Reproducible Pizza Results

I made another pizza with both Sorrento and Arrezzio cheeses. I learned that the cheese conclusions I drew the first time I made one of these are still true. Hey, it may sound like I achieved nothing, but this kind of research is important. No matter how big a drag it is. Making delicious pizza. Over and over.

I also learned that everything I concluded about overnight pizza fermenting was nonsense. I fermented this baby in a couple of hours, and it was very much like the one I fermented overnight. So I still don’t see what the fuss is about.

That Publix pan is a wonder. It fries the bottom of the crust beautifully. The texture is breathtaking. If you live near a Publix supermarket, try one. I no longer recall the exact name of the thing, but it’s about 8″ square, with sides maybe 1 1/2″ high. The inner surface is some kind of nonstick, but it’s not Teflon. I believe it’s aluminum oxide. Sounds crazy, but it works, and you can’t burn it.

A cast iron skillet won’t do this, unless you go through a lot of pointless work. The Publix pan works like this: put dough in pan, let dough rise, put sauce and stuff on dough, put pan in oven. Bam, as Emeril says. You have a perfect crust, except possibly for a little stone touch-up. No pre-baking, no preheating the pan. I suggest you try it.

I put the pan as close to the lower heating element as I can, and I bake for 9 minutes. I make sure the lower element is cycling on when I put the pan in, so the element will be red-hot for part of the time the pan is over it. When the pie is done, I pop it out and give it 30-60 seconds on the stone, but you really have to watch it, because the pan gets it very done, and the stone cooks the pie fast.

The pie I just made was beyond bizarre. I used my usual no-oil recipe (oil added to the outside later), but instead of activating the yeast, I sprinkled instant dry yeast over the dough as soon as I got the water and salt and pepper mixed into it. Then I mashed the dough around and folded it until the yeast was pretty much inside the dough. Sounds nutty, but it was great. There was yeast stuck to the outside of the dough, and I thought it would be nasty, but it was perfect.

I’m starting to wonder if there is a wrong way to combine pizza dough ingredients.

I got some new stuff for the garage today. A while back, I got a 16N Jacobs chuck, because the used 14N I bought to save money was junk. The 16N was a new chuck some guy had bought but not used, and while I got the chuck, I did not get the key. Today a new key arrived. It’s so big, you could literally use it as a tiny hammer.

Now I can actually use my chuck.

I also got several new center drills. All but one are cobalt. The other is carbide. I have HSS center drills, and they’re crap. I keep hearing how great HSS is. They’re crap. I’m sorry. I can’t help it. It’s not my fault. After you use one twice, it stops working. When I finally bought a big drill bit set, I went with cobalt, because the difference is very obvious, and the cost is not much different.

Maybe the HSS bits I’ve used were lame imports, and that’s why they got dull so fast. Maybe I applied too much pressure. I don’t care. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trying to prove everyone who promotes HSS to me is right. If I’m wrong, I’m out maybe a hundred bucks I didn’t need to spend, and meanwhile, I have tools I can actually use. If my bad technique is the problem, isn’t the smart thing to buy tools I can’t hurt with bad technique? Obviously, I should try to do things well, but every little bit of insurance helps, and it’s extremely annoying to have to quit a job because a 30¢ drill bit is fried.

I tried to use my drill press to take the lower handguard retention pin out of my Vz 58, before I was persuaded to beat it hard enough to drive it out with a punch, and I learned something. Drill presses are not rigid. I knew that already, but I didn’t know how true it was.

I have a big industrial Rockwell press with a cast iron head, and the drill bit still wandered all over the pin. Even when I tried a thick center drill, it wandered. Some of this may be due to a need to tighten up the head, I suppose, but I can tell this thing will never drill like a mill. So if you’re looking for serious drilling technology, my recommendation is to get a drill press and a small mill. I may be wrong, but that seems like the way to go. You can get a little used mill for a few hundred bucks, and on those occasions when you need a mill or a rigid drill, you will get down on your knees and thank God you bought it. When you need a mill, you NEED a mill.

Truthfully, I’m a little worried that the drill press will turn out to be useless, but I guess that’s just neurosis. I’m sure it’s fine when you’re not trying to drill rock-hard Eastern Bloc steel that came from melted-down Trabant pistons.

I ended up putting my drill press vise in my milling machine vise! That was my strategy for drilling the pin out. But when I mounted the giant chuck on the mill, I realized I had no key. I tried to tighten it as best I could, but I couldn’t get it tight enough to do the job. The bit kept receding into the chuck. That’s a good thing, because otherwise, I would have wasted three hours trying to drill an inch-long pin out.

Those pins are insanely tight. You have to beat them so hard, it’s scary. I marred mine up, but instead of buying a new one for three bucks, I think I’ll make one on the lathe, slightly thinner than the original, with some means of yanking on it. Maybe a loop in one end. I realize pins in guns should be tight enough to resist falling out when the guns fire, but this thing was way past that degree of tightness, and anyway, my gun is semi-auto, so it’s not like it’s getting pounded ten times a second.

Now that I think about it, a brass or aluminum pin might not be a bad idea. Easy to make, easy to hammer out, and it won’t hurt anything around it. Brass would be pretty, too. And I have lots of 360 brass. I don’t know if brass galls when it contacts steel. Something to consider. I also have 304 stainless. That would work, and I wouldn’t have to blue it.