Not for Me

People are sending me links to a story about making pizza in a cast iron skillet.

I appreciate the information, but my Sicilian literally could not be any better, and I don’t have to go through all those gymnastics to make it. I do it the same simple way pizzerias do it. On top of that, I can make it any size I want and any shape I want, as long as I can find a thin pan in the desired size and shape. With a skillet, you’re stuck with skillet-size, skillet-shaped pizza. Would you serve a 9″ pizza to four friends? I’d probably be killed for that. I can make an 18″ square pizza, just like the pros.

The skillet pizza reminds me of the “mom hamburger” Eddie Murphy used to talk about. His friends would go to McDonald’s, and his mom wouldn’t let him go. She’d make him a burger at home, with Wonder Bread. He’d be in the yard with his mushy bread, trying to keep the meat from falling out, and his buddies would be at McDonald’s, having what they actually wanted. This is what most homemade pizza is like. I’ve made many bad homemade pizzas; I know the pain.

If you use my methods for Sicilian and thin pizza, you’ll do very little work, you won’t use up a lot of time, and you’ll get pizza just like what you buy on the street in Manhattan, only–in most cases–better. It’s hard for me to see any reason to try another way.

I belong to a pizza forum. These people use language I don’t even understand. They talk about “hydration,” and how you have to have a certain precise amount of water in the dough to make it work. You know how I measure the water in my dough? I poke it with my finger. It’s always–ALWAYS, I’m saying–perfect. Making pizza is extremely hard; why make it worse by requiring people to buy burettes and gram scales?

Here’s something I’ve noticed in life. When people obsess about the equipment they use for a task, and they get drawn into a thicket of details, very often it means they’re not getting good results, because they don’t know what they’re doing. Oscar Peterson could make fantastic music on an upright piano; it’s the amateurs who think they have to have a Fazioli.

When I was wandering lost in the pizza wilderness, I worried a lot about equipment and so on. Now I know that stuff doesn’t matter. I have a screen, a stone, and the right ingredients. I’m golden.

Try my method. All you need are a stone, a screen or some semolina, a peel, and a food processor. Get Stanislaus sauce. Get Costco or Grande cheese, or buy sliced whole milk mozzarella at a deli. Use my recipe. You’ll win every time. Well, you might have a few false starts, but you’ll win every time, after that.

Sometimes people complain that they tried one of my recipes and it didn’t work. This almost always means they thought they were smarter than me, and they changed something. If you use my pizza recipe, follow it to the letter at first. Don’t ruin it the first time out. Once you get it to work, THEN you can change it to suit your tastes. It really works. If not, you’re the problem.

You don’t need special flour. It doesn’t matter what your tap water is like, unless it’s truly disgusting. You don’t need a special oven. Just make sure you have top-notch tomato sauce and cheese, and you’ll be fine.

Maybe the skillet pizza is great. I have no motivation to find out. When you have Sophia Loren at home, why go on a blind date?

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“Sometimes people complain that they tried one of my recipes and it didn’t work. This almost always means they thought they were smarter than me, and they changed something.”

I read that, and it occurred to me that God probably says the same thing all the time. Often, about ME.

Gap in Skillet Collection Filled

I finally have a decent #7 skillet

I got a #7 Griswold large logo skillet a year or two ago. The finish on the inside was not perfect, and I delayed in sanding it down, and one day I somehow managed to put another pot in the skillet while the pot was wet. Some kind of electrolysis occurred, and the skillet pitted in two places.

After that, I ordered one from some dealer, and I got a good price, but it had a tiny wobble in it, which is no good for a glass range. Also, the handle had some odd sort of pitting on it.

Last week I Ebayed a third skillet, and it’s perfect. I have it in the oven right now, at 550. I’m hoping I can get most of the crud off without resorting to the clean cycle, which could warp the skillet.

I’m thinking I made a mistake when I concluded that cast iron skillets were wrong for Sicilian pizza. I reached that conclusion after baking with the skillet on a stone. Now that I bake Sicilian on the bottom rack with no stone, I’m inclined to try a skillet again. Maybe the pitted skillet would be good enough to use for this. A #7 skillet is a good size for a one-person Sicilian. It’s about 64 square inches, so about the same as an 8″ square pan.

I called Mike about my latest Sicilian, and he went to the store while we were on the phone and made me give him the particulars. I don’t know if it will work. He’s using store cheese and Pastene sauce, which is not comparable to Stanislaus. The cheese can be made to work, if he tosses it in a little olive oil before he cooks.

Should be interesting. He and I used to hog down Sicilian together by his parents’ pool table. When I think of the food our parents let us buy, I wonder if they were trying to kill us. On Friday nights, my parents used to go out, and they left me enough money to get a large pizza and a whole bag of garlic rolls, and you better believe I ate the whole order, every time.

I hope he gets good results. I owe my pizza success to his tutelage.

The [Greg] House of Pizza

I can see I’m going to have to throw out my mozzarella.

I’m going crazy, wondering whether I need to remove the stone when I make Sicilian pizza. I intended to go a few more days before my next experiment. I’m waiting for some smaller pans to arrive. I don’t want to go through a pound and a half of cheese every time I want to do a trial run. But curiosity is too strong for me, so I’m going to make a half-size pie in a full-size pan. I can’t make myself stop.

I hope it will work. I think it should. I’ll cram it into one side of the pan, and only one side of the pie will be unsupported. It should be firm enough to stand up and not collapse.

Unless it isn’t.

I’m starting to think Stanislaus Saporito may be better, for my purposes, than Super Dolce. The flavor is a little different. The biggest difference is that Super Dolce is sweeter, and they make a product that corrects that. It’s called “sugar.”

I have to get a nine-inch square pan. I’ve decided that’s the perfect size for lunch. It’s actually slightly bigger than the perfect size, which is 7.5″, but I don’t think anyone makes a steel pan that size. To roughly equal the calorie content of a thin 12″ circular pie, I need a square Sicilian pie 7.5″ on a side.

Wait, that’s wrong. That pie will have the same amount of flour but less cheese, since the cheese on a Sicilian isn’t twice as heavy. It’s only one and a half times as heavy. Man, this is going to take some algebra.

Hmm…it turns out a 9″ square pie is pretty close. The bigger pie has 1.4 times the area, but you use 1.5 times as much cheese per square inch on a Sicilian, so you have to factor that in, and it looks like you get about 7.5 ounces of cheese, which is within spec for a 12″ pie. The sauce calories are negligible compared to cheese and flour.

I still have to do the flour calculation. Looks like it’s 1.4 cups, instead of 1 cup for a 12″ thin pie. That adds around 160 calories.

Okay, whatever. Nine inches is about right. Probably.

I wonder if thin Sicilian is any good. If I halved the dough, it would still be thick enough to be Sicilian.

They probably don’t even eat this stuff in Sicily. It’s like English muffins. Here’s a tip: don’t bother buying them if you have British houseguests.

Okay, I’m wrong. Wikipedia says they really come from England, where–no kidding–they call them “American muffins.”

In any case, I’m making a half-size Sicilian today. I don’t even care if I get to eat it. I just have to know if it works.

I care a little.

Peace

My soul is finally at peace. I just made the best Sicilian pizza I have ever eaten. In fact, it’s the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. It’s almost exactly what I would dream of, if I dreamed I was eating Sicilian.

Here’s the crucial info, in brief. Bake your Sicilian at 550°, on a lower rack, in a thin steel pan with baked-on seasoning. If the top starts to get too dark, put a cookie sheet or a piece of foil on the rack above it, because your broiler may be kicking on. To get a darker bottom crust without burning the top, go low in the oven. If you like your cheese brown, go higher.

This pizza took a surprising 13 minutes to cook. I had it too high in the oven during the first 8 minutes (bottom too rare when I lifted up a corner), so I put it on the bottom rack during the last five minutes, and that baked the crust. It wasn’t quite as well-done as I would have wanted; I underestimated by maybe 30 seconds. Next time, I’ll put the pie low in the oven from the beginning.

Using half the pan did not cause any problems. I was afraid it would burn the seasoning off the empty side, so I stuck part of a broiler pan under that side, but during the last 5 minutes, I had nothing under it, and it was fine. The unsupported side didn’t bake against steel, so it wasn’t quite as tasty as the other four sides, but it was very good.

To help you out, I’ll give mathematical information. The pie was 9″ by 12″. I used two cups of bread flour. The base of the sauce was four ounces (by weight) of Saporito. I used 12 ounces (by weight) of Costco cheese. These proportions are just about perfect, but you might want to go to 14-16 ounces of cheese.

The cheese will try to migrate to the middle, so make sure you pile it high around the edges. I ran the sauce to 1/2″ of the sides, which was perfect, but I should have worked harder to make sure the cheese covered the sauce completely, and I should have fixed it so there was a little more near the edges than in the center, to compensate for drift.

That Costco cheese…you haven’t had street-pizza cheese until you’ve piled Costco mozzarella high on a pizza. It’s chewy and buttery, with tons of stretch. Honestly, I think it’s better than the Grande cheese I bought. Might be better if they aged it longer, but even with the pre-shredding and the cellulose powder, it’s a dream come true.

I would say I am now like the Vladimir Horowitz of Sicilian pizza, and that in time, I’ll be the Sviatoslav Richter. Right now, I’m the Oscar Peterson. Later, I’ll be the Art Tatum. After that, people will build statues that look like me, and some day, they’ll name a tomato after me.

The pan is totally non-stick. The crust could not be better. The cheese and sauce are flawless. The recipe is simple and foolproof. What a day. I feel like I was just crowned Miss America. I’m even against gay marriage.

Maybe now I can quit making pizza for a while.

Pizzumentary

Today I’m documenting my Sicilian pizza. Here is the pan. Seven bucks at Gordon Food Service. I seasoned it with lard before I used it for the first time, but it stuck a little. Since then I’ve been adding layers of baked-on lard, and you can see how much has accumulated. It’s very clean. There is no oiliness to it. The baked fat is like varnish. I’m hoping to build up a nice thick layer over the years.

Here is the dough. That’s four cups of flour. I was low on bread flour, so I used regular all-purpose flour and added around a tablespoon and a half of gluten. I’m sure it will be great. I used the small plastic blade in the Cuisinart, because this load of dough was really too big for the main blade. I want to get a Robot Coupe commercial food processor with a bigger bowl, but maybe it would be smarter to get a stand mixer. It would be a lot slower, but what’s an additional four minutes?

There is no oil in the dough, but I oiled the outside. The outside of the crust on a Sicilian pizza should be fried, more or less. When the pan gets hot, it fries the crust a little, giving a little crispness to it. I plan to oil the pan pretty heavily. Worked last time.

I don’t want this much pizza, but the small pans I ordered aren’t here yet. I can freeze the excess. I suspect you could get a good result with a disposable aluminum pan and PAM, but I don’t feel like experimenting.

I’m using Saporito sauce, plus water, vinegar, salt, sugar, garlic powder, and oregano. Fresh garlic is too good! The cheese: COSTCO! It really works!

More as the pizza develops. I hope I don’t do something stupid and ruin it.

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The dough rose like crazy, so I oiled the pan and spread the dough out. This may be too much oil.

Here’s the dough in the pan. I think this stage is called “proofing,” but I know more about cooking than jargon.

Here is the cheese I love. I know pizza snobs will sneer, but I use what works, and this is it.

I used 6 ounces (weight) of Saporito sauce. I don’t know if I’ll apply all of it, but I mixed it. I have a pound of cheese weighed out. This should be spectacular. Assuming I can pry it off the pan.

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Here’s the dough with sauce. You could eat that sauce as an entree. Stanislaus tomato products are incredible.

Here’s the dough with sauce and cheese.

Have to run.

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I’m an honest man. I admit it; I still have a little work to do. The sauce is perfect. The cheese is perfect. The dough is perfect. But I need to fine-tune the cooking technique, and I need to use more sauce and cheese. I think the magic numbers are 8 ounces and 24 ounces. This pie was a marvel, but the crust was not done as well as it should have been, the ingredient balance wasn’t optimal, and the cheese got browner than I like.

Here’s the pizza. I had no idea what to do with it, so I cut it right on the stove.

Here’s the underside. It’s done, but just barely.

The answer is probably to give up the stone and bake on the rack. That will get the bottom done faster. Right now I’m going 12 minutes, and I need to be down around 8 or 9. I thought the stone would bake the bottom faster, but it doesn’t. If I can bake the dough faster, the cheese will not be as brown.

I could throw foil over the top after a certain amount of time, to prevent browning while the bottom cooks, but that’s stupid, if I can just remove the stone.

I’m surprised how much cheese and sauce this thing needs. You can’t just use the same amount you put on a thin pizza with the same area.

The flavor is right on the money. No pizzeria could do better. And the parts of the crust that are fully done are sublime, so I know the rest of it will taste the same, once I get it to brown more.

One other interesting thing: I need to form the dough into a large rectangle before it rises, so I don’t have to stretch it so much. I stretch the dough and then flip it and stretch it some more, and this gives desirable finger indentations in the bottom of the dough. They improve the texture and flavor. But if you stretch it too much after you flip it, you end up pressing a lot of these indentations out. Much better to start with a sheet of dough that doesn’t have to be worked as much.

Anyway, the best Sicilian you ever ate can be made in your home oven with great consistency and no special equipment. That’s news the whole world should want to hear.

Horn

I get crazier every day.

I’ve been watching my Jazz DVDs all week, and I’ve been encouraging my dad to pick up the trumpet again. And while this was on my mind, I thought about the horn and woodwind players in the documentary. These guys play one note at a time. ONE. No chords. No sustain pedals. No supporting one hand with the other. I keep thinking that has to give them a lot of freedom, compared to a pianist, and it has to make sight-reading easier to pick up.

Maybe I’m wrong. But I am going to take a whack at the cornet.

My dad can give me a lot of help. He knows how to play several horns. He says real men play the trumpet, not the cornet, but Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong played the cornet, so I want to see what it’s like.

Maybe it will be a stupid idea, but finding out will be cheap. It’s amazing how cheap used horns are. You can get a professional-quality cornet for two hundred bucks, if you don’t care how it looks. The worst professional-quality grand piano on earth will run you ten grand, and that would be a good buy.

One nice thing about a used cornet is that even if I hate it, I can get rid of it without getting dinged.

We’ll see what happens.

Woe to Thee, O Land, When Thy King is a Child

Are we finally reaching the point where gravity catches up with us and we have to admit we can’t finance the future by eating it?

The Dow is down over eighty points, and we just had two days that were even worse. Sooner or later, before we can have a real recovery, somebody somewhere has to make some money–has to create some wealth–and given our unemployment figures, that doesn’t seem to be happening. And we still have a gigantic glut of foreclosed homes the banks are sitting on. They can’t hold them forever. Eventually, they’re going to be put on the market or bulldozed. It will be interesting to see what happens to home loans and property values.

Because we borrowed an astronomical amount of money to finance the recovery, in the future, we have to make more money than usual in order to have the same prosperity we had in the past. It’s just like a student loan; you borrow money when you’re 20, and by the time you pay it off, every pizza you ate in college cost $50. What happens when you graduate with debt and then can’t get a job? That’s America’s situation.

Where is the evidence that we’re going to do better in 2015 than we did in 2005? Why would anyone think that was possible, let alone likely? And if we try to solve the problem by inflating the currency, we’ll just end up with larger numbers of smaller dollars. We’ll all be millionaires, and nobody will have a second pair of shoes. It’s still poverty, no matter how you look at it. We may be able to cheat the Chinese via inflation, but we’ll also be burning our cash reserves.

I don’t know why God provided me with silver coins, but it looks like I should be happy about it. I inherited a bunch of circulated silver coins from my grandfather. He snapped them up after Johnson turned our money into steel slugs. Seemed crazy at the time, but if we have a depression, I’ll be able to buy bread.

People think silver coins are worthless. They’re ignorant. The coins are 90% silver.

I just looked it up. My nickels are worth a dollar each. The dimes are worth over a dollar. The quarters are worth over three dollars. Wish I had enough of them to keep me alive for a year or two. Maybe I should buy some.

Gold is fine, but in a depression, it would be hard to spend. Owning gold would be like carrying thousand-dollar bills. A piece the size of a sesame seed would buy a dozen eggs. That’s useless. They don’t make coins that small. And what are you going to do, if you own it? Run a smelter in your kitchen? Forget it. Even if you could cut your gold into small pieces, no one would trust it. This is why mints exist. The purpose of a mint isn’t to make coins. It’s to make coins people can trust. Otherwise, private enterprises would be making gold coins diluted with copper and brass.

A silver coin, unlike a gold coin, will have a useful value. One of my dimes is worth a dozen eggs. Spending gold will be very difficult, but handing over a dime and grabbing a dozen eggs will be simple. Gold will only be useful if you’re buying a car or real estate. Or you’ll be able to trade it for silver, at a loss.

People say you don’t have to have precious metal in your possession in order to use it. You can trade it electronically. Good luck with that. If things get weird, I don’t want my money in the vault of some metals dealer three thousand miles away, waiting for him to declare bankruptcy and disappear. Savings accounts are insured by the government. Gold? No. When it’s gone, it’s gone. You can have private insurance, but would you trust it? Look at AIG. And the insurance wouldn’t compensate you in gold. You’d get worthless paper dollars. Better to stuff a few bags of silver in a deposit box at a local bank. If the bank fails, money will vanish, but goods in deposit boxes will remain.

If Obama and the Fed manage to eat our savings by printing money, what will we have left? Subsistence agriculture and bread lines. People in cities will starve. It may be especially bad in Florida, where we are suffering an unprecedented wave of blights and exotic pests. Oranges are probably going to get very scarce over the next five years because citrus greening is incurable. We may lose our bananas. Growing tomatoes here is already very hard; without chemicals, it can’t be done.

What do you do when you live in Miami and times get hard? The fish and peacocks and ducks would disappear in two months. Squirrels and pigeons would follow. You can’t grow enough fruit to live on, if you have a typical lot. It’s hard to grow vegetables here, and most lots are small anyway. Many homes here have topsoil six inches deep. Under that, it’s pure coral.

I never pray for God to fix things for us. Not exactly. I pray that we will turn to him and submit to him because of our problems, and that he’ll give us recovery only after that happens. We won’t learn anything from an unconditional handout. It would be a false kindness, and God doesn’t deal in those. I actually pray he will maintain the recession until we have revival. Otherwise, the suffering will be in vain. I also ask that he end the recession for those who have turned to him already.

Obama thinks a chicken can make a living by eating its own eggs. Everything he tells us goes against common sense, history, and basic economics. Borrowing only leads to prosperity when you reasonably anticipate that the borrowed money will enable you to make enough money to repay it. Otherwise, the result is bankruptcy. Can a nation declare bankruptcy? I guess so, but it won’t protect us from harsh consequences. We may weasel out of our debts by devaluing the currency, but we’ll all become poorer, and we’ll have to pay higher interest to China the next time they lend to us. This is how bad credit works. Everything costs more. But it’s worth it, so we can have essential government services, such as the subsidy of multimillion-dollar studies to tell us why trout can’t fly.

I think we’re going to have labor pains for a while. Things will get better and then worse, over and over, until the big collapse comes. The fluctuations will warn people and help those who are teachable to make preparations. Hopefully I’ll be ready. Life isn’t perfect when you’re in good standing with God, but it’s a whole lot better.

I Have my Brass

I am a bad person. I am an instigator.

My dad used to play the trumpet and some other horns, and he loves music. But he quit playing, because it’s so loud. You almost have to live on an island to practice the trumpet without annoying people.

I saw Wynton Marsalis in the documentary, Jazz, commenting while occasionally playing a horn. I realized his playing wasn’t loud, and knowing nothing about horns, I figured he had to have a special instrument that played quietly. Apparently, there is no such thing. But I found a weird electronic mute made by Yamaha, which supposedly allows horn players to practice quietly without the back pressure problems a regular mute causes.

I emailed the information to my dad, and now he’s fooling around with his cornet. I may have succeeded in tempting him.

This has to be better for him than watching the tube.

I am Now Self-Actualized

I think I have the pizza-pan situation figured out. I need thin steel, not cast iron. And I need three sizes. First, 12 x 18, to serve more than one person. Then 12 x 12, for a serious meal for one person or a small meal for two. Then 9 x 9, for a normal meal for one. Cast iron is out. Steel works, so there is no need to look for another answer.

I don’t know what to do with all this power. I pretty much have pizza under my thumb, so I can’t continue eating it every day with research as my excuse. I guess the smart move is to bag and freeze the cheese and sauce and have pizza maybe twice a week.

I’ve reached a point where it’s hard to think of anything new I want to learn to cook. I guess cheese poori and certain Indian appetizers and entrees would be good, but I can get a good cookbook for that; I don’t need to be original. Same for Chinese.

It’s unbelievable, now that I think about it. I can make the best pizza in Miami. I can make the best cheesecake anywhere, as far as I know. My barbecue is the best I can find anywhere near me. Prime rib is a joke. Aged steaks are simple. I can cook everything I really care about. God has really blessed me.

If only I could eat this stuff every day.

I guess now I should focus on small, healthy meals that are easy to fix. To me, that means meat or fish, plus non-starchy vegetables. Dull, but cheap and fast.

My dinner menu is embarrassing. Here’s the kind of thing I fix: two tiny pork chops fried in olive oil with no breading, half a can of greens, and Brussels sprouts with salt and butter. I really can’t eat more than that without fattening up. My current routine (admittedly derailed by pizza research) is one serving of oatmeal at breakfast, a sandwich and some pickles at lunch, and a little-bitty dinner. I’m changing that now; the small, sad-looking dinner, which is the largest meal, will come in the middle of the day.

I like vegetables, so eating things like greens and sprouts is not a problem. As far as I know, all Southerners like vegetables. I don’t know why. I always hear about people who won’t eat vegetables. They hate broccoli. They hate spinach. I don’t get it. No one in my family is like that. One of the best Southern meals is hot cornbread, soup beans, and fresh, raw vegetables. Southerners aren’t fat because they don’t eat vegetables. They’re fat because they also eat Moon Pies and chili-cheese-slaw dogs.

I’ve been watching Ken Burns’s Jazz for a few days. I love this documentary. I own a copy. Sometimes the BS can be hard to take; I don’t know why so many successful young black men talk crap, when their achievements stand for themselves. But generally, it focuses on the music, with a surprisingly fair approach to race relations.

Actually, I do know why so many successful young black men talk crap. It’s because Martin Luther King died and Jesse Jackson lived. They pattern themselves after the sideshow act, instead of the greater man who preceded him and died without leaving a substantial video or audio record. King didn’t live long enough to make the kind of impression Jackson has. That’s truly unfortunate. Slogans and chants and doggerel and transparent sophistry are no substitute for character, brains, and dignity.

Now that I think about it, Malcolm X was about fifty times the man Jesse Jackson is, and he died young, too. He had a weakness for slogans, though.

Anyway, I keep watching these videos and marveling at the music. Louis Armstrong is astonishing. He’s like Mozart. He was so good, it didn’t even make sense. Greatest jazz instrumentalist who ever lived. Arguably the greatest vocalist, although you would never know it from garbage like What a Wonderful World. I think THC had pickled his brain by then. They say he smoked every day. Some defend his later work, but far as I can tell, he said all he had to say before he hit middle age.

And people say dope won’t hurt you.

I’m glad I never cared for drugs enough to stick with them. I have never understood the appeal of pot. Sometimes I think other people smoke dope to be more like people like me. Some people have no sense of humor and no creativity and no ability to relax unless they’re high. If you have those things naturally, maybe dope seems pointless. People take drugs to compensate for shortcomings, so my theory makes sense to me. I admit, I’d love to have natural self-confidence comparable to what stimulants provide.

To get back to jazz, Bix Beiderbecke was another superhuman talent. Seems like he could do absolutely anything except quit drinking. He didn’t consider himself a pianist; his instrument was the cornet. But I have a couple of his piano recordings–stuff he played on the spur of the moment, almost as a lark–and the things he did are like nothing anyone else was playing at that time. It’s like a fusion of Debussy and Thelonious Monk.

He was never able to get it together, and he drank himself to death before he turned thirty. Maybe some people are too talented and too creative to lead happy, successful lives. Maybe the human body can’t contain them.

As I listened and watched, I wondered why Christian music couldn’t have this kind of quality and creativity. It’s not as if musical creativity didn’t exist before jazz. Stuffy classical musicians killed it, out of ignorance and misplaced worship. In the times of Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin, a classical musician was required to improvise. It’s virtually forbidden now, but the greats used to sit and make up melody lines on the spot, just like jazz musicians do now. Liszt could take sheet music for an orchestra and play it on the piano, at sight, while making suggestions and criticisms as they occurred to him.

American popular music was pretty weak (Turkey in the Straw, heaven protect us) before jazz and the blues, and improvisation in classical music was essentially banned, so it’s no wonder most popular music, including the Christian variety, is second-rate. Why can’t a Christian pianist sit and improvise brilliantly during a worship service? No reason at all. They used to do it. Maybe blue notes and certain jazz rhythms would be somewhat out of place, but those things aren’t essential to spontaneous music.

I keep banging away at sight-reading. Yesterday I amazed myself by playing a triplet correctly, while staying in time. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that before. I used to break measures into twelve beats and practice slowly, I think. I need to start journaling my progress, so I don’t get discouraged. I still can’t play anything, but I’m making substantial headway.

I should thaw out some tiny pork chops. I hate to miss out on a fine feed like that.

Haiti and Kentucky

Two prayer requests.

First, RE Haiti:

Hi Steve,

The babies from the abandoned baby unit need prayers, They are missing! Pray they are found safe.
Susie Krabacher was on CNN this morning and the url is a link to the interview.
http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2010/01/20/intv.krabacher.orphan.aid.cnn

Made “tiny” if the link is broke.
http://tinyurl.com/ye58z5b

Missing babies are the part that just breaks my heart.

Thanks,
Cindy

Second, from Kentucky, Heather is asking for help:

Hi Friends,
Just had my appointment with the high risk OB and they believe that the baby has a tumor of some sort on it’s spine. I know I depend on you for prayer for my mom and everything else in my life, but could you please ask the Lord to heal this?
They believe the tumor is non-cancerous, but would require surgery after the birth, which can be so dangerous and I would love to be able to avoid that if possible.
I am scheduled for an MRI on Friday so they can have a better look. That is the same day as mom’s oncologist appointment, and I know that I had already asked you all to pray for a good result with that.
Thank you and God Bless.
Love,
Heather

Have at it.

Forget Health Care Reform; This is Important

I’m making Sicilian pizza in my old Lodge skillet. This skillet is 12″ across, on the inside, at the bottom. I sanded it when I bought it, so the bottom isn’t as rough as most Lodge skillets.

I’m using two cups of bread flour, salt, pepper, yeast, and water. That’s it.

I let the dough rise in an oiled bowl. It stuck to the bowl, which is normal unless you add flour to the oil. It turns out this doesn’t matter, as long as you can get the dough out without mangling it. The imperfections you get from pulling the dough off the bowl disappear later.

Here is what I have right now. I oiled the dough (extra light olive oil), spread it out, flipped it (so the finger indentations would be in the bottom of the crust) and put it on top of a Pyrex bowl, which you can’t see here. The bowl is to keep the skillet off the warm stovetop. I want the warmth, but I don’t want so much of it the dough is adversely affected. As soon as the dough pumps back up, I’ll add sauce and cheese.

Ordinarily, for a 12″ pie, I use 2 ounces of sauce concentrate, plus water and other ingredients. I generally end up discarding a small amount of the sauce mix, because 2 ounces are a little too much. Today I plan to use a minimum of the whole two ounces. Sicilian requires more sauce, and it seems like Saporito (the sauce I’m using today) doesn’t extend quite as far as Super Dolce (my usual sauce). I’m pretty sure the Stanislaus website says it should be the other way around, but I call ’em as I see ’em. I’ll also use a full 8 ounces of Costco mozzarella.

The oven is at 550°. I plan to rest the skillet on the hot stone. I hope this crude Lodge skillet isn’t so thick it doesn’t heat up in time to brown the crust.

I hope I can get this silly thing out of the skillet. As of now, it’s loose, riding on a layer of oil.

More

Here’s what I have now. I put 9 ounces of cheese on it, and a little over 2 ounces of sauce (measured before adding water). Looks pretty good. I wanted to flop it out of the pan and put it on the stone during the last two minutes, but I won’t be able to. The pan is too deep. The cheese would slide around and cause problems.

More

Got a few more photos.

Here is the pie after I miraculously popped it out of the skillet. It didn’t stick at all, except for a tiny area where some cheese hit the iron. I stuck it on the stone for a minute after I got it out, to improve the crust.

Here are some slices, so you can get an idea of the thickness.

Here is the bottom of a slice. Oddly, no other slice got that dark. I should have photographed one of the others. This slice tasted off because of the burned area, but you can see the indentations in the crust, which are very important to a good Sicilian pizza.

Here is my assessment. Cast iron is not nearly as good as thin steel. The texture of the pie I made the other day was astonishing. This one was imperfect. It leaned toward leathery. The difference was small, but it’s the difference between good and sublime.

Another problem, as mentioned above: it browned unevenly. And the cast iron seemed to give it a flavor that is not right for pizza.

Last thing: to get the crust brown, I had to leave the pie in the oven until the cheese browned. Unacceptable. Burnt pizza cheese is an abomination bad pizzerias have taught Americans to like. Pizza cheese can have a small amount of browning, but this pie was at the limit.

I consider the cast iron experiment a failure. From now on, it’s thin steel or nothing. I can’t get pizza this good anywhere near me, but the other Sicilian I made was straight from paradise.

My online source for the correct pans is an outfit called Zesco. They’re expensive ($24.50 each), but they should last a hundred years. I’ll report when I get to try them out.

Incidentally, the cheap GFS pan I bought has no faults. If they made a smaller one, I would not have shelled out for rolled steel pans. If you can find a thin steel pan in a size you like, don’t bother with “authentic” pans. And bake the seasoning onto the pan, and never wash it.

67$ for Plain Old Skillet

Today I got blown out of the water while trying to snipe a Wagner skillet on Ebay. The Bible of cast iron collecting said the maximum value was $45, so that’s what I used as my high bid. Someone showed up and offered $67 at the last minute.

Is it me, or is Ebay disappointing these days? Cast iron prices are insane. Sometimes you get an okay deal, but skillets routinely go for prices far above the market rate.

I want to start making Sicilian pizza in a cast iron skillet. I don’t like round Sicilian, but cast iron seems like the perfect choice, and skillets are the easiest thing to come by. I want a big skillet I can dedicate to this, so it will develop a perfect surface. I have a crummy Lodge I can use, but I’ll need something better to replace it once I set it aside for pizza.

Maybe a square griddle or skillet is the way to go.

The Gordon Food Service pan I bought seems to work perfectly; it’s just too big. Any steel pan will work, if I can find the size I want.

I still haven’t used silicone bakeware. I don’t know if it will give me a crunchy outer crust, the way metal will. I assume it must be capable of doing this, because otherwise, who would buy it?

I just checked Williams-Sonoma’s site. Wow, what a mistake. Enough said about that.

Hmm…Lodge makes a square griddle that would be perfect. I don’t trust the rough surface, but maybe it would work. Now that I have a Multimaster, sanding the inside wouldn’t be too hard.

The best thing is probably to give up, order a couple of real pizza pans, and get on with life. But for today, it’s going to be my lame Lodge skillet.

I Judge You for Judging, Even When You Didn’t

I got some glib, condescending comments about Pat Robertson today. I started to respond, but then I deleted them. I make an effort to check the things I write, and people show up and post judgmental comments that are obviously not supported by a scintilla of research, and they expect me to post them and take the time to respond thoughtfully. They expect me to work much harder than they do, and I get tired of it. If you’re going to argue with me about the Bible, read it first. If you’re going to argue with something I said, make sure I said it. WordPress’s comment page has a Trash link for good reason.

If you didn’t watch the Robertson video, and you didn’t read my blog posts carefully, and you don’t read the Bible, you will not read and consider my comment responses. I am not stupid enough to waste my time researching and writing for people who have proven they won’t benefit from it.

The irony of the Robertson situation is amazing. The people who are condemning him are doing exactly what they falsely accuse him of doing. They don’t watch the video. They have no idea what he said. Still, they condemn him and post lies. Because, in their own minds, they’re better Christians than he. If judging other people’s sins is bad, how bad is it to judge other people for judging, when they never did?

Robertson did not say Haitians deserved what they got. He didn’t even say they brought it on themselves. He did not express happiness over the earthquake. He sent them (and is still sending them) millions of dollars. He prays for them. He shows compassion. He is doing more for Haiti than anyone who is criticizing him, and when he pointed out that idolatry causes problems, he was doing them a kindness, as a Bible-reading Christian should already know: “Let the righteous smite me; it shall be a kindness. And let him reprove me; it shall be an excellent oil which shall not break my head.”

I guess I should point out that I’m quoting the Bible, so the uber-holy folks who don’t actually read the Bible won’t show up in my comments to tell me how stupid the above passage is.

The only thing Pat Robertson can be accused of in good faith is a breach of tact, committed out of love. I wouldn’t even go that far. If my house fell on me and I were worshiping demons, and an evangelist came to dig me out, and while he was doing it, he said, “You’ll be better off if you give up astrology and Santeria,” I’d thank him for the advice. At least I hope I would. I search the Bible and books and sermons for correction, because I know I need it. I am very concerned about the changes I need to make. What’s wrong with a little advice? I mean GOOD advice, not platitudes offered by people who write by reflex.

The left’s bizarre, unbiblical, unchristian, humanist obsession with denying the existence of sin has leached into Christianity, and now Christians think it came from God. Look, sin is bad. It causes problems. Exposing it is a good deed.

Pat Robertson didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t drive anyone to suicide. No one will have to have counseling because of what he said. BUTCH UP already. How did we end up with such stupid priorities? Bodies are rotting under fallen buildings, and people are up in arms over a few words an old man uttered in compassion. Who knows how many Haitians will hear his words, consider them, and be blessed?

I can’t believe I have to defend this guy. I am no fan, but it’s disgusting to see other Christians lie about him like this. Whatever else may be true of him, he gave his life to God, and he has brought millions of people to Christ, and when we get to paradise, they’ll all be there. How many of his ignorant, lying critics have a record like that? You people would have a Bentley crushed because of a scratch on the fender.

Stop telling lies about this man. Give it a rest and focus on helping the Haitians.

I’m not taking comments on this post. Experience has shown that it would be pointless.

“Your Lifelong Dream Just Went on Craigslist.”

This is really funny. Mike is pulling his hair out because I told him we should open a pizzeria. I’ve been sending him Craigslist links for pizzerias that are for sale, just to torment him.

There are three pizzerias we used to frequent when we were kids. It turns out one of them–Mario the Baker–is for sale on Craigslist, so I forwarded it to him. He’s losing it.

There is no way we could buy this place. They want 1.4 million, which is like 20 times what I could consider investing. I don’t think haggling will get us where we need to be; call me a pessimist. “How does thirty thousand sound?” No, I don’t think so. But it’s fun to throw the temptation out there. I think Mike would sell his kids for parts to buy this place.

Mario’s was pretty good when I was a kid, but it’s not good now. It’s barely acceptable. The rolls are nice, but I would steer clear of the pizza. They have a second store now, near me. I tried it twice, and I haven’t been back.

Mike says he has talked to the owner. They sell a thousand dozen rolls a day. He says the old owner was a guy who collected toy trains, and he sold out to a Cuban family. That probably explains the bad pizza. I’ve only known of one really good pizzeria run by Cubans.

I was lucky enough to live near a lot of Italians when I was a kid. There were a lot of Mafia families a few blocks north of us. In North Miami and south Broward, there are a number of good pizzerias. South of that…you are taking your life in your hands. People down here think bad pizza is wonderful. They don’t know the difference. Send them to New York for a week, and they’d cry when they got back on the plane.

Simplicity

I know I’m crazy, but I can’t help myself. I started looking at pizzerias for sale on Craigslist.

My problem is, I know nothing about running a business. That’s what scares me. But I know what kills most pizzerias. Bad food, bad locations, unrealistic prices, stupid hours, and bad service.

It’s surprising how little money gets you in the door. I figured it would be like $100K, minimum, but it looks like a lot of places are ready to sell out for much less. You could equip a small place, from scratch, for maybe $30K.

I think a smart person would go to each of these places and try the food. If the food is good, the location is good, and the prices are okay, it’s a bad buy, because they’re doing things right, and they’re still not making money. If the location is good and everything else stinks, it’s an open door. They’re doing something wrong, and you can fix it.

We have a place called Cozzoli’s, in South Miami. It’s the worst. Bad sauce. Weak crust. Cheese that tastes artificial (I don’t think it’s real cheese). They should make money hand over fist, because the location is fantastic. But over and over and over, the place gets bought by people who just can’t cook. People will eat mediocre pizza, but when it gets downright bad, they’re going to stay away. I could take that place and make money, if Cozzoli’s would go away. The key would be to get rid of their disgusting food, which you probably have to buy in order to be a franchisee. The problem is not hard to spot, but it’s impossible to fix, unless you have a talent for cooking. And very few people have that.

Pizza is the hardest thing there is to cook well. I tried for years and got nowhere. There are lots of pizzerias near me, and I only know two within ten miles that I think of as worth visiting. None come close to the pizza I make. I beat them all; no contest. Not even close. Only a tiny percentage of restaurants have recipes developed by people who know (and care) what tastes good. They think desire and service and hard work are all it takes, but if the food isn’t right, no one will miss you when you close. If the food is exceptional and you don’t have any other serious liabilities, you should make money.

For someone like me, the key would be simplicity. Sharply limited menu, with extremely good food. As few seats as possible. Minimal staff. I could manage to make pizzas and sell them to people. But overseeing a wait staff? Looking after a big parking lot and dining area? I could see myself making a real mess there. In order for me to get anywhere, I would have to start out with a place that, for all intents and purposes, was a vending machine with ovens. Like a Domino’s with two or three seats. Keep it clean, cook the food, and keep the books. No live music. No bar. No kiddie area with a big bin full of slobbery plastic balls.

All I have to do is convince Mike to abandon his life and move a thousand miles. That should be easy.

“I’m Sorry, but Mike Ate Our Inventory Again.”

I know I am smoking crack, but I am checking out the SBA website to find out what would be involved in starting a storefront takeout pizza place. All I need is a town up the coast where the pizza stinks.