking for Your Health focuses on a different food, from squash, salad, ice pops, tofu, turkey, brown rice and even Halloween candy. So after you check out Tofu, view the many other videos right here on Youtube.

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Hello, this is margaret stratton, I'm from the buncombe county health department. You know how sometimes you just really want to have pizza.

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It's delicious, I'm going to show you how to make pizza without spending twenty thirty dollars going out or six seven dollars for a frozen pizza. It's easy. This looks like a lot of stuff, but I'm giving you some options here now. I want to talk also about flour. I use whole wheat flour, it's better for you. It has more fiber, it has more nutrients. There are two kinds of whole wheat flour that I have used. This is regular whole wheat flour. It's a little bit stronger in flavor a little bit thicker in texture.

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This is white whole wheat that I use in a lot of my baking for cakes and things like that. It's a little bit lighter in flavor and texture. I'm going to make a whole wheat crust out of this, and of this just to show you some differences.

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Okay, let's start with the crust now people think oh gosh, yeast dough. I can't do it, you can't it is not hard. I have a recipe you take. Three quarters of a cup of flour and I'm using the white whole wheat flour.

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You can buy packets of yeast. If you don't want to buy packets of yeast, you can do a scant tablespoon of bulky. So if you want to start doing this, you can buy your yeast bulk, it's less expensive and it's easier, throw that in there and then you're going to put in a little bit of sugar and people. Oh gosh sugar. You need a little sugar to feed the yeast a little bit of salt and that's to stop these from working too hard.

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We're trying to keep the yeast is a a uh a live organism, so we want to kind of keep it in the ideal atmosphere. I like adding italian herbs to my crust.

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I just buy bulk herbs from it and then you add to this whisk it around, because you do not want the yeast to touch too hot water and you're going to add about two-thirds and I'm testing this to make sure it's not too hard of hot water. You don't want it too hot. We don't want to have it bubbling.

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Whisk this around and it gets kind of thick sorry.

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Okay, now we're going to add about two tablespoons of oil.

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And I like mixing the oil in before I put the rest of the flour in.

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Just because I think it's easier then you're going to put another cup and a quarter of flour and again I'm using the lighter whole wheat.

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Now you can turn this out and need this, and I kind of want to show you how to do that, because it's not hard.

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It will take a little bit of time and it's actually great exercise for your hands. You're just going to use your hand and incorporate this. If you want to be lazy or you want to do it faster, you can use a mixer or a food processor.

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Bring this out.

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And you're going to need this.

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And you kind of get rid of all your stress from the day as you're doing this.

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Now I do want to say sometimes: kids come around or critters come around and say: oh please, let me have a taste but do not feed them, yeast dough, it will grow in their stomach and it can make you pretty sick.

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I didn't believe that when my father told me so I tried it, don't do it okay, this is pretty well incorporated and it's a pretty thick dough. You want to knead it for about five minutes.

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This incorporates some air in it and it also builds gluten and gluten is what makes bread have its texture.

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Now I'm going to put this in a bowl and normally you put it in a bowl, I'm just going to stick it back in this bowl, I'm going to put a little bit of oil in the bottom, and I like these dispensers and I'm going to kind of shlog it around.

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And I'm going to cover this and put it on the back of the stove. I'm going to go, get the other crust that I made earlier and then we're going to roll it out and show you how to make pizza.

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Now this is my dough that I have let rise when you're, making it with whole wheat flour.

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It is a little denser.

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It is a little tougher.

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But it's so much better for you. I also want to talk about baking. Your pizza, you can use a cookie sheet or you can use a pizza stone. I prefer pizza stone and that's simply because you get a better crust. I think now I'm going to mix this up. Oh my knuckles, cracked, it's very therapeutic for hands!

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Now, I'm going to tell you. I am not able to throw it up, catch it and throw it up again.

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It's just not going to happen. I throw it up. It's going to land on the floor and no one's going to want to eat it. So you don't have to be fancy.

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Unless you want to be and I'll tell you, you need to be a strong person. This is kind of like a workout because your hands get really strong as well as your arms. Now you want to roll this out to about a 14 inch round.

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And I'm trying to make it round. I don't always succeed.

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Sometimes it comes out quite creatively, but I think that's pretty good.

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This is a pizza stone. They come with a little rack. You do not put these in soapy water, because the soap will come into this. It will absorb. So you want to allow it to.

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You just wash it with warm water, so it gets kind of gross looking, but it's not bad and it's heated in a 500 degree. Oven. You put these in the oven before you put your pizza on them. You want these hot.

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Now for transport I'm going to use this and to make it kind of interesting like they do in the pizzerias, I'm putting some cornmeal on it.

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Now you can use cornmeal in a pinch, I've used grits just whatever's easiest.

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Now I am going to make now you can make your own sauce, I'm lazy! I buy jarred sauce.

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You don't want too much sauce on this and I'm also going to use the pesto sauce, because that is a totally decadent one. I'm going to use that on one of the other crusts that you can do again. I want this to be easy.

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What do you want on your pizza? You want some peppers. Let's put some pretty peppers on here, make it kind of creative. You want these fairly thinly sliced and if you do different colors, you get different nutrients.

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Let's put a few olives and you can put whatever kind of olives. If you want to make faces, the kids can make faces a little bit of onion. I, like onion on my pizza, my son, doesn't so we get it and he picks it off and he gets something else that I pick off between the two of us we're happy. Broccoli works really well on pizza. Do not put cauliflower on pizza again been there tried that you don't want to do that.

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Artichoke hearts again. This pizza, I think even our cameraman will like it and it doesn't have any pepperoni.

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Some other olives add a little dash of oomph, okay and then the cheese that looks yummy. Doesn't it and again you can put as much or as little cheese as you want to. This is part skin mozzarella.

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Okay, I'm gonna go put this on the pizza stone in the oven and then in a little while you'll get to see what it looks like.

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The next thing I'm going to do is what we used to do when my son was little. We used to use english, muffins or pitas and make pizza some people say to make them with frozen biscuits or you can do the the frozen rolls and just roll them out. English muffins are easier and you can have your bowls ready with all your stuff.

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And I did some peppers that were smaller. This is a good way to get kids to eat their vegetables about a tablespoon of sauce, not too much, and I use the light english muffins.

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You can use the whole wheat if you really want to you, can use the white english muffins, I'm going to put a little bit of pesto on this. I did this once with kids. I have teenagers come to my house and this one child, and I made he was the one willing to help. So he got to choose, we made pesto and spinach and it was the most wonderful thing I think we've ever eaten.

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He and I both like spinach, so I'm gonna put a little spinach on there and on this one, I'm gonna put a little bit of artichoke.

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Now some of these things, your kids aren't going to like I'll, be, you know honest, but I'm kind of making them for us too.

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On this green, I'm going to put some peppers and kids like broccoli, pretend it's trees, uh here's some tomato pieces. You know all depending on what you like and then of course, you're gonna put some cheese on top.

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These are small portions. You have to remember little kids have small tummies. This is going to be enough for them.

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And I'm gonna pick up the cheese because otherwise it smells terrible when it cooks and burns.

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I am going to put these in the toaster oven.

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And I'm going to, I don't want to bake them as much as I want to broil them and I'm going to boil them for about 10 minutes we're going to keep half an eye on them. I'm going to get my cookie sheet back and I'm gonna do some pita pizzas and again you can have the pitas and they're, usually pre-cut.

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Somewhere, you can make your own pitas once you're, making your pizza dough. Well, I'm not going to open them. You can't open them or not, depending on what you want to do, I'm going to make another one, I'm trying to think what would be really neat with the pesto. I think I'll do an onion.

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You can tell I like pesto and tomato how about that.

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You want to have relatively thin slices of onion and you don't want to go too wild with them um and then I'm going to do a tomato sauce. I'm trying to think what combination I haven't done, because I want to show you a whole bunch of different things on here. Let's see this goes well.

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And I put some more green peppers a little bit of broccoli.

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Now you can see this is not taking very long. I also want to say I use frozen broccoli because it's easier, it's less expensive, it's frozen right after it's picked, I mean they have the little freezer carts almost in the fields and it's less expensive in a lot of ways. Now, if you're growing your own um broccoli in your own garden, that would be wonderful. You can use it. You can put ham and shrimp or pineapple on pizza.

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There are no rules. um I have put. Oh lord, I'm trying to think of all the really good things you can put on. So this is just a variety they're, colorful vegetables, they're good tasting. I lost my cheese there for a second and again, you can put different kinds of cheeses.

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Some people like asiago some people like the mozzarella, some people put some parmesan oopsie.

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And we're going to cook these in the oven for just a little while starting to smell, really good in here.

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I put the pizza stone on the bottom, because I wanted the pizza the bottom to cook really well and this because it's thinner, I'm putting it on top, so the pizza stone is going to kind of keep it from getting too hot and too burned.

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Welcome back I've taken the pizzas out of the oven. We have a good variety, different skill levels, different textures, different flavors. The other thing I wanted to mention this summer was a real hot day. I wanted something easy. I had bought a prefab pizza crust at the grocery store. I had tons of tomatoes from my garden thinly slice. The tomatoes lay them on the pizza crust, put some italian herbs and some cheese that in a salad was dinner.

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It was delicious. Now I'm going to invite somebody to come in and try some pizza. I'm going to cut this with these, you can cut. If you want to you, don't have to really. If you have young children, those you can cut this. You definitely want to cut now.

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This has got a good crusty crust.

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If you want to make it thicker, you can.

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This is hot and that looked great, it's about ten dollars, much more nutrient dense and just plain good. I want to invite megan lester our intern to come up and eat some pizza with me. These might be a little hot. You might want to try one of these and there's the tomato okay, I'm gonna do my favorite, the pesto and spinach. This is to die for.

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That's really good margaret one little taste of that sure you want to trade yeah, we're friends now.

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Is that not yummy kids might actually like spinach enjoy for more information? You can go to the buncombe county website, cooking for your health for recipes and other ideas. Goodbye.

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