“Breakfast” means “America”

This post will repeat things I wrote in an earlier post, but that’s okay, because I want it to stand on its own.

I just had my first decent breakfast in weeks. I had my last good breakfast in Ireland, during my recent trip. Every breakfast since then was lame. Until today. I just visited McDonald’s.

I don’t know why people don’t man up and admit McDonald’s makes some of the best breakfast food on the planet. It must be snob anxiety. They’re afraid of what other people will think. I remember seeing Candice Bergen brag that she had never had a McDonald’s hamburger. She sounded like a fool to me. Sure, she said the right thing to avoid raising the anemic eyebrows of her elitist vegan peers, but she sounded like a snob who was more interested in currying favor than in enjoying good food. For all she knew, McDonald’s burgers were wonderful, but she was afraid to try them because the unwashed intracoastal masses ate them.

I know Mcdonald’s burgers are NOT wonderful, but then I’ve eaten them. I gave them a shot. I didn’t sneer at them in proud ignorance.

Today I had a sausage and egg McMuffin, a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, and hash browns. I mixed Hunt’s All-Natural ketchup with a little Frank’s Red Hot, and I dipped liberally. I’m still basking in the afterglow.

You may wonder what I had in Ireland that constituted my last good breakfast. Simple. I went to the McDonald’s on Dublin’s O’Connell Street.

I think the first breakfast Rhodah and I shared in Dublin came from Keogh’s, a cafe in the Temple Bar area. They sold us two scones; cranberry and raisin. We paid over three Euros each. The scones were cold and dry. The butter was cold and hard. Rhodah’s scone had no raisins in it. We sent it back. The waiter returned our serve, unaltered. They had a big pile of scones with raisins in them, but they insisted a raisinless raisin scone was normal.

Not long after that, we went to Bread 41, a hipster bakery that sells the kind of food people describe as “artisanal,” which means it looks good. Bread 41 had a lot of great Internet reviews, and people on a forum recommended it.

Here is the problem with food: most people have the palates of goats. If you put three people at a table, you serve them horse manure on cold bagels, and you pay two of them to say the bagels are great, the third will almost certainly agree. The third person is not likely to know the difference between horse manure and good food, and even if he does, he’ll probably want to fit in with the other two. For these reasons, it’s not really possible to get good advice from people you don’t know. When it comes to the Internet, the problem is compounded by fake reviews. All over the world, people are making good money recommending things they haven’t tried.

We were told Bread 41 was so good, we needed a reservation. We were told people lined up around the block. We walked in anyway, during peak breakfast hours, and there were about three people in front of us. That should have told me something.

I ordered pain au chocolat (“chocolate croissant”), a croissant, and hot chocolate. Rhodah ordered something called a morning bun, along with a roll that had been sliced in half and filled with some kind of cream. She also ordered coffee.

The food looked marvelous. The croissants (I will call both of them that) had all sorts of flaky layers in them. The items Rhodah ordered were very appetizing. Then we tried to eat our purchases.

The croissant tasted like burnt egg wash and not much more. A true croissant is made with milk, sugar, and salt. It should be very flavorful. It should not be dry. It should not be harsh. My croissant had very little flavor, except for tasting burned.

I have managed to enjoy a lot of bad croissants. Burger King croissants are not impressive, but they taste like bread and butter, so they’re pleasant to eat. Publix croissants have a nice buttery taste. Walmart croissants are no worse than a good slice of bagged white bread. In Egypt, at a hotel buffet, I had croissants which pretty clearly arrived at the kitchen in a bag, but they weren’t offensive. Bread 41’s croissants, I could not finish. I mean, I could have, but I didn’t want to. They were that bad.

The chocolate one was just like the other one, but it had chocolate filling installed WAYYYY down in one end. This made it look very stylish, but it was a stupid move, because you would have to eat most of the croissant before tasting chocolate.

Rhodah’s morning bun was fine. It was sort of a glorified pecan twirl kind of a thing. Spiced dough rammed into a mold and baked. Imagine a really good cinnamon roll, and then imagine it dryer and with less flavor. She shared it with me, and it was the only thing we finished.

The cream roll was horrendous. Rhodah complained about the flavor. I tried it, and it had a bitter taste. There was a spice in it that belonged in something like sausage or Indian food. Ruined the whole thing.

Her coffee was lukewarm and not very tasty. My hot chocolate was fraudulent in that it was not hot at all. It was tepid, and it tasted as though it had been made with spoiled milk and water. It wasn’t very sweet, either.

I think the Irish dislike hot beverages. This wasn’t the only time we were served lukewarm coffee or cocoa.

I was afraid the chocolate was spoiled, so I barely touched it. I didn’t want to spend my vacation throwing up.

This is how post-Food Network foodie hipster food is. It’s supposed to look perfect, and you’re supposed to rave about it even if it tastes bad, which it often does.

I wrote an honest Internet review, and someone from Bread 41 had a conniption and responded with a total lack of professionalism. This says a lot about the restaurant. A professional never berates a diner. They say they’re sorry the diner didn’t like the experience. They say they will try to do better. Or they ignore the complaint altogether, sure that it’s a fluke. When you go after a dissatisfied patron, you show that you can’t improve because constructive criticism infuriates you.

I’ll go through the employee’s claims.

He said the bitter roll was a Swedish semla. I’m sure you’re all very familiar with these, since all Americans eat them several times a week. He said it contained cardamom, as specified in the traditional recipe. He seemed irate that I did not expect this.

Couple of things. Like 98% of the world’s population, I had never heard of semlas. If you’re going to sell people bitter cream rolls for breakfast, you should offer some kind of warning before handing them over, unless your business is in Sweden. On top of that, I tend to doubt the amount of cardamom was correct, because the roll was disgusting. It tasted medicated. Based on the chef’s inability to recognize a good croissant, which people in nearly every country on Earth can do, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he has no idea how much cardamom to put in a semla.

You don’t have to tell people what croissants are like before you sell them, because everyone knows what a croissant is. If you’re going to sell, say, an obscure Congolese pastry made with a tablespoon of mace, you should let customers know what they’re in for.

My wild guess is that he overdid the cardamom. The web says a proper semla is “lightly flavored” with it.

He also made it clear he thought I had no idea what croissants should be like, because I was American. He said American croissants were full of various unpleasant things, such as emulsifiers.

That was really dumb. America has the best food on Earth, because America is rich and able to pay for it. We have drawn all sorts of skilled immigrants over the centuries, and many of them are from France, the home of croissants. I know Ireland is the world’s French pastry mecca, so forgive me, but I think our French cooks, and the people who have learned from them, have figured out how to make croissants here.

When I say we have the best food on Earth, which is true, I don’t mean the majority of our restaurants sell great food. I mean our best restaurants, bakeries, butchers, and grocers are as good as anyone’s. Now that the microbrew revolution has blossomed, we also make the world’s best beer; no contest, even from the Belgians.

Obviously, our croissants are not all full of chemicals. I’m sure some are, but clearly, this country is full of bakers who would never use such things. And the unpopular truth is that sometimes, chemicals make good food a lot better. Try adding sodium citrate to mac and cheese.

He said I should continue eating at places like Burger King and Walmart, since their food was more on a par with my tastes. He was actually right, because a lot of the food from these places, unlike his food, isn’t so off-putting I don’t want to finish it. A good Whopper is better than a burnt croissant.

Go to Youtube and search for croissants made in Paris. You’ll see they’re not burnt. They’re not even dark.

I can’t believe an Irish person would dare make fun of another country’s food. Irish food has such a bad reputation, the government mounted a nationwide campaign to fix it, and it hasn’t been a great success. They don’t even do uniformly good work with fish and chips, which is a signature dish of the British Isles. Imagine going to Tennessee and finding that most barbecue restaurants were no good. Same idea. It could never happen. It’s nice that the Irish have made an effort, but I ate there for about 12 days, and I was usually disappointed, even in the Guinness, which they served incorrectly.

We never had a bad Thai or Italian meal in Ireland, but the Irish themselves nearly always let us down.

Two hungry people showed up at Bread 41, hoping to fuel themselves for a long day of walking, they were hungry enough to eat substandard food if necessary, and they left most of their items unfinished. The customers were not the problem. Case closed.

I really wanted to get some calories into me because I knew we would use them up, but it wasn’t worth it to me to finish my food, nor was it worth it to Rhodah. When we left, we joked about needing to find a place to have breakfast.

After this, we had breakfast at two B&B’s. One was in Dingle, and the other was in Inis Mor. In both places, I made the error of ordering the full Irish breakfast.

They gave me one egg, which is ridiculous, dry Irish bacon, fried mushrooms, white pudding (funky-tasting sausage), link sausage, and canned beans which were about like pork and beans. I also had toast. I passed on the black pudding, which is a giant scab of seasoned congealed blood.

I don’t know why people rave about English and Irish breakfasts, because they’re not very good. They’re kind of okay. That’s about it. Who pours beans out of can and microwaves them for breakfast? Who eats one egg? The link sausage was like finely ground mystery meat; it tasted cheap.

My advice is this: don’t try to like the full English or Irish breakfast. You may think you’re supposed to like it, because people who don’t know good food claim it’s good, but it’s not good at all.

I also had eggs Benedict; an AMERICAN dish. I couldn’t tell exactly what the object that was supposed to be an English muffin was, but it was dry, small, and hard. The egg was also small, which is weird, because Americans supposedly use smaller eggs than the British, who are right next door to the Irish. All the Irish eggs I saw were tiny.

In America, eggs Benedict is wonderful. You get two big eggs with lots of Hollandaise sauce. You get a big English muffin with butter. You get Canadian bacon, which is much better than Irish bacon, a drier, less tasty version of the same thing.

Eggs Benedict came out of Delmonico’s restaurant in New York, where it was named after a customer named Benedict. If it had tasted like Irish eggs Benedict, no one would know what it is today, because no one would have considered saving the recipe or naming it.

Here’s something else that’s bad about Irish breakfasts: they don’t provide cream for coffee. They use milk, which is completely useless. The fat in cream kills bitterness and improves the texture of coffee. How can people in other nations have failed to catch on?

I could have had French toast, but I opted not to. Why? Because I knew there was no way they would have real syrup. Maple syrup is a NORTH AMERICAN condiment. It would amaze me to learn it was sold anywhere in Europe. Ordinary pancake syrup is a chemical counterfeit better known as diluted corn syrup. I don’t understand why any serious establishment would serve pancakes, waffles, or French toast without offering real syrup.

In Dublin, we found a McDonald’s, and Rhodah loved it. The McMuffins were very good. The hash browns were a bit undercooked, but they were still better than Irish food.

The food I had this morning was great, and McDonald’s deserves some credit. They make beautiful biscuits; if you don’t believe me, order them a la carte, take them home, and put your own gravy on them. Their muffins can’t be criticized. They’re standard English muffins, smeared with real butter. Their sausage is just as good, or better than, anything you can get at your local grocery store. They fry their circular eggs in-house. Granted, the folded eggs are warmed up at their restaurants, but eggs take reheating very well. Waffle House cooks eggs to order, but McDonald’s makes a much better breakfast.

If you don’t respect the hash browns, try making them yourself. I have. You will fail. It’s very difficult to make a McDonald’s-style hash brown that isn’t soggy or brown inside. They do a beautiful job.

The coffee at McDonald’s is also excellent, WHEN they keep it fresh. They tend to let the decaf sit, and then it starts to smell like cat pee. I really mean cat pee. Not trying to be funny.

I am extremely blunt and honest when I write Internet reviews. Business owners seem to think the purpose of reviews is to flatter them and lure people to their establishments. It’s not. It’s to give people solid information so they can patronize good businesses and avoid bad ones. If a proprietor does a bad job, I’ll say so, and I don’t care at all how he feels or whether it costs him money. I’m not on his side. I’m on the side of other consumer. If he doesn’t like complaints, he should change his ways.

If the Bread 41 guy is upset, tough. Reviews are matters of business. We’re not buddies. If he thinks people who do business with him are supposed to go on the web and lick his ear, he needs to grow up.

The best breakfasts I’ve had in Europe were continental, i.e. a couple of baked items and coffee or chocolate. On the continent, you get excellent pastries and rolls, and the coffee and chocolate are just as good. When it comes to real breakfast, meaning a meal, I don’t know of any country that can touch America. If you have a Cracker Barrel and a McDonald’s near you, you are in pretty thin air, and there are many American restaurants that put these businesses to shame. Try a real Jewish deli that serves good bagels and smoked fish. Try a fancy hotel with a big brunch spread. I make country ham, scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy, and fried apples that would bring most people to their knees. Americans do breakfast right. No getting around it.

Thin Pizza is for Apostates

Lunch was okay today, and by “okay,” I mean the closest thing to heaven I expect to experience in this life.

I have been making thin pizza after thin pizza, wondering why the pies didn’t make my eyes roll back in my head the way my Sicilians do. I finally realized this: thin pizza is inherently not as good as Sicilian. It’s not possible to make a thin pizza that compares to my Sicilian, so I have been wasting my time chasing a culinary unicorn. I’m wondering if I should ever make thin pizza again.

Today I decided to make a full-size Sicilian, meaning a quarter sheet. The measurements are about 9″ by 13″. It may not sound like a big pan, but a Sicilian made in it will feed three reasonable people or me and one of my friends.

I haven’t messed with my Sicilian recipe much, because it was incredible the first time I made it back in 2009. I have made little changes, but it’s nearly the same pie it was then. Today I decided to get brave and innovate.

I have been experimenting with twice-melted cheese. When you reheat pizza, the texture of the cheese is usually better than it was the first time around. With that in mind, I wondered why I shouldn’t melt my cheese, cool it, put it on the pizza, and bake it a second time.

I used twice-melted cheese today. I made a mixture of Boar’s Head mozzarella, Publix sliced provolone, and Cracker Barrel extra-sharp white cheddar. I used a quarter sheet as a mold and shaped a piece of nonstick foil around the bottom of it. This gave me a foil tray slightly larger than the bottom of a quarter sheet. I mixed my cheeses, put them in it, and heated them until they bubbled. With great care, I was able to get the foil out of the oven and chill the cheese without any accidents. At room temperature, it formed a sort of cheese placemat.

I used slightly more dough than I usually do, and I chose to parbake it. Ordinarily, I don’t do this. I put my stretched dough in a very oily pan and baked it at 500° for 9 minutes. I was surprised how long it took to start to look cooked.

I had 6 precious cans of Stanislaus Saporito sauce. I had been reluctant to use them, because the nearest source is 90 minutes away. I had been working with Cento tomatoes and Glen Muir paste to come up with an acceptable, readily available substitute, but today, I had to have Stanislaus.

I thought about the economics. I hesitated to use Stanislaus because the cans contain around a gallon, and the cost about $7 each. When I use Cento and Muir Glen, I spend over $5, and the amount of sauce I get is a small fraction of what a can of Stanislaus produces. I realized I was tormenting myself over nothing. Stanislaus is actually cheaper, even if you throw a lot out.

I broke the can into four nearly equal parts, took a little out for today’s pie, and froze the rest in bags. I should have good-quality sauce for a month or two, and even if it deteriorates, it will still be a lot better than Cento and Muir Glen.

I put 8 ounces of sauce on the parbaked crust, which is a third more than usual. I applied my sheet of cheese. I had a little bulk Italian sausage, so I put that on the pie, too.

When I baked the pie, it took forever to cook. I had added dough, I had interrupted the baking by parbaking, and I believe the twice-melted cheese took longer to brown than cold cheese. When I put it on the pie, it was already covered in fat, and fat slows browning.

I was hoping the cheese would crawl over the edges of the crust and burn against the pan, and that did happen, but not to the degree I had hoped.

After I pulled the pie out and cooled it a little, it popped right out of the pan. The crust was nicely browned. The cheese was limp, cooperative, and gooey. The sauce was a home run, plain and simple. I felt stupid for using store ingredients.

The crust could have been crunchier and lighter. The top could have been a little more brown. There could have been more browned cheese around the rim. The pizza was hard to handle, so it got a little beaten up. In spite of all that, this pizza was exquisite.

I don’t know if I’ll keep fooling with cheese sheets. I don’t think they improve things. Not sure yet. I will try to let the next crust blow up more so it will be airier; I was in a hurry today. I will increase the heat to get better crunch. Of course, I will use more sausage. Other than that, there is not much to say. I can’t get a pizza like this anywhere except in my kitchen. When I die, America’s best street-style Sicilian (to my knowledge) will die with me.

I’ve been watching pizzaiolos on Youtube, and some of them make Sicilian. Some call it “grandma pizza,” which makes it sound gross and inferior. I don’t think much of the way they make it. They make very thin crusts. What’s the point? If you like thin crusts, make a thin round pizza right on the stone. The joy of pan pizza is in the crust. It should be thick enough to give you the sense that you’re eating homemade bread.

I think my pizza is better than theirs. I’ve had Sicilian in Miami and New York, made by actual Italians. I’ve had excellent Sicilian in Hollywood, Florida, at a place called Vannucchi Brothers. I know what good Sicilian is. When I watch someone make a Sicilian on Youtube, I have a pretty good idea what the taste and texture will be like. I think they do it wrong.

Urban mythology says all pizza made in New York is perfect. That’s completely untrue. There are bad pizzerias in New York, and even the good pizzerias generally aren’t making astounding pies. New York pizzaiolos are stuck with ancient traditions that may or may not work, and which may be rooted more in economy or laziness than a desire to make excellent food. It shouldn’t shock anyone when I say I can make better pizza.

In Pennsylvania, there is an elderly lady named Norma Knepp. She took over a pizza concession at a farmer’s market a few years back. She had never made pizza before. She got some advice and worked up a recipe, and she ended up winning a big competition in New York City. If New York Italians knew everything, that would never have happened. They are beatable.

Along with the pizza, I had a Coke. I chilled the can in the freezer along with a very heavy glass. When I poured the Coke into the glass, ice crystals floated to the top. That’s how you serve a Coke. I want a special cooling device made with a Peltier cooler to keep my glass of Coke at freezing temperatures while I eat.

I still have enough pizza for a day or two of fine eating. I may fry the slices in a pan before or after heating them in the toaster oven, to make the crust crunchier.

I have pizza figured out. You don’t make thin pizza unless you have a special craving or a finicky guest. You make Sicilian, like a man. You use real tomatoes from a serious company. Thin pizza and store tomatoes are foods of a lower order.

I don’t think my thin pizza can get much better, because no matter what I do, it will always be thin pizza. The pizza of the undiscerning.

No Oil Crisis Here

When it comes to pizza dough, it looks like a small amount of oil goes a long way.

Day before yesterday, I made a 12″ pie with 225 grams of flour and no oil except for some applied to the outside. I found the crust leathery, which is what I wanted, but not quite as crunchy as I desired.

Having obtained the leathery crust I was shooting for, I started to feel I didn’t want it after all. I decided to try to make it slightly less tough, with more crunch.

The pizza before last was made with a teaspoon of cheap olive oil, and I thought it wasn’t tough enough. Pizza with no oil was too tough. I decided to try half a teaspoon.

I fermented the dough overnight in a fridge, and today I baked at 550° on a quarter-inch steel. I baked it slightly longer than usual. You can see the result below.

I think this is what I’ll stick with for a while. It was a perfect pizzeria-quality pie, except of course better. All of the ingredients are sold at my local Publix, so I don’t have to worry about local availability.

I used about 4 ounces of Boar’s Head sliced mozzarella and 2 ounces of Cracker Barrel extra sharp white cheddar. I cut the cheese in small pieces, tossed it to mix it up, and applied it.

The cheese was good. I found I wasn’t thinking about it while I ate the pizza, and that means I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I believe the cheddar loosened the mozzarella up and added some zing.

I also used big chunks of Publix bulk Italian sausage, which is now my default pizza sausage. Much less aggravation that sausage in a casing, and it cooks beautifully.

Next time, I’ll cook the pie for 8 minutes instead of 9. This one was wonderful, but it didn’t need to be quite so well done.

Now that I have a grip on dough management, I can make dough up to three days in advance. That will give me flexibility. I may make a ball now for day after tomorrow.

I’m thinking about making mozzarella. I read about making it at home, and it seems like a good way to get it the way I want it and save half of the cost. I learned that you need unhomogenized milk to make it, and that’s expensive, but you can make your own unhomogenized milk by adding heavy cream to skim milk. If I can make low-moisture mozzarella at home, I should be able to get a better product without shelling out 10 dollars per pound.

I have read that you can make mozzarella from queso blanco. Evidently, queso blanco is what you get if you start making mozzarella and stop before you’re done. If this is true, I could make nice cheese without all the work of starting with milk.

Once I can make cheese, I think I’ll be stuck. There won’t be anything left to figure out. Maybe at some point I’ll develop an interest in high-temperature pizza. That would supply fodder for new projects.

After writing all this, I had a revelation. I figured out why my thin pizza hasn’t been as good as my Sicilian.

Back in 2009, a recipe for astounding Sicilian pizza simply fell into my head, and since then, I have been making the best Sicilian I know of. I have never had a restaurant pie as good. I have improved my recipe a little, but even the first version was beyond compare.

Once I had Sicilian under control, it was natural to try to conquer thin pizza. I already knew how to make a pretty good thin pie, but it didn’t bring me the same level of ecstasy as my Sicilian. Over the years, I have made a lot of progress, and for a long time, I’ve been making thin pies better than restaurants do. I was still never quite sure I had the perfect recipe.

A few minutes ago, I had a revelation. I now know why I do better with Sicilian than thin pizza.

Sicilian pizza and other forms of pan pizza are objectively superior to all types of thin pizza.

Why didn’t I see this sooner?

Sicilian combines a crunchy, fried, buttery crust with a thick layer of delicious fresh bread. If you want, you can spread cheese all the way to the sides and get magnificent baked cheese all the way around your crust. There is no way to make a thin pie give you all that potential for joy. A thin pie has a small rim, a fat rim, or no rim, and it can be puffy and soft or crunchy. It’s not fried. You can’t make it buttery. The crust under the sauce and cheese isn’t crunchy and aromatic like Sicilian crust. It’s like burned leather. It has almost no bread flavor, because it’s so thin.

Sicilian pizza is Godzilla. Thin pizza is Japan. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter how well you make your thin pizza. It’s still not going to be as good as Sicilian. Even Pizza Hut pan pizza, which is made with fake cheese and spray-on butter, is better than a really good thin pie.

I have been striving for a goal I had already reached.

I think now I have pizza peace. I’m sure I’ll keep messing with thin pizza variations, but I’ll give up the idea that it will ever make me as happy as Sicilian.

I had the feeling I should get a propane oven that reached high temperatures, but that’s stupid. The best New York pizzerias cook at around the same temperature I do. A hotter oven would not make things any better.

I already make the best garlic rolls possible, so I have nothing to strive for in that area. When it comes to pizza and rolls, I believe I can be content with small changes from now on.

Let’s just hope I don’t go Neapolitan. I don’t want to open that can of elmintiasi.

Papa Who?

Today I gave my shopmade pizza steel a try.

Yesterday I made a pie on a makeshift steel, and it was a big improvement over a stone. I thought the pie was imperfect, though, because it was done more on the bottom than the top, and I didn’t think the rim was crunchy enough.

I decided to make another pie. I didn’t use any oil, except for an extremely thin film on the pan where I left the dough to rise. I reduced my sugar from 2.5 teaspoons to 1.5 teaspoons. This is for 225 grams of King Arthur Bread Flour.

I was afraid the dough would rip when I tossed it. Oil prevents that, probably by preventing the dough’s surface from drying during tossing. In the old days, I had some problems. When I took the dough out today, it worked fine. I believe the night in the fridge helped the dough become stretchier, so even though it probably dried out a little while I was working it, there were no holes

I baked today at 550° using convection. I moved the steel higher in the oven than yesterday.

After 9 minutes, I had a very nice pie. Pictures follow.

The crust was leathery, which is something I was shooting for, but the rim didn’t crunch quite as well as I wanted. The underside of the pie was beautiful. It had plenty of charring, but not enough to make the pie taste burnt.

For cheese, I used 1/1/1/ provolone/mozzarella/cheddar. It was very nice. I may reduce the cheddar next time.

When I was at the store yesterday, I bought cheese and bulk Italian sausage. Today when I got ready to make the pie, these things were nowhere in sight. I decided to check the car. When I opened the door, I smelled the odor of dead pig. The sausage had expired during the night. I had left all three items out there.

Before I assembled the new pie, I bought new stuff. I used the room temperature cheese from yesterday, though. I didn’t think sitting in the car would hurt it.

I put a number of globs of sausage on one half of the pizza. I was afraid I was using too much, but it turned out I should have used a lot more. I used raw sausage. I used to think pizza sausage had to be cooked in advance, but that’s wrong.

The steel is a big blessing. It produces better pies than a stone, and I have the satisfaction of knowing I made it myself.

Some people recommend half-inch-thick steels, but that seems to be overkill. Mine is 1/4″ thick, and it cooks the bottom of a pizza like nobody’s business. I think a thick steel would burn it.

Now I need a pizza stand to raise my pies off the dinner table. Not that I sit at the table. Come on. I’m a man, after all. I’ll start doing that when my wife moves in and not before.

My next pie will contain a tiny amount of oil. I wanted a leathery crust just like the ones I used to eat at Pizza Town in Manhattan, and now that I’ve made one, I think I went a little too far. Maybe a very small amount of oil will make the crust slightly less chewy without making it mushy like Papa John’s.

New Pizza Steel Almost Ready

This is a big day. I just made myself a pizza steel.

I realize it’s not likely anyone wants to read about it, but then I don’t blog for hits.

For years, I’ve used a stone I bought at Bed Bath & Beyond. I’m pretty sure that’s where I got it, anyway. It has been so long, I forgot.

It was much better than a pan, and it did a fantastic job of making the bottom of a Sicilian pizza crunchy, but I always felt my thin New York pies were A- pies, not A+ pies. Sicilian is easier to make than thin pizza. If you can stuff dough into an oily pan, and you can find good ingredients you should be able to make a good Sicilian. New York pies have to bake faster, and you have to have a good balance of heat on the bottom and top.

I was also using way too much yeast, and that hurt the flavor.

People on a pizza forum told me steels were all the rage. I was surprised, because I had tried a round Lodge cast iron pan, and I had given it away because the results were so bad.

When I looked at steels on the web, I saw they were selling for $120, which seemed ridiculous, given the price of steel plate. Eventually, I saw them selling for as little as $59, but that’s still a lot, and they weren’t the steels people recommended. Also, the steels I saw were small. Fourteen by fourteen or so.

Yesterday, I swung by the metal place, and I got me a 16″ square of 1/4″ hot-rolled. I got lucky and received a piece with nearly no rust. It hasn’t rained much here lately. Cost: $27.46.

Today I used a big Metabo angle grinder and a Walter cutting wheel to knock the corners off the steel. After that, I deburred it and knocked the rust off with a smaller grinder and a Walter flap wheel. Then I used the 2×72 grinder to round the corners. I deburred the corners with the smaller grinder, and I was ready to go.

I took it in the house, washed it in the kitchen sink, applied coconut oil, and stuck it in the oven, which is now running at 500°. My favorite seasoning fat is bacon grease, but I thought it would be fun to try coconut oil, since it’s essentially tree lard. Vegetable oil and peanut oil give off blue smoke and stink. Burning bacon grease just smells like food.

It looks beautiful. I can’t wait to try it.

Yesterday’s pie was great, but it was more done on the bottom than the top, and it was softer than I wanted. The crust was also sweeter than I liked. On advice from forum people, I am doing my next pie differently. I’m baking it higher in the oven, and I’m cutting the sugar by 40%. Moving the pie higher should help the top cook faster, and cutting the sugar should make it crunchier and let me cook it longer. Sugar speeds up crust browning.

I’m also making the pie with zero oil, except for an extremely thin film I put on the pan I’m using for proofing the dough. I like the flavor and consistency of oil-free dough. I have been using one teaspoon of olive oil in 180 grams of flour, which is not much. I use it because oil prevents the dough from drying out fast while you toss it, and this makes tearing less likely. My forum advisors claim I can do without the oil if the dough is fermented properly, so I’m doing a day-long fermentation in hopes of getting a tear-resistant dough. I can toss a dough that’s prone to tearing, but it’s always possible I’ll get one or more small holes that require repairs.

I’m going to try something like 4/2/2 provolone/mozzarella/white cheddar. I want cheese that’s a little more sour and less rubbery than 50/50 provolone and mozzarella.

I’m definitely picking nits. My pizzas are very good as they are.

I grabbed some bulk Italian sausage at Publix today. Tomorrow, I hope to soar.

Steel Life

Today I finally tried my new oven, along with a pizza steel. I had been using baking stones for years, but people on a pizza forum said steel was much better for New York pizza, so I decided to try it.

Naturally, I barely had to move in order to get a steel going. I had a big sheet of 1/4″ plate on hand already. It had a small amount of rust, so I put it in the kitchen sink and used a Fein Multimaster to knock it off. Then I coated it with lard and baked it to season it.

I still get to do things like that until the wife moves in.

My old oven only went to 500°, which is at the low end for New York pizza. It also had a failing display, and I couldn’t use the self-cleaning cycle because it would blow its thermal breaker. The new oven does 550°, it’s bigger inside, and it will clean itself with either steam or high heat. The steel I used today is a plate I intended for use as an outdoor griddle, and it’s almost 18″ square. It would never fit in the old oven, but it just barely fit the new one, so I used it.

I picked up a slightly smaller piece of steel this afternoon, so I’ll still be able to make the griddle.

Why do people use pizza steels instead of stones? Simple. They transmit heat faster. Would you rather touch a 550° stone accidentally, or would you prefer to touch a steel? Exactly. The steel would burn you faster, making it harder to pull your hand back in time. The same principle applies to pizza. The steel will brown the crust faster at the same temperature.

I stuck my dough in the fridge last night. I don’t have any faith in long fermentations at low temperatures, because my refrigerators are too cold to allow yeast to do much. I do have faith in a long rest’s ability to improve dough’s texture. Today I took the dough out of the fridge a few hours before I intended to bake, and it blew up well.

I had been concerned about unsatisfactory oven spring, and I also wanted to make a pie with no oil inside the dough. Pizza dough is just plain better without oil in it. End of story. I didn’t put any oil inside today’s ball, but I did oil the outside before refrigerating it.

A completely oil-free dough will work great, but it will tend to tear during tossing. This is why I oiled the outside. I hoped it would prevent tearing.

When I got the dough out of the bowl, it had some nice big bubbles starting. I consider pizza a failure without big bubbles in the crust. When I worked at Domino’s, they made us break the bubbles. That’s Domino’s for you.

The dough tossed very easily. I had to be careful not to open it too much. I was making a 12″ pie with 400 grams of dough. It could easily have opened up to 16″ if I hadn’t been careful.

I left a fairly large rim, thinking I would need a lot of dough for a big rim.

The pie blew up beautifully. The rim was so big, I may reduce it next time. It’s almost like a doughnut with a pizza inside it.

The crust was nicely browned on the bottom. The upper part was browned, but it could have used a little more heat to crisp it up.

Here are some shots to show the details.

I measure my ingredients very carefully, so I am sure this pie was made with the same things as the previous one. Strangely, this one tasted sweeter. It also cooked much faster. I find myself wondering if these things are somehow related.

I have been advised that sugar makes dough softer, so maybe I need to cut back. I guess I can do that the day after tomorrow and see what happens.

Pizza steels are obviously great. That, I am sure of. The Sicilians I finished on stones were wonderful, but they could just as easily be finished on steels, and the thin pizzas didn’t cook as well as the one I made today.

The store-bought steel that was recommended to me costs $120, which is ridiculous. At that price, they are begging potential customers to make their own. I paid under $28 today for a 16″ square. I’m going to grind the corners off, which anyone can do, and then I’ll season it and be done with it.

I already made nice New York pies in an ordinary oven, but it looks like the steel makes them better, and it will also reheat faster than a stone, so you can make several pies at one gathering without a lot of down time.

In short:

Steel: recommended.

Buying a steel someone else made: not recommended.

Now what do I do with my stone?

Famous Chefs Focus on the Wrong Kind of Dough

Today, I am making pizza. I can’t seem to stop doing it. I made myself an excellent thin pie which was just about perfect, so I had a recipe I should have clung to. Naturally, I decided I had to go on and make a less-thin pie with a different crust recipe. While I have been fooling with it, I have gone looking for helpful advice.

It’s surprising how hard it is to get solid information about food. You would think it would be simple to find great advice in this, the Internet’s fourth useful decade. Not so. People who have no idea what they’re doing post recipes and include the word “best” in the descriptions, and many of them seem to have credentials, so it’s easy to get sucked in.

It’s a little like America’s Got Talent. A small percentage of Americans can actually sing, but there are many, many more who clearly can’t yet insist on auditioning. People who ought to know perfectly well they can’t sing show up in droves, and the judges have to waste their time listening to them.

How you can get to be an adult and not realize you can’t sing is beyond me. Surely many of the bad performers that have made the judges suffer had already been informed.

People post bad recipes, and they also give bad general advice about cooking, and many of the worst offenders have big followings.

Long ago, I quit watching the Food Network. I had tried recipes and gotten poor results, and it was not my fault. I found out that famous TV chefs had published a lot of useless, time-wasting material. I had a realization: it wasn’t just that they couldn’t cook. They had jobs that required them to produce an endless stream of good recipes, and there was just no way for mere mortals to fill the demand, so they published a lot of things that weren’t tested properly. They hired ghost cooks to send them things, and many of those cooks weren’t very good.

The goal of a famous chef isn’t to produce good food or teach other people to cook well. It’s to maintain a huge income stream. You can’t do that without providing way more content than a real human being can create responsibly.

I have learned I can’t trust famous chefs, and I have also learned that a cooking school degree is meaningless. America is full of trained chefs who serve terrible food. Cooking well requires a little ability and a lot of humility. You have to know good food when you taste it, and cooking school can’t teach that to everyone. You also have to keep testing yourself. You have to taste the food you make. You have to ask for advice. You can’t just say, “I went to Cordon Bleu, so I know this dish is going to come out right.” I knew two Cordon Blue chefs who couldn’t cook as well as I could, and among the total population, I’m probably a 90th-percentile cook. After several years of college, a chef should be a 99th-percentile cook.

A professional chef once made me a dessert as a gift, and I had to throw it out. It smelled like a wet dog, and this person apparently couldn’t tell, in spite of making a good living in kitchens. I didn’t tell this person how bad the dessert was. I was afraid it would be devastating.

Here’s what I always say: think about all the bad food you’ve had at expensive restaurants, and then consider the fact that most of it was made by trained chefs.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about a person named Kenji. Based on what I read, I thought he might be a useful resource. He is famous for his methodical, fact-based approach to food, and people cite him as though they were citing God himself. They don’t even use his last name. He publishes recipes at a site called Serious Eats.

He grew up eating pizza from a place I liked: Pizza Town, near Columbia University. He also ate at V&T’s, an Italian joint near Columbia. I probably had hundreds of slices of Pizza Town pizza during my New York years, and I grew to like it. Pizza is that way. You will start to like whatever you eat regularly.

In reality, Pizza Town was not that great. Their thin pizza crust was pretty hard, and I believe they used Stanislaus sauce (paste plus basil) straight from the can, with a little water added to reconstitute it. I developed a taste for it anyway, and I had it in mind when I started making pizza, but there are better places. V&T’s was actually very good, although Kenji says it made “good-bad” pizza, whatever that means. V&T’s pizza’s big flaw was that it was very wet, so it had to be eaten with a fork.

V&T’s was significantly better than Pizza Town, so it’s odd that Kenji preferred Pizza Town.

Today I decided I would check Kenji out, and that’s how I learned the facts mentioned above. He has a recipe for New York pizza. He has a separate recipe for the sauce. I thought it would be smart to look at his sauce recipe. He ought to know what he’s doing, right?

Here is the main ingredient for his sauce: “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes.”

Poof. There go my Kenji hopes.

Pizza is extremely ingredient-sensitive. You can completely screw up a tested recipe by using the wrong flour, tomatoes, or cheese. You can buy the right type of ingredient but the wrong brand, and things will go sideways. There are all sorts of whole peeled tomatoes out there. Some are very good. Most–most–are so bad, it is not possible to make an acceptable pizza with them.

You can be a mediocre cook and not know the importance of using the right tomatoes in pizza sauce, but you can’t be a towering food genius and not know.

It is not possible for a person who understands pizza sauce, and who wants others to do well, to recommend “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes” without specifying brands. The tomatoes are the most important thing to get right. Good tomatoes are so helpful, many good pizzerias use sauce that is nothing more than tomatoes and water. You can get away with that if your tomatoes are right. If they’re wrong, nothing you add to them will save your pie.

He also says, “Canned tomatoes invariably have some citric acid added to them in order to increase their acidity.” That’s not true. Everyone who makes pizza knows this. Many pizza makers hate citric acid, so they insist on acid-free sauce. I’m used to citric acid, so I don’t care, but many people insist on brands like Escalon, which preserve tomatoes without it.

You can’t say all canned tomatoes have citric acid in them if you know anything about pizza sauce. Every pizza enthusiast knows better.

He also specifies “bread flour” for the dough, leaving it at that. First of all, that’s the wrong flour. It’s a second choice, for people who can’t get high-gluten flour. I use bread flour (King Arthur) and add gluten. I can’t get high-gluten flour around here. When I used to use high-gluten flour, I found that different brands gave different results, and I settled on Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto. I tried all the big names and ended up with a store brand.

He uses only mozzarella in his recipe, which is questionable at best, and he doesn’t recommend a brand. That’s a serious problem. There are cheeses that fit his specs that don’t work well. Right now, I have a block of Walmart low-moisture whole-milk mozzarella, which meets his specs, and it makes bad pizza. It’s extremely important to try different cheeses and pick the best ones.

My guess: his pizza is excellent, because he has a brand of tomatoes he likes, not to mention a brand of flour and a brand of cheese. But he’s useless to me as a source for a pizza recipe, because he isn’t specific. Fortunately, I already know which ingredients to buy.

His ingredient input is unhelpful, but he may be helpful with other things, like methods. He holds himself out as a sort of scientific chef who tests things instead of accepting dogma. He made several batches of pizza dough by different methods, and he came up with an interesting result: a food processor made better dough than a mixer.

That interests me, because I’ve been using food processors to make dough since around 2009. People have told me it didn’t work, but I was doing it, so I knew it did. It’s strange how people will insist things don’t work when great numbers of other people are already doing them.

His food processor gave pizza crusts bigger air holes. He said this:

Only the food processor-produced dough created a crust that was perfect in both texture and flavor. Tender, chewy, and crisp all at once, with that coveted slick layer at the sauce-crust interface and a thin layer of melted cheese just hinting at brown, it was the archetypical New York pie, and it had just come out of my own oven!

That’s reassuring. To many people, kneading dough with a chopping blade in a food processor is unthinkable, but they’re wrong. I was also reassured to see that his dough recipe was pretty much like mine, except he likes a lot of oil.

He may not be a real pizza expert, but he probably knows what a New York crust is supposed to taste like.

He has a German-style joint in San Mateo, California, which is basically San Francisco. His restaurant is called Wursthall, and I looked it up. Overall, it gets unexciting reviews on Yelp. So-so food, according to many. Some reviewers who don’t give good ratings mention him as the factor that drew them to try the place, and then they talk about the disappointing fare.

Here’s a disturbing review:

Wow, this place is really expensive. It is like being at a giants game. Two beers, a salad and chicken sandwich for $70!!!
And slow beer delivery to boot.
Won’t be returning anytime soon.

That price appears to be no exaggeration. The menu says a sandwich platter runs $16, and most beers cost $8 per pint, with some costing a lot more.

The restaurant specializes in sausages like bratwurst, served as sandwiches. Call it what you want: it’s a hot dog. It may be the best hot dog on Earth, made with unusual ingredients, but it’s still just a hot dog. It can’t be worth $16. I don’t care if the cost of making it was $50. If you’re spending a lot on gourmet ingredients, make something other than a hot dog. That’s my advice.

I would never go to a sit-down restaurant with tablecloths in order to get a hot dog platter. I could see spending $15 on a really good bratwurst on a fantastic bun, plus sides and a good beer, but…no, actually I couldn’t.

I’m not sure there is any German-style meal that’s worth more than $20. Maybe if you threw in strudel. German food is generally pretty gross. Sausages in a pile of beans, with melted cheese on top. Potato salad that tastes like pickled potatoes. Pickled this. Pickled that. There is a reason why young chefs train in Paris, London, and New York instead of Berlin.

Does German haute cuisine even exist? I don’t think so.

I think nothing of giving a steakhouse $75 for dinner, because steak costs money, and a really great steak is as good as any food on the planet. I don’t mind paying $20 or more for an excellent pizza, because pizza is wonderful, and one pizza will feed at least two people. I don’t mind paying $25 for excellent Southern food. It’s well worth it. A sausage on a bun is different. It can’t be all that good, no matter how you make it. Wienerschnitzel, which is actually Austrian, can’t be all that good. German dumplings can’t be all that good. Pig snouts and feet can’t be that good. Their desserts are wonderful, but then they have to be, to make up for everything else.

If Kenji’s knowledge is unsurpassed, why does he have 777 Yelp reviews and only a 4-star rating? He also gets 4 stars from Tripadvisor users. He gets a lot of bad reviews. Overall, he’s doing okay, and he gets plenty of stellar reviews, but if he’s the once-in-a-generation food genius people make him out to be, he should be stunning people with his food, consistently, and that is not happening. And he’s making the same things over and over, so he should have everything perfected by now. His food should be as good as it could possibly be.

Based on what I know of the steak, I don’t buy the sizzle. I don’t think this man is a reliable resource. I guess that explains why I’ve never been impressed by Serious Eats.

I am reminded of Bruce Lee. He weighed about 135 pounds, and he squatted 95 pounds, which is not an impressive weight for a strong woman, but people think he was the greatest fighter who ever lived and that he had superhuman strength. He never fought anyone in a ring with a camera going and judges present. No competitions. He ran from scrutiny. People seriously think he could have flattened the best heavyweight UFC fighters, which is ridiculous. He didn’t have the training to handle the little ones, let alone the big ones. Their way of fighting didn’t exist when he was alive. If you don’t prove yourself, your reputation is just words.

Maybe Kenji does superhuman work when he’s not making New York pizza or running a German restaurant, but what I know so far is discouraging.

I don’t like James Beard, either, and there is a prestigious award named after him. I had three or four of his cookbooks, and the recipes just were not good. I believe I threw them out.

I also think poorly of Mario Batali’s skills. I went to two of his restaurants, and both served me bad food.

I have seen Alton Brown ruin steak, and he also recommended Shun knives, which are fragile and expensive, not to mention poorly balanced. He touted them enthusiastically, until he stopped and started touting completely different knives. My guess is that the wind of money blows him around like a windsock. America’s Test Kitchen, which actually tests things, recommends cheap Forschner knives, and so do I.

Bobby Flay published a prime rib recipe that, for very obvious reasons–the wrong oven temperature–produces a hard lump of unappealing meat. Prime rib is easier to get right than a cheeseburger. All controversy concerning prime rib methods should have ended by about 1900.

Now that I think about it, Myron Mixon, the TV barbecue king, opened a restaurant in Miami, and it was very bad. I tried it. I make much better barbecue at home. Barbecue is simple, but he couldn’t do it. His restaurant went out of business. He claimed his partners ruined everything. That’s hard to believe. I could write two paragraphs and show you how to make perfect dry-rubbed ribs. Anyone can do it. Even with bad partners, Mixon should have been able to teach his staff how to make ribs. Mix seasonings according to boss’s recipe, put on ribs, smoke ribs. That’s all there is to it.

Today’s experience confirms what I already believe: as helpful as outside advice is, there is no substitute for personal experience in the kitchen. Few experts can be trusted, and some of the most respected are the least reliable. Most people who buy cookbooks can’t cook, so even if millions of people recommend a celebrity cookbook, it means nearly nothing.

Reading about Kenji also makes me regret posting recipes that were not as great as I thought they were. That has happened. I have sometimes misled people and contributed to the clutter of unneeded recipes. I have made both the America’s Got Talent error and the Food Network error.

On the other hand, I have come up with a number of truly magnificent recipes, so there’s that.

I have never had a cheesecake that compares to mine, or a Sicilian pizza that comes close. I have never had beer or steak that compares to mine. I made sourdough garlic rolls that seemed to come from heaven itself. I could never eat a standard Thanksgiving turkey after eating my boneless turkey stuffed with cornbread dressing. I’m crazy about the Alfredo-ish sauce I came up with recently. I have a pretty decent list of victories.

Maybe the recipes that weren’t that great can be forgiven in view of my successes. I am, after all, an amateur.

I don’t think the pizza I’m working on right now will be a victory. It looks like the dough will not be elastic enough to give me big bubbles. I hope I’m wrong, but at least I’ll know, and I’ll have meticulous records to incorporate the new knowledge.

Kenji claims New York pizzerias commonly cook at around 500°, so that’s good news. He should be right about that, given the fact that he grew up in New York. I have a better source, though. A guy on a pizza forum says 500° will work fine, and he is a paid consultant who has helped New York pizzerias. That puts him higher on the authority scale. Unlike Kenji and Bruce Lee, he has produced results on the battlefield. Professionals in the nation’s top market are willing to pay for his help.

In a side note, Kenji’s restaurant is near San Francisco, and he got attention for saying people in Trump hats would not be served there. Here is the text:

It hasn’t happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served. Same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.”

He said it hadn’t happened, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that there aren’t many Trump supporters in San Francisco, and the second is attitudes like Kenji’s. Conservatives know they aren’t safe in San Francisco, so they are reluctant to out themselves. They don’t want food full of boogers. They don’t want to be attacked physically. Leftists talk a lot about safe spaces, with reference to trivial things like hearing words that upset them, but they have a history of creating actual unsafe spaces in which conservatives are threatened with actual harm or battered.

His remark, itself, was a declaration of something at least approaching hate. Ironic. He couldn’t see the beam in his own eye.

Delusion is getting very bad in the US. A friend of mine has a far-left adult son who is literally deranged. Yesterday, my friend brought up the Ukraine invasion, and his son told him he didn’t want to hear about it because it was just an unimportant conflict between white people. That’s startling. It’s a lot like Whoopi Goldberg’s crazy remark about the Holocaust being unrelated to race. The Germans were white, and so were the Jews, so the Jews don’t get to be real victims like, I suppose, Jussie Smollett.

It’s not a problem when children and other civilians are hurt and killed, or when soldiers suffer the same fates, as long as they’re white. That’s my friend’s son’s position. And he’s white.

The son’s mother used to be conservative and probably still is, but she has started listening to leftist 1984-style “thought leaders” and parroting their absurdist, racist hate speech to her son. My friend is considering letting his son know his mother used to be conservative, and he is also considering telling him she is probably only pretending to be a leftist in order to avoid upsetting him and being rejected. My friend hasn’t done these things. He is not sure they will help.

The mother has never been quite right. She has claimed to have a psychological disorder, officially diagnosed, which makes her extremely uncomfortable whenever she doesn’t get her way. I don’t think that’s a real disorder. Not unless it’s demonic. To me, it sounds like she’s just spoiled, controlling, and misandrist. Which can also be demonic, now that I think about it.

How can you abandon your right to think and let some hateful, willfully ignorant idiot on Youtube do it for you? How can you trust another person that much, especially when that person’s idiocy is extremely obvious? It’s unusual to trust Jesus himself that much, and he’s always right. God has said he sends supernatural delusion to rebellious people, and we see it all around us now.

The other day I heard a Holy Spirit-filled conservative say maybe we should just quit obeying the law because Biden was incompetent. That’s also delusion. It proves being baptized with the Spirit isn’t enough. You have to pray in tongues and ask for correction every day.

In 2 Thessalonians 3:2, Paul calls the Antichrist “the man of lawlessness.” Satan is really pushing lawlessness now. There are truly stupid and dangerous laws we shouldn’t feel compelled to observe, but these days, people are encouraging disobedience that isn’t really justified. Thanks to the toxic philosopher Henry David Thoreau, leftists think breaking laws is highly virtuous, and in recent years, they have been breaking good laws like never before. Conservatives have become jealous, so they are also becoming lawless. It’s not good. Even if disobeying the law brings short-term benefits, it contributes to a culture of lawlessness. If you like that kind of thing, take a look at Somalia. That’s where we are headed.

My guess is that things will become so chaotic, the world will be ripe for the Antichrist to step in and restore order. Isn’t that pretty similar to the Saul Alinsky plan? It should be, since Alinsky took dictation from Satan himself.

Human interaction is rapidly being reduced to, “I got you,” and, “I got you back.”

Last night I dreamed I was at my dad’s home back in Miami. I was looking after him. I heard motor noises outside, and I realized trespassers were in the yard. I went into the garage and yelled through the doors, telling them to take off. I started opening the doors, hoping they would flee. They did not.

When I walked outside, they were working on the driveway. I became enraged. I thought they were driveway gypsies. Maybe you don’t know what those are.

Gypsies, or Romani, as they prefer to be called, have a long history of cheating people on driveway work. We are supposed to treat gypsies as though they were wonderful people who are oppressed unfairly, but the truth is that their culture permits and encourages stealing and swindling, so I can’t really go along with the white privilege guilt trip and manipulation.

Here is a gypsy legend most people don’t know of: many gypsies claim the nails for the crucifixion were provided by a gypsy blacksmith. In addition to the three we know about, there was a fourth nail intended to go through Jesus’ heart. The blacksmith refused to provide it, meaning he stole it, and as a reward, God exempted them from the 7th commandment. This means they are allowed to steal.

Not a great pillar for a culture to stand on.

It’s a horrible, sick, stupid, gypsy-destroying rationalization, and it would make no sense if it were true, because Jesus’ heart was pierced by a Roman spear after he died. Stealing a nail wouldn’t have helped him. A nail through the heart while he was still living, on the other hand, would actually have been merciful.

My mother was crazy about gypsies. I have dim memories of her taking me to see them when I was very young, in Tampa. I haven’t thought about that in years. They must have had a community there. She liked having her palm read, which is, of course, idolatry.

Anyway, gypsies (and other people) are known for showing up at the homes of elderly Floridians and offering to do driveway work cheap. They’ll say they have materials left over from other jobs, so they quote low prices. The problem is that the material is basically paint, so it comes off quickly.

In the dream, I thought gypsies were after my dad. For some reason, I reacted like a rabid dog. I have run actual driveway gypsies off, and I was polite. In this dream, I was a different person.

I started calling them filthy names involving excrement and sex acts performed on other men. I really laid into them. One of them approached me, and I slapped him so hard, he should have been on the ground. He came up behind me, and I pulled his glasses off his head with my teeth and threw them on the pavement.

I saw that they had cut a big hole in the driveway. One was carrying a piece of lumber I thought he had stolen from us.

I kept excoriating them, and the guy with the glasses and another man who was like a foreman kept asking me to let them explain. I was not having it. I made them leave. They fixed the hole they had dug. I was not afraid of them at all.

One of them came over to me and asked me why World Relief, a huge Christian charity, had been mailing me. He apparently wondered why a person like me would be hearing from a charity. He was a young black man, and he was very polite and respectful. None of them treated me the way I treated them.

I had a tablet, and we started looking at it. We were looking at sites dealing with World Relief. I was not angry at him. My tablet had a protective plastic film on the screen. I wondered why I had never removed it.

Anyway, they left, and when I woke up, I tried to find out what the dream was about. Were they demons, trying to break through God’s hedge of protection and harm me? Were they angels, sent to help me because I had done alms in the past? Why was I so angry?

I started to feel very bad about all the times I had mistreated people who were helping me. I had been nasty to educators, for example, over trivial things. It’s amazing that I could have been stupid enough to give people a hard time when they were trying to help me get an Ivy League degree. I had been nasty to other people who had tried to give me helpful advice. I had rejected other people’s input because I was proud and wanted to get by on my own ideas so I could have the glory.

When I was a kid, my parents did a poor job. They didn’t teach me much of anything in the way of wisdom or good habits, and perhaps as a result, I learned to think for myself. In doing so, I lost respect for other people’s advice. I was very smart, so I was used to being the brightest person in the room, and I started feeling I was always right.

Maybe the dream was about the way I had rejected helpful correction and ended up suffering unnecessary defeats. I reinvented the wheel many times, often incorrectly, instead of building on other people’s good ideas.

I also felt bad about the many times I had jumped into or started angry arguments, treating people who were merely wrong as though they were trying to do me harm.

Maybe the dream was about these things, or maybe the men were demons.

The other day, I dreamed a kid and a young man were trying to harm me, and I beat them brutally, crushing the young man’s face. In that case, there was no doubting their hostility, and I have no doubt they represented evil spirits. This time, I don’t know.

I hate demons with a hate I can’t describe, so maybe they did represent demons. If I could, I would do things to them that would make Josef Mengele throw up. I can understand why God plans to burn evil spirits forever. In my dreams, I break their bones and mutilate them. It’s not possible for me to feel that way about a human being.

Even if the gypsies represented demons, I still believe it was very good for me to confront my faults last night, so it’s a win. We are in the apocalypse, so a spirit of murder and hatred has been released on the world, and I need to avoid opening the door to it.

I can’t really see myself pleasing God by calling demons names involving gay oral sex. I would think that if I were fighting demons in a dream, in obedience to God, I would be somewhat more dignified.

Last night I thought about all the things he has shown me lately. He keeps telling me to change so I will not be like the rest of humanity. While I was in bed thinking about this, I put my face in my hands and told him I was going to end up surrounded by people I couldn’t even communicate with. I would be so different, and other people would be so deaf, I wouldn’t be able to explain much to them. Even if I didn’t become particularly good, I would understand things I couldn’t make other people understand.

I wasn’t complaining about his demands. I just felt I needed to tell him.

In my mind, I had an image of a long train full of people, hurtling toward a cliff. I could watch, but I couldn’t stop it.

I started asking God how people were supposed to learn. Who was supposed to teach us? Instantly, I realized I already knew the answer: the Holy Spirit. Churches are like grocery stores where half the food is poisoned, and we can’t rely on them. We have to hear from the Holy Spirit himself, one on one, as John taught. That means prayer in tongues, and not just a couple of minutes per day.

We can’t find reliable pizza information easily, and it’s hard to get good information about God. From human beings, I mean. Yet we still push people to turn pastors and priests into little gods who can’t be questioned.

I hope God restores the Holy Spirit as a teacher before the world ends. If not, I think the apocalypse will continue to progress without interruption.

Pump up Your Pizza

I have been fiddling around with thin pizza, and I have figured out some things.

I love my recipe for thin pizza, but I am fairly sure it would be better if my oven were a little hotter. I got stuck with an old 500° oven. In addition to the temperature issue, it also blows a thermal fuse whenever I try to use the self-clean cycle. I can’t clean it unless I do it manually. That will not happen. I’m not sure why ovens have to be cleaned, however. They seem to work fine whether you clean them or not. Is cleaning just a vanity thing, or will my oven eventually explode?

The oven also has a display that has grown so dim, I have to use reading glasses to read it.

My oven in Miami went to 550°. I have been looking around for something new that will do that. I learned that many brands only go up to 500° in bake mode, which is ridiculous, given that pizza making is more popular than ever. You can bake a good New York pizza at 500°, but hotter is better.

I discovered that Frigidaire, the manufacturer of my last oven, still makes hot ovens. I started trying to find one that will work for me.

Of course, ovens have changed a lot since the last time I bought one. They have a lot of silly “smart” features I don’t want. Why on Earth would I want to talk to my oven from across town? It’s bad enough getting distress calls from the vacuum cleaner. Smart features just add expense and more risk of failure. I guarantee you, your smart 2022 smart oven has parts that won’t be available in 2027.

Ovens with phone apps are patently stupid, like refrigerators that send you movies of their contents, but ovens have other new features that could be great.

I have learned about oven spring. This term refers to the way bread blows up when you put it in the oven. I thought I could get peak oven spring with any old oven, but that’s wrong. To get good oven spring, you need steam in your oven when baking starts. Steam keeps the outside of your bread elastic so the bread can puff up. You can force your old oven to do steam by putting things like skillets full of water-soaked rocks in it, but it’s a pain, and it’s not optimal. They now make ovens that do steam baking, imitating the ovens real bakers use.

Today I baked a pizza, and when I put it in the oven, I threw about a quarter-cup of water in the oven below it. This helped the dough blow up beautifully, but you can’t keep throwing water in an oven that isn’t made for it. I found a Frigidaire that has a steam-bake setting. Will it work? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try.

New ovens also have better convection and air-fry capabilities, and it’s not hard to find one that has a probe to measure the internal temperature of meats. You can also find ovens that somehow skip the preheat business, and you can get ovens that proof bread.

I found a Frigidaire that does all this stuff. Man, is it expensive. I know I’m cheap, but $2300 for a single oven seems like a lot to me. It could be worse. Other ovens break the $4000 mark.

I’ll post a photo of today’s pizza. You can see how big the air holes in the crust are. Very nice. Unfortunately, the cheese I used is disgusting. I decided to try Boar’s Head provolone, and for some reason, the only provolone they make is the low-sodium kind. I decided to try it, thinking maybe all provolone was low-sodium cheese. The pizza just didn’t taste right. Also, I fermented the pizza too fast because I was in a hurry, and that didn’t help the taste.

I learned something else about oven spring. If you rest your dough before turning it into a ball or loaf, it will spring better.

I make phenomenal Sicilian pizza. I make the dough in a food processor, I make a puck out of it, I put it in a very oily pan, and I let it rest for around 20 minutes. After the time is up, the dough, which was initially more like hard, lumpy batter, is smooth and stretchy. At this point, I stretch it to fit the inside of the pan and let it rise again. It’s always magnificent.

I had read that thin pizza (and baguettes) needed to be stretchy and tight before final proofing, and today, I thought about those Sicilian pies and that stretchy dough.

This afternoon, I tried resting dough for thin pizza. Using the food processor, I blended everything but the oil and waited 10 minutes, for sound reasons which escape me at the moment. Then I processed the oil in and waited 20 more minutes. Then I kneaded the dough in my hands a few times to move the outside in and the inside out, and I formed it into a ball. The ball had a nice, tight surface, and when I put it in the toaster oven to proof, it stood up nicely instead of flattening out the way my dough balls used to.

Combined with the steam, the resting helped the dough puff up in the oven.

Obviously, you have to ask which change made the most difference: the steam or the resting. Answer: the resting. I think. I made two pizzas today, and I didn’t add water to the oven the first time until the pizza had already been baking for several minutes, so I don’t think the steam did much. Both pizzas were made with rested dough, and both blew up well. The second one was better, but the improvement between it and the first one was smaller than the improvement between the first one and the ones I used to make.

I’m trying to convince myself to buy the Frigidaire, and I plan to rest my dough from now on. And I’m not buying any more Boar’s Head provolone.

Under Biden, we now have an oven shortage, so I feel like I need to get an oven right away, before things get worse. The Frigidaire is on sale for about 10% off, which is remarkable given the supply chain problems.

Rhodah and I have been praying for Biden, and today we prayed for the leaders of Russia and Ukraine and their people. We didn’t just offer bland, “Oh, please prevent war,” prayers. We prayed for God to correct people and help them to become Spirit-led. I think it’s dumb to pray for things to go well for people without praying for God to correct and repair them.

We also prayed for special protection for God’s children in these countries. God’s children; not everyone. Most people are not God’s children, and many people can’t be helped because of their rebellion. Many have come under curses they will just have to put up with until they repent.

I have not been keeping up with the news, but I can’t help hearing some things, so I know about Russia and Ukraine. Would Putin have attacked with a functioning chief executive in office? I don’t know, but I don’t see how Putin could pass up the chance to run wild with Biden in charge. America is much weaker now that Trump is gone, and of course, this matters to our enemies. They will pull things they would never have tried with Trump or even Obama.

Obama didn’t put America first, and our enemies often played him for a fool, but he was also warlike and egotistical, so he didn’t always roll over.

If I were Putin, Xi, or Kim Jong Un, I would be thrilled to be up against Biden. They must have been ecstatic when Trump lost.

My friend Mike has a pal who hates Trump. Before Biden won, this person said he would rather see America destroyed than see Trump reelected. A lot of people felt this way, and now they’re eating their words. Very sad. I would rather see Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, or even Whoopi Goldberg elected rather than see my country destroyed.

Whether we could elect any of these people without destroying America is another question.

I don’t know how serious the Ukraine situation is for America. I have no idea whether there is or is not a danger of a world war. I do know the apocalypse has started, however, so I suppose anything is possible.

I have been putting dry food in containers in case I need it, and I’ve considered getting an upright freezer for meat. I found out I needed to make sure I didn’t get a frostproof model.

In the past, freezers kept food in good shape for a very long time. They were not frostproof, and they didn’t have warm cycles. Frostproof freezers actually warm up every so often. It ruins food.

If you put ice cream in a frostproof freezer and leave it unopened, it will degrade. The ice crystals will melt and refreeze over and over, and the refrozen crystals will be a lot bigger than the original ones. This ruins ice cream’s texture. The same thing happens in other foods.

Apparently, you have to avoid frostproof freezers or eat your frozen food pretty quickly, which defeats the purpose of a freezer. I don’t look forward to defrosting a freezer once a year, but it sounds better than eating freezer burn.

Maybe I’ll get a freezer. Might as well have decent food while everything disintegrates.

Popeil Appeal

I guess I have a lot of nerve, because I have decided to second-guess the great Ron Popeil.

As some readers know, I recently picked up a Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven, unused, on Ebay. I felt I needed it. My dad had one, and it was great. My friend Mike has two of them. You would think nothing with the Popeil name on it could possibly be worth buying, what with all the attention his spray-on hair got, but it isn’t true. The original Showtime was a reasonably well-built product made in South Korea, and it did what he said it would do. It made great food.

It’s very weird that the Showtime has no present-day competitors. George Foreman sold rotisseries, but they vanished from the market. You can get vertical rotisseries, but they’re stupid. The fat runs off the food. No self-basting.

I’m going to guess the food Nazis are behind the vertical rotisserie problem. Who else would drive a policy that dumb? Competent cooking is literally impossible without fat, and fat is good for you, but people are still convinced it’s evil. What kind of fool would spend hundreds of dollars on a machine designed to cleanse food of the very thing that makes it delicious and juicy?

So far, I have cooked four things in the oven: a chicken, a rib roast, and two pork roasts. I learned a couple of things.

1. You have to be careful about applying too much salt, because the rotation of the spits makes it hard for things to run off the food. More of the salt will stay where you put it.

2. Some dishes would probably be better if the oven had a lower heat setting.

The pork roasts I fixed were magnificent. The rib roast I made was fine, but it was too salty. The chicken was done, but not done enough to be tender, and the skin was getting dark when I took it out of the oven.

The Showtime has three settings, but none of them have anything to do with heat. You get one heat setting, and you’re expected to accept it. The spit assembly can be placed in two different positions, one of which is farther from the heat, but the difference in heat that reaches the food is small.

I looked into ways to vary the heat, and I found three solutions, only one of which have I seen applied.

1. Attach a simmerstat to the oven.

2. Buy an AC speed control for power tools and splice it into the heating element circuit.

3. Put a diode and a switch in the same circuit.

A simmerstat is a device found on stove burners. It turns a burner on and off repeatedly. The overall effect is to lower the heat output. Depending on the ratio of on time to off time, you can get plenty of control. Because the simmerstat shuts the juice off instead of shunting it through a resistor, it doesn’t give off a lot of heat. Resistors always use up energy and give off heat. A stove burner coil is a resistor.

I do not know how a speed control works, but since they don’t heat up and catch fire, I know they don’t use big resistors. Maybe they work like simmerstats.

A diode will only pass current in one direction. A heating element in a Showtime oven runs on AC, which means the current switches direction 60 times per second. If you stick a diode in the circuit, half of the time, the circuit will not pass current. That means you should get something like a quarter of the energy output. For DC, it would be a quarter for sure. Don’t ask me about AC, because AC is somewhat different, but half is in the ballpark.

A Youtube genius got himself a big diode and a switch, and he modified his oven. Now he can cook stuff slowly when he wants to.

I considered the alternatives, and I decided to get a diode. A simmerstat or speed control would involve a lot of work to make it part of the oven, and I don’t think I really need a wide range of heat settings. I think high, low, and off will get the job done. I ordered a diode, an SPDT switch, and some spade connectors, and when they get here, I plan to roast a chicken. When I’m done working on the oven, it will look no different than it does now, but for a toggle switch on the control box.

Once the heat issue is solved, my only complaint will be that the top of the little broiler-style drip pan that sits in the bottom of the oven is hard to keep clean.

The oven literature says the pan is nonstick, but to me, it looks like plated steel covered with some kind of ceramic. It sticks to everything. Whenever I use the oven, I cover the pan and grate with foil and poke holes in the top for the grease, but stuff still burns onto the top.

I don’t trust the pan to remain rust-free in the dishwasher, but maybe it will. The new ones do. I need to find out. The dishwasher should remove nearly all of the crud.

I made my second pork roast last night, and it was superb. I will post the recipe, which is extremely simple. Obviously, it will also work in a conventional oven.

INGREDIENTS

pork roast (shoulder)
12 oz. apricot or peach nectar
2 tsp. pressed garlic
1 tsp. sage
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. butter
1/2 cup sweet Marsala or Harvey’s Bristol Cream

Salt your pork roast and let it sit for a while to take the salt in. Boil the other ingredients together until you get a thick syrup that doesn’t run. Cover the roast with the syrup and roast it however you want. Make sure you burn the outside a little to make a nice crust. You’re looking for around 150° on the inside. I think low and slow is the way to go, followed by increased heat to brown the crust.

I gave a 4-pound roast something like 25 minutes per pound, and it was excellent. Very juicy.

It would probably be even better to double the sauce and reapply it halfway through. It’s easier to apply the sauce once the roast is attached to the spits.

I like to bone my roasts and tie them back up, tightly, with twine. You save maybe $1.50 per pound for 5 minutes’ work. To make tying easy, use a butcher’s knot. Look it up.

You can’t imagine how good this tastes.

Smell the pork package at the store to make sure there is no boar taint. If you get a smelly roast anyway, you can brine it with baking soda to kill the stink.

I look forward to my first low-temperature chicken. Should be wonderful.

EUREKA

Aside from the day I “met” my wife (online) or the day we married–no, wait–aside from the day I accepted salvation, the day I received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, AND the days I “met” and married my wife (bases covered now), today is the most triumphant day of my life. I stuck it to the greenies by modifying my old-fashioned eco-hostile washing machine to make the inlet valve easier to clean, and I made the best thin pizza I have ever had.

I got myself a Maytag Commercial washer from Lowe’s last year. It would have been better to get a sister model from another vendor, because the Lowe’s job has a shorter warranty, but I needed a washer fast, and Lowe’s was ready. I got the washer because my old clothes-fermenting Samsung washer was making new noises.

The people who used to own this house weren’t cheap, so they got very expensive laundry machines. Unfortunately, they bought them after Uncle Sam (more like Aunt Sam or maybe Uncle Rupaul) ruined washers with stupid environmentalist rules. Newer washers use too little water, and they never dry out, so they make clothing stink with mildew. There is no remedy for this. If you’ve ever stood next to someone and assumed he smelled like mildew because he was a filthy person, you were almost certainly wrong. Everyone who uses a greenie machine smells like mildew on warm days.

My Samsung started making noise, and I leapt for joy, because I was awaiting the day when I would have an excuse to junk it. I didn’t even consider having it repaired. I had already done my research. Speed Queen used to make good washers, but they stopped. Maytag was the best option.

The Maytag will do a load of clothes in 27 minutes instead of the 90 minutes the Samsung needed, and it only has minimal electronics, so I don’t have to worry about trying to buy a discontinued computer in the future. It uses tons of water, and it dries out between uses. It’s the best.

Problem: the inlet screens were not removable.

Washers typically have hot and cold water inlets in the back, and these inlets are almost always fitted with internal plastic screens you can pull out and clean. This keeps rocks out of your clothing. I can’t believe tiny rocks will damage clothes, and I doubt they hurt washers, since washing machine instructions never say, “Don’t put muddy clothes in machine.” The screens are there, however, so you have to live with them.

My water has a lot of rocks in it, so every few months, the washer starts making scary sounds. Then it quits. The first time this happened, I thought it was broken. No. It was just whining.

I saw that the inlet screens were full of crud, so I tried to pull one out. It would not budge. I couldn’t get it out with pliers. Turning it didn’t help. It wasn’t screwed in. It was a permanent fixture.

Things like this remind me that every engineering class has a bottom 5%.

To clean the screens, I had to pull the washer out into the room, remove the hoses, and use things like an old toothbrush. Unacceptable.

I didn’t want to butcher the original valve. Some day I may need warranty service, and I don’t want the lonely Maytag guy to look at my modified valve, tell me I’ve been a bad boy, and refuse to work on the machine. I decided it was worth it to buy a whole new valve assembly. I forget what it cost. Probably around $60.

I also bought some removable screens made for other washers. You can find them on Amazon. I got 4 for about $7.

I took the new valve and ripped the screens out of it. I shoved new ones in. They fit perfectly. I was ready. I stored the valve assembly in the laundry room and waited for the day when the washer started whining again. Today is that day.

In order to get the old valve out, I had to take the control panel off the machine. That was impossible, because it was held on with special Torx screws that require bits with cavities in the ends. Tamper-proof screws, because, as everyone knows, repairing your own belongings is TAMPERING. I gave up and called Maytag.

Are you high? Do you really think I don’t have a huge supply of tamper-proof bits? Did you seriously fall for that? I got the bits out, took the washer apart, slapped the new valve in there so it looked OEM, stored the old valve, and washed my clothes.

The next time the rocks build up, I can remove a hose, pull a screen out, rinse it in the sink, reverse the procedure, and go back to making pizza or whatever. If the washer develops any other problems during the warranty period, I’ll put the old valve back in before the repair guy arrives.

Is it wrong to play warranty tricks on Maytag? Sometimes. If I had a CNC shop, and I decided to make my own souped-up washer transmission, and it ruined the machine, it would be wrong to put the old transmission back in and pretend it had always been in there. Inlet screens are different. The screens I put in do the same job the old ones did, only better. It will be impossible for them to harm the machine. It would be unfair for Maytag to use inlet screens as an excuse to cheat me out of warranty work.

Corporations play that game sometimes. Some won’t touch a product that has been opened by a consumer. That’s just plain evil, so I don’t feel bound to cooperate.

I only have a three-year warranty, and I probably won’t get to use it, so I don’t think my subterfuge will ever come into play in a repair situation. I still think the money I spent on the new valve was well worth it. A non-warranty repair on a major part could cost a great deal. Also, inlet valves go bad often, and now I have a replacement valve ready to go.

As for pizza, today I had the best thin pizza ever, from any source, anywhere. I am done searching. I’m sure I will continue tinkering, but the recipe I used is recorded and stored, and unless a miracle happens and I manage to improve it, I will use it until I die.

The best thing about it is that it didn’t take a day or more to prepare. People claim you have to let dough ferment for over a day, preferably in a refrigerator. I did that a few days back, and today’s pizza, which rose over about 4 hours, was better. The texture and flavor were magnificent. It puffed up nicely. It had big bubbles, which I like. It browned beautifully. I literally start to drift into a dream state when I close my eyes and remember how it tasted.

I used the last recipe I posted here. I made the dough with cold water to slow down the rise, and I proofed it at 75° on my kitchen counter, on a pan, under a glass bowl to reduce evaporation. It took around 4 hours, not 24. I suppose it could be 2% better if Gordon Ramsay moved in and worked on it for a month, but I have never eaten its equal.

For cheese, I used about 3 ounces of Boar’s Head low-moisture, whole milk mozzarella from the Publix deli, sliced, combined with Sargento thin-sliced provolone. I put the provolone on top because it doesn’t burn easily. Anyone can find these cheeses or their equivalents. No Internet orders or road trips needed.

Walmart sells LMWM mozzarella in blocks for $3.68 per pound. I plan to try it. Boar’s Head costs $10 per pound, which is impossible to justify based on the manufacturer’s cost. If other companies can sell it for less than half that price, Boar’s Head has to be overpriced.

I plan to get a piece of steel for pizza. People say steel is better than a pizza stone. A good pizza steel only costs $139 on the web, so why not?

You believed that? You really thought I would pay that? I’m going to my metal dealer. I’ll bet I can get a 15″ square of 3/8″ plate for under $25.

I don’t know what kind of tool-illiterate leggings-wearing morphodite would pay $140 for a piece of steel plate, but he isn’t me.

It must seem silly for a grown man to get so excited about pizza, but I have been trying to get to this point for decades. I summited the Sicilian pizza mountain 12 years ago, but I was never completely certain my thin pizza was perfect until today. It was good. No restaurant I knew could touch it. But it wasn’t my dream New-York-style pie.

This must be how Edison felt when he stumbled on tungsten.

The only thing left for me to perfect is fried chicken. I have no other food Everests to conquer. There are innumerable things I don’t know how to cook, but then I don’t want to cook them. I know how to make everything I want.

Except chicken.

Pizza is unbelievably difficult. An ideal pizza you picture in your mind is an extremely elusive target. When you make recipe changes you are sure will work, they will often move you further away from your goal. It’s maddening. The really annoying thing about it is that once you get your recipe dialed in, making it over and over is simple. The execution is a joke. The search for the recipe is what crushes your soul.

I ate an entire 12″ pizza earlier, and I want to make another one right now, even though I’m not hungry. I want to relive my victory. I’m not going to do it, but I want to.

I bought two pounds of cheese today. I may have to chain myself to something.

My Greens are Greener Than Your Greens

It’s amazing how stupid people are. Unfortunately, I am a person, so my generalization applies to me.

When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a plastic trash bag. People put their trash in paper grocery bags that leaked and tore. Garbage was disgusting. You would simply throw your bags into your rusty galvanized can, and it would rot and ooze until pickup day. The cans stank even when they were empty. Indoor cans also stank and had to be washed out. It’s not like that today. I have indoor cans that have never been washed, thanks to plastic bags. They still look and smell new, apart from the holes my pets have chewed in them.

Digression: I use the words “trash” and “garbage” interchangeably, because the dictionary gives pretty much identical definitions for them. A lot of people think “trash” means dry stuff like paper, but Mr. Webster disagrees.

It’s sort of remarkable that the human race didn’t start using plastic as its default material for trash bags until I was out of diapers. In patent law, one of the requirements for a new patent is that the invention must be “nonobvious,” and that means it’s not obvious to “one skilled in the art.” The use of plastic for trash bags should have been obvious to everyone, not just bag manufacturers. Plastic bags already existed. For some reason, the little wires in people’s heads didn’t touch, and we were deprived of a great boon for a disgracefully long time.

The Internet says plastic bags were first used for institutional trash in 1950, and Glad introduced plastic trash bags to the public in 1966. They took a surprisingly long time to catch on. Paper bags were commonly used during the first few years of the next decade.

We didn’t have trash bags, but we did have Baggies. These were thin polyethylene bags for food storage. People put them in lunchboxes and so on. They came with little wire ties because the bags didn’t have zipper closures on them. Baggies, or a similar product, were introduced in 1957, so why did consumer trash bags take so long?

When zipper bags came out, the writing was on the wall for Baggies. When I go to the store, I can’t find Baggies. I guess they were discontinued long ago.

I have bought zipper bags for decades. I don’t like them. They’re small and expensive, and the zippers often fail. The zippers are stiff, so the zipper end of a bag always has to be relatively straight. You can’t gather it up.

Really cheap people wash them and reuse them, but who wants to do that? It comes across like a mental disorder, and the bags take forever to dry. Said the guy who actually tried it.

I used to walk around in grocery stores, lamenting the absence of Baggies, pushing a cart containing produce I had stuffed in bags that were almost exactly like Baggies. Again, the little wires failed to make contact.

I started eating salads for breakfast recently, and that means I had to deal with lettuce. I ended up with a storage problem.

It all began with concerns about washing lettuce. I wondered if it was really necessary. I doubted restaurants did it. Washing lettuce is time-consuming, and in the end, you get wet lettuce which is hard to dry.

I checked the web to learn whether washing lettuce was actually important, and I read some disgusting stuff. Evidently, it really is important. Things like sand, bugs, worms, frogs, and fecal bacteria are found on vegetables, even if the packaging says, “Pre-washed.”

As if it were necessary, I am reminded why I have no respect for vegetarians. They love telling us they’re “eating clean” and that meat makes us sick. They also have a big bias against cooked food. Guess what? Frog poop isn’t clean, but a nice steak is. Bacteria can’t do much to the inside of a steak, because it takes them weeks to get there. Microbes can’t do much to people who eat cooked food, because cooking kills germs. Their precious salads kill lots of people every year! Have you ever noticed that nearly all germ-related food recalls involve vegetables?

Okay, that’s not totally true. Ground beef gets a few recalls. But it’s worth the risk, because it’s meat!

You can use a device called a salad spinner. It’s basically a spinning colander in a bowl. You spin your greens and hope the water goes out through the holes. I started looking for a salad spinner. I could not find one that didn’t get awful reviews. They break. They warp in the dishwasher. They’re useless.

OXO used to make a good one, but of course, they quit and replaced it with one that falls apart.

Until I figure out what to do about a salad spinner, I will be rinsing lettuce in the sink and standing the leaves up in a colander to dry. Then I have to store the ones I don’t eat right away. That involves bags.

I can use gallon zip bags at a minimum of about 13 cents each. Okay, I admit it. This adds up to maybe $12 per year, so I can probaby swing it, but it still annoyed me. The bags are not as versatile as a produce bag, they hold a lot less, and I can get produce bags for three cents each.

Needless to say, I just ordered 700 produce bags off Ebay.

“Wow, an eccentric saved himself $7 per year. Why should I care?” I’ll tell you why.

I have a big roll of Costco plastic wrap. It’s useful for covering bowls, but that’s about it. When you wrap things like cheese and bread, it’s a pain to use. It clings to itself and wads up, and you can never open it up so you can use its full length and width. It’s narrow, so it can be hard to get it to cover a dish or bowl well without using several wraps.

It gets on my nerves.

A big ol’ produce bag will hold a fairly large dish or bowl. You can just shove it in there. The bag won’t stick to itself, either.

“The bag won’t close!” Sure it will. If whatever you put in it is under a certain size, you can tie an overhand knot in the open end of the bag. If it’s bigger, you can rest the bag on top of the open end, closing it.

It’s genius.

Obvious genius.

I can also use a produce bag to line the bottom of Marv’s pooping basket. I have a big basket for him, and he sits on the handle when he has to poop. When I’m lucky. I used to put newspapers in the bottom, but I quit subscribing. A three-cent bag will do the job fine.

I already use big cheap bags to line his cage. They’re fantastic. So much cleaner and easier to handle than paper. Every day, he gets a new bag. His poop tray stays clean.

I bought the cheap bags for him, but now I use them for trash.

I found that trash bags ran around a quarter apiece, which is ridiculous. We buy very tough bags when we don’t really need them. If you’re a lazy sack of manure, and you only take your trash out once a week, okay, maybe you need a strong bag. You’ll want something tough so you can crush the trash every day with your shoe to make room, and while the trash is sitting in your kitchen, it will rot and feed roaches, ants, and mice. If you’re a clean person, you’ll remove all the edible garbage from the inside of your house every night, and you’ll get rid of it before it causes problems. You only need your bags to hold a reasonable amount of trash, and they don’t have to hold it very long.

I buy 30-gallon bags for 10 cents each. They’re wonderful. A truck just pulled up and dropped 1500 of them on my porch.

I was an idiot to buy Hefty bags. They’re for suckers. There’s a reason why you never see them at malls, stadiums, and so on. Their crews use cheap bags like mine.

I can still use zip bags and plastic wrap for certain purposes, but basically, I have switched over.

If I still lived in Coral Gables, where the nutbars have banned economical, environmentally sound plastic grocery bags, I would buy a stack of those bags and take them to the store with me. I would drop them in front of the cashier and say, “You encourage people to bring their own bags. Eat your words, baby.”

There is a ban on providing plastic bags for customers. There is no ban on customer-owned plastic.

I may get a couple of rolls of mid-size produce bags, between my trash bags and the produce bags I just ordered.

Of course, I feel bad about filling landfills with so much plastic. It probably adds up to half a pound per month. Clearly a crisis. I’m sure it would be a lot better to use several pounds of paper bags which never degrade once they’re covered with fresh trash. Your greenie virtue-signaling bags will still be intact when your great-great-grandchildren are in assisted living. Then there’s the environmental damage associated with the paper industry.

Don’t think about it. Listen to great geniuses like Jessica Alba and Whoopi Goldberg. How can they be wrong if they’re famous?

No More Fungal Bungling

It’s impossible for me to quit fooling with my recipe for thin pizza. My Sicilian is like the pizza they eat in heaven, but I have never truly nailed thin pizza down. Today I really dialed the crust in, and I made an excellent sauce using grocery store tomato products.

It turned out I had been using way too much yeast. Like by a factor of 12. I believe this is the reason my thin pizza sometimes had an unwanted taste that reminded me of cardboard.

I have been experimenting a lot lately, and as of this morning, I thought I was very close. I made a pizza today with some new adjustments, and it was so good, I had to make a second one to see if I could do even better. I succeeded.

CRUST INGREDIENTS

180 g flour (I used King Arthur bread flour.)
115 g water
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. instant yeast
1 tsp. cheap olive oil

Put everything but the oil and water in a food processor with a chopping blade. Process to mix. Heat the water to something like 110° and process it in, just until everything is blended well. The dry stuff may stick to the walls of the bowl. You can use a silicone spatula to shove it back down so you can blend it in. Let the dough sit in the processor for 10 minutes. Add the oil and give the dough maybe another 30 seconds. You just want to turn it into a nice wet dough.

It will be hard to handle, so put a thin coat of olive oil on your hands before picking it up. Make a ball. Put it on a lightly oiled dish. Cover it with a glass bowl so you can see it rise, making sure the bowl is big enough for expansion without touching the dough. Let it rise at 75°-85° for about one hour and 15 minutes. You want the dough nice and loose.

While you’re doing all this, you should be heating your oven and pizza stone to 500°. Hotter might be better. I’m limited to 500°. You can use a laser thermometer to check the temperature of the stone. My stone gets up to around 530°, probably because it’s down close to the heat. I like to put a metal object like the grate from a broiling pan on a rack above the pizza to keep heat from browning the top too much.

Tear off two 14″ long sheets of nonstick foil. Join them by folding so you get a wide sheet 14″ long. Cut off the excess so you have a 14″ square.

Toss the dough. You should get a pizza around 12″-13″ in circumference. I like to leave a big lip on the outside, with a center maybe 1/16″ thick.

Spread the dough on the foil. Add your sauce and cheese and use a pizza peel to transfer the whole operation to the stone. The foil will make sure it’s easy to assemble and handle the pizza, and it will keep it from sticking to the stone. Pull the foil out after three minutes. Cook the pizza for about 9 more.

You can get enough sauce for a bunch of pizzas from two cans of tomato products.

SAUCE INGREDIENTS

1 can Cento peeled San Marzanos (contains basil leaves)
1/2 can Muir Glen paste
1 tbsp. garlic
2 tsp. oregano
1/2 tsp. salt
3 tbsp. sugar
1 tbsp. oil
1/2 cup water

Unfortunately, the garlic and oregano measurements are guesses.

You just process this stuff until it has a uniform texture.

This might be better with only half a can of paste. It’s a little sweet, but I wouldn’t go with less that 2.5 tablespoons of sugar.

As for the cheese, my inventory was low, so I had to use 5 slices of Sargento provolone and one slice of Sargento Mozzarella. The pizza was excellent, but I think in the future I should go with 8 ounces of provolone instead of my usual 12 ounces of mixed cheese. If you substitute a little sharp cheddar, it will add some zing.

I sprinkled oregano on the pie before baking.

After it was done, I put it on an aluminum pan, waited 5 minutes, and cut it with a wheel. If I had had company, I would have cut it a little sooner so it would stay hot longer.

I don’t think there is any point in trying to improve this crust, but I probably will anyway. I may reduce the yeast to 1/4 teaspoon. The crust might be better if it started out cool and rose overnight in the fridge, but I like pizza on demand.

I used to use Cento “Italian style” tomatoes, but I can’t find them any more. I like them better than real San Marzanos. I don’t use organic San Marzanos.

If the crust is too chewy for you, I suppose doubling the oil will tame it. I like a real old-fashioned rim you can give your dog for a toy.

Adding a little pepper to the crust will give it more flavor, oddly resembling cherries.

I believe I can finally relax and get over the stress of being 90 minutes from the nearest source of my favorite ingredients. My area has really good pizza, but I can’t get anything as good as what I made today.

In Heaven as it Was on Earth

I hope everyone had a great Christmas.

I am physically separated from my wife, but we spent a long time together using video chat. I have great friends, so we had presents to open and people to message and chat with. Even though we were both technically alone, we had a holiday of love and warmth, and we were encouraged by the knowledge that we would probably get together for good soon.

On Christmas Day, I had a wonderful revelation about Christmas.

I realize December 25 probably isn’t the date of Jesus’ birth, and I have heard all the overthought arguments against celebrating Christmas. Some of them aren’t true. For example, it isn’t true that we got Christmas from the pagan holiday Saturnalia. I don’t think Christmas trees honor the devil. There are plenty of real problems with our modern traditions without making up new ones.

Christmas is imperfect, but it’s still very important. We need to acknowledge Jesus as a nation and as families. The fact that most people think Christmas is about elves and going into debt doesn’t mean you and I can’t do it right.

When I was a kid, my life was miserable. My dad was a wife-beater who drank too much. My mother was a defeated pessimist who failed to introduce her kids to God. My sister was a jealous, sadistic sociopath who resented my existence. Our house was a depressing place of fear and dreary expectations. Nonetheless, I loved Christmas, because we used to visit my mother’s parents in Kentucky. They were wealthy, they had a big house, they always decorated, I got to see my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and I was their favorite grandchild. Kentucky was a place of escape for me. The impression it made in my heart was overly idealistic. It wasn’t hard for Kentucky to look like heaven after what I went through in Florida.

We always had lots of presents and two big dinners. We got to play with great toys. Sometimes there was snow, so we could ride a sled.

It was very comforting to feel I belonged to a loving family. Every branch of the family was somewhat dysfunctional, but at Christmastime, we all came together to form a much more pleasant-looking whole.

On Christmas Day, I started thinking about the passage where the Bible says that through the Holy Spirit, we cry out, “Abba, Father!”, to God. “Abba” is a Hebrew word, and it’s an affectionate term meaning “father.”

Sometimes preachers talk about it, saying it means “daddy.” Personally, I never called my dad that. It always seemed childish to me. It was okay for girls, but “mommy” and “daddy” sounded awful coming from boys. I called my parents “Mom” and “Dad.”

I could never call God “Daddy,” because it would be insincere and make me feel uncomfortable, but I can call him “Dad.” There is no one else here to answer to that now.

I decided to make a special effort to use “Dad” in my prayers. The Bible says Spirit-led Christians are literally the children of God, so we shouldn’t be reluctant to call him what he is.

I had tried this in the past with limited results, but doing it on Christmas day, I felt a real connection. I got a stronger revelation of who I am; what my identity is and what my rights and privileges are. It gave me a sensation of belonging.

It made me think of those Christmases in Kentucky. We gathered at the home of a wealthy, powerful male figure, and we enjoyed his generosity and the warm oasis he provided for us. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I felt that special connection only family members feel. If you’ve ever felt you could show up at your grandparents’ house or an uncle’s house uninvited and unannounced, use your own key to get in, raid the fridge, make long-distance calls from the phone, and move into the guest room, you know what I mean. I felt we were more than separate individuals. We were woven together so none of us had to face the world with only our own strength.

People who say they have seen heaven tell us there are countless radiant beings around the throne of God, inside walls and gates of pearls and precious stones, looking at their father and praising and thanking him with love pouring from everyone, in every direction.

This Christmas, in my heart, I realized what we experienced in Kentucky was a picture of what residents of heaven enjoy every day. It made me feel warm and safe. I was in my big house all by myself, my grandparents were dead, my aunts and cousins generally were no longer interested in relationships with me, my wife was nearly 8,000 miles away, but I had the same basic feeling I used to get in my grandparent’s family room as the kids tore wrapping paper off presents.

Now that I think about it, my house, more than any of my aunts’ or male cousin’s houses, is like my grandfather’s house. I have no kids, but I have brothers and sisters my father in heaven gave me, and I have two godchildren and a bunch of other kids who care about me. They are always welcome to visit. They are safe here, to relax and enjoy each other’s company.

When I was young, I had the feeling I was my grandfather’s son. My dad had this feeling, too, but he would never have said it. He knew his bad behavior had made it impossible for me to look up to him the way I looked up to my grandfather, and when he got older, he developed the habit of saying “your father” when he really meant my mom’s dad.

In my heart, I felt my dad was a problem, not an asset. He was just someone I had to manage and humor in order to avoid problems. My grandfather was different. I was proud to be his grandson. Everywhere we went, people gathered around us to talk to him. Men wanted his counsel and his help. Women wished they were married to him. With my dad, it was different. When I walked around our neighborhood, I knew everyone there had seen police cars outside our house, and maybe they had seen him half-dressed, taunting the police because they knew he couldn’t be arrested for public drunkenness or disturbing the peace as long as he didn’t leave his doorway. I knew the other dads bought their wives and children more things than my dad bought for us, and no one was afraid when those men entered a room. My dad was not very violent with me, but because of the way he had treated my mother in front of me, I couldn’t help being scared of him.

My dad became a loving, doting, Christian father during the last years of his life, but things were different when I was young.

My grandfather didn’t have any boys. He had 4 girls, and he made considerable effort to get the same things from them he would have gotten from sons. He tried to interest two of them in the outdoors, which didn’t work. He sent my mother to law school, where she promptly selected a fiance, got married, and quit. His first male grandchild was older than I was, but my mother was his favorite daughter, so the first male didn’t get the bond I got. I was the one. The next male that arrived was a terror the adults fantasized about slapping, so among the first 4 children, I looked pretty good, and my position was safe.

Now that I’m an adult, I feel I am more of an heir to my grandfather than the others. I didn’t inherit any more wealth than they did, but my place among the people close to me is more like his.

My life is largely shaped by my experiences with him. The pleasure I got from being with him shaped my desires. Like him, I love the country. I live on a farm. He had cattle; I have cattle, although the ones on my farm belong to a tenant. I have tractors because he used to set me on the fender of a Massey-Ferguson and let me ride while he raked and mowed. He used to put me in the driver’s seat and let me drive while he shouted instructions. I love guns because he and I shot and hunted together, and like him, I have a gun room in my house.

I think of myself as someone who turned out barren, but I am more of a patriarch than my 4 male cousins, all of whom had kids. Like my grandfather, I participate in other people’s upkeep. He let my divorced aunt live on one of his farms rent-free for years. He bought cars for his daughter. He paid my sister’s high school tuition even though my dad was wealthy. He gave my mother money to invest. One of his sons-in-law was a hateful, black-hearted drunk who was very hard to like, but my grandfather invested a lot of money trying to keep his car dealership open. He gave his grandchildren calves and paid them the proceeds when they were auctioned. When I was a kid, sometimes he would slip me a fifty when no one was looking. He loved doing things like that. He never expected me to do anything for him.

When I got married, it never occurred to me that my wife should work. I would have been ashamed to let her do that. She doesn’t pay for anything. Yesterday, a cousin who still talks to me said that was remarkable. I was surprised. I had always assumed people would look down on me if I let Rhodah look after herself in Zambia.

When I call her every day, I love hearing her tell me she has spent her day relaxing. That’s exactly what I want to hear. She should shop, cook nice food, read the Bible, pray, minister to others, drive around to see people, and watch good teaching. She should enjoy the home she lives in by herself. The less work she does, the better I like it. I don’t think my male cousins have that attitude. Two are divorced, and I believe the wives of the other two work. The cousin who was surprised I supported my wife is divorced, and her husband abandoned her son. I have another female cousin who seems to have done better. Her first husband was man of good intentions, and I hear complimentary things about the man she married after he died.

Sometimes when I ask my wife what she has been doing all day, she grins and says, “Sitting!” I always tell her I hope she didn’t overexert herself.

I think it’s okay to say I do things for my wife. Jesus cautioned us against telling others about our charitable deeds, but supporting your wife isn’t alms. It’s the fulfillment of an obligation. Bragging about doing things for your wife is like bragging that you brush your teeth. No one should be impressed.

When my mother and father got married, my grandfather bought them a new DeSoto. It was extremely ugly. It was grey with an orange roof. He paid to have the paint improved. He put a red roof on it! At least he tried. Of course, he paid for the wedding, including my dad’s clothes. He rarely drank, but he had a few drinks at the wedding, and before my parents drove off, he took all the money in his pockets, which would have been a lot, and he made them take it for their honeymoon.

That’s the kind of person I want to be.

Maybe God gave me my grandfather and made me a little like him so I would understand what it felt like to be the patriarch. To be a patriarch is to be like God. It’s a very good thing to provide abundance, safety, and shelter. It’s good to overcome the selfishness of my youth so it can’t disgrace me in my old age.

When we are together in heaven, it won’t be like being in church. When I used to go to church, I liked the people around me, but the bonds weren’t that strong. Many of them were hypocrites who didn’t really belong to God’s family. Most of them didn’t know me. When I stood among them during services, it was not much different from standing among total strangers. In heaven, we will feel a family bond like the one I felt in my grandparents’ house as we stuffed ourselves and opened presents. It will be a family reunion, very literally.

Sometimes I have been concerned, and occasionally resentful, about the demands people have made on me. It has annoyed me to hear new requests from people who weren’t making much effort to fix their lives. I believe that feeling is evil, and I try not to cling to that mindset. I always tell Rhodah it’s much better to be the one who gives than the one who takes, because if people are coming to you for help, it means you have, and they don’t. You are more blessed than they are. Rhodah feels the same way.

I can see why leftists, who hate the principles of God’s kingdom, hate Christmas and work so hard to erase it from the public’s culture. Their father is Satan, and Satan doesn’t want us to know we can be a family. He doesn’t want us to love patriarchy, because God is a father, and men who worship God correctly are patriarchs. He doesn’t want us to see the parallel between Christmas togetherness and the unity and love we will one day feel, assembled around the throne Satan will never again see.

Satan’s children want us to be a family, too; the fear-driven, self-centered, ruthless children of the global government and the Internet. He wants to hide the breast and give us a pacifier dipped in poison.

If my revelation from God helps you, then let it be my Christmas present to you. You have 364 days to prepare to receive the benefit.

But You Will Never Forget It

Over the last week, I’ve implemented a strange new way of honoring and remembering my late father. I bought a Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven and fixed a pork roast.

My dad was not a good cook. I’m not sure, but the feeling I always had in my youth was that he figured any man who cooked had to be a flamer.

I can’t recall ever seeing him cook anything before my mother died. I saw him carry boxes of Cheez-Its into the living room and eat directly from them. I saw him open packages of lunchmeat, grab handfuls, and put them in his mouth. I saw him eat raw hot dog. He didn’t cook. He didn’t even barbecue.

At some point in his old age, he developed an interest in infomercials. It seemed like he was more curious than he had been when he was young. I think he wanted to see if the crazy things they sold really worked. He ordered a few things. It is for this reason that I have personally had the opportunity to handle Mighty Putty.

I think the Showtime oven was his most surprising buy, because of his lack of interest in cooking. It startled me. Apart from the surprise, I thought he had been swindled.

As everyone knows, Ronco was named for Ron Popeil, the TV huckster. What people may not know is that Ronco had nothing to do with the original Popeil company, which belonged to his dad, Sam Popeil. In fact, it was a competing company. Sam and Ron were bitter rivals. They were estranged.

Here’s a story I’ve told before. I clerked for Jack Dominik, Sam Popeil’s intellectual property lawyer. Jack kept samples of inventions his clients had created. For example, he had Glugless Jugs. This is a big jug with an air line molded into it so the contents pour out continuously instead of in intermittent spurts. The Glugless Jug makes pouring pool chlorine much safer. For some reason, Jack actually gave me one. He was extremely eccentric.

Jack showed me his example of the Bionic Knife. This product came out in the Seventies. It was similar to a Ginsu except for a weird triangular saw handle, and it came in a case which unfolded to form a cutting board.

Why “the Bionic Knife”? Because when Sam invented it, Ron was dating Lindsay Wagner, TV’s Bionic Woman. Sam wanted to needle him.

Anyway, in the mind of the public, the Popeil name is associated with cheap, gimmicky products that don’t work. It is associated with fraud.

Is that fair? Yes. Jack Dominik told me what Sam told him about one of his ads. It showed a knife cutting through a nail and a boot. Popeil said the nail was made of lead, and the boot had been soaking in lye all night.

Sam Popeil was pretty shady, so anyone who flinches at the sound of the name Popeil can be forgiven. I thought the Showtime oven had to be a ripoff.

To make my suspicions worse, it came with a “flavor injector,” which was a giant syringe that inserted solid objects in meat. People were told to load it with things like garlic cloves and shoot them, whole, into roasts.

The sight of the newly-unboxed oven and flavor injector was jarring, but if you think that surprised me, you should have been there the first time my dad tried it. He got a recipe somewhere; probably included with the other things he bought. He shot garlic cloves into a big piece of pork. He followed the directions. When it was done, he invited me to try a piece.

You can guess how optimistic I was, but curiosity runs in families, so I tried it. It was excellent. Tender, juicy, and flavorful. The chunks of cooked garlic were a wonderful touch.

The original Showtime ovens (three sizes) really work, and the construction isn’t bad, either. They were made in Korea, not China or India or some other known source of disappointing garbage. The cases were sturdy sheet steel, nicely painted. The ovens use good-quality gearmotors to achieve the desired 6 RPM, which Ron Popeil said he personally chose after a lot of testing. When you put a Showtime on your counter, it won’t heat the material under it, so it’s safe for stone and wood.

One of the neatest, and funniest things about the Showtime is that the top of the oven is used for cooking vegetables. It gets really hot, so Ron Popeil, marketing genius, turned a burn hazard into a feature. He sold little trays for vegetables, so you can cook side dishes on top of your oven while your meat roasts. This actually works.

The metal parts that hold the food get very hot during cooking, so if you try to remove the food with your bare hands, you get blistered. Ron’s answer? He included a pair of cheap insulated gloves just thick enough to allow you to pull the food out and put it down before getting burned. Fortunately, I have a pair of silicone chef’s mitts which are much better.

Cleaning up is not bad. You clean the window, which comes out, the broiler pan that sits in the bottom of the machine to catch grease, the spits and spit holders, and maybe the heat reflector. A self-cleaning wall oven with a rotisserie would be simpler, but I’m not looking to drop $4000 any time soon.

Rotisserie cooking is better than cooking on a pan. When you cook with a rotisserie, the grease and sauce have a hard time falling off the food, so everything is basted continuously. The liquids keep pouring down the front side, keeping things moist until they bake into a delicious crust. Meat browns beautifully on all sides, and it doesn’t dry out because gravity drains the juice out of the upper parts. I haven’t Showtimed a turkey yet, but my buddy Mike does it all the time, and he says the breast meat is always perfect.

When my dad and I left Miami, I threw his Showtime out. I had no help with the move, and I was also taking care of my dad. The things I threw out and gave away were worth 4 figures, easily, but I had no choice.

My dad didn’t care, because he hadn’t used it in years. It’s not like I discarded his treasured possessions.

Sometimes it bothered me that I didn’t have a rotisserie any more. Mike rubbed it in during phone calls. What are friends for? He has two Showtimes.

I started thinking about the Showtime last week, but I didn’t think I could get one. I believed the company was kaput. Ron Popeil died in July, and he was retired at the time.

When I checked Amazon to see if any company still made a countertop rotisserie, I found that Ronco was still selling them. The company had been sold years earlier, and it had gone into bankruptcy, but it was back.

The new ovens got mixed reviews. I read two disappointing things about them: the steel (Chinese) was thin and flimsy, and the motors turned too slow. Unsatisfactory. If I was really going to do this, I was going to honor Ron by trusting his 6 RPM design. I actually looked into putting a faster gearmotor into a new machine, but I couldn’t find any acceptable motor deals.

I checked Ebay for used Showtimes, and I found a like-new oven. It looked like it had just left the Ronco warehouse. I made an offer, and I ended up paying about $70. When the oven arrived, I could see that it had never been used. It was spotless.

I decided to honor my dad by making a pork roast. I bought a bone-in shoulder roast and cut the bone out myself. I put salt and Accent on it and let it sit in the fridge for two days.

I planned to use my old recipe: apricot nectar, sage, and Marsala, reduced and applied as a glaze. Then I learned that coronavirus had somehow created a shortage of apricot nectar. Reluctantly, I used peach instead.

The proportions are 12 ounces nectar, 1.5 teaspoons sage, 1/2 cup sweet Marsala, half a teaspoon of salt, and as many cloves of crushed garlic as you like. Just boil it down to a thick syrup.

I tied the roast together, shoved it onto the spits, tied it again, covered it with syrup, and fired up the machine. One and a half hours later, I had the roast you see in the photos. I overcooked it a little. I went to 160° when I should have stopped at 145°.

Overcooked or not, it was wonderful. It was tender and juicy. The heat from the element charred the outside of the meat along with the sauce, and the charred stuff flavored the meat’s juices. You would think the black parts were ruined, but they were better than the rest of the roast.

The oven has two settings. One is closer to the element than the other. I used the far setting. Next time, I think I’ll finish the roast on the near setting to get more blackening.

I wish I could serve my dad a big slice.

Of course, I sent the wife pictures. She is looking forward to a continuous supply of roasted pork and beef.

After the novelty wears off, I’ll probably use the oven pretty rarely, but I’m glad I got it. There are times when there is no substitute, and it brings back memories of my old man. Also, Mike is moving to Florida, and he will be living with me for a while, so it will comfort him by reminding him of his natural habitat back in New Hampshire.

A cynical person would say I’m looking forward to having my own personal live-in rotisserie chef, but I’m not like that. Not me.

It would be interesting to do a small boneless turkey in the rotisserie. Might be impossible, because the legs and drumettes stick out after you stuff them.

My rotisserie mission is accomplished. On to the next challenge.

Let’s not Let 10,000 Dead Bodies Ruin a Good Grift

Let’s recap. What are the three hostile spirits that will be released before the tribulation? Death, famine, and murder. They cover a lot of ground. Death includes disease and wild animal attacks, for example.

What are we going through right now? A global pestilence, shortages, and an astounding outpouring of hatred and crime.

Today, newspapers (Is that term appropriate any more?) are reporting that 12 big American cities have record murder rates. Not records for this decade, century, or millennium. All-time records.

Let’s look at the list, which comes from the notorious right-wing smear outfit, ABC.

Albuquerque: 82
Austin: 60
Baton Rouge: 137
Columbus: 179
Indianapolis: 246
Louisville: 175
Portland: 72
Philadelphia: 523
Rochester: 71
St. Paul: 35
Toledo: 62
Tucson: 80

This is a misleading list, because it only includes all-time records. Chicago is leading the country right now with 753 murders, which, remarkably, is not a record. New York is at 443. It’s also misleading because the year isn’t over yet. We have about three weeks to go, and it’s looting season because Christmas is coming up. Finally, the list doesn’t include smaller, but still large, cities.

The New York Post notes that all of these cities have leftist mayors. That’s pretty shocking. Who would have guessed?

What they’re not telling you: for the most part, this is an epidemic of murders committed against black people. Most American homicides (a term which includes killings that are not murders) are committed by black people, and black people who murder overwhelmingly choose other blacks as their victims. Cities have big concentrations of black people. It’s also important to note that black women are more likely than anyone else to be murdered.

Oddly, no one is marching or painting streets over this. There is no movement called “Black Women Matter.” We have people wearing shirts that say, “All Cops are Bastards,” but we don’t see, “Civilians who Murder 10,000 Black People per Year are Bastards.” No one on the left cares much about black women or black murder victims in general. They’re just enjoying pushing the police around.

Fewer than 1 in 40 of the roughly 10,000 black homicide victims 2021 will produce will have been shot by the police, and nearly all of the police shootings will turn out to be justified, even in the eyes of black witnesses. Strangely, the police are perceived to be the problem.

Human beings are amazing. “Never mind the floods and landslides. My faucet is dripping.”

For some reason which is subject to debate, societal ills tend to hit black areas first and then spread to the rest of America. I think the spirit of murder will work this way. Americans are already filled with partisan hate, and leftists, in particular, are more than willing to rise up and kill the rest of us. The Internet is like a virtual hell, in which people vomit up their vilest expressions of loathing and cruelty, and when people let hate drive their speech, they are likely to let it drive their behavior later. I expect large armed skirmishes to start popping up before long, and after that, we can expect a state of guerrilla warfare, at least in cities and suburbs; every area near a leftist-dominated city. Leftists will form mobs to punish the “privileged,” and everyone else will respond in kind, having no choice.

I have been wondering why leftists congregate in cities, and I think it must be because life is so easy in cities. Cities hand everything to you. You have no yard to maintain, you never have to travel far to get food, and there are all sorts of people who dedicate their lives to helping you. In the country, you really have to know what you’re doing. No one is going to come take care of you.

Leftists feel everyone else owes them a lot, so it’s natural that they like cities.

I think there are more demons on earth than there were a few years back. If God has released three great spirits to hurt us, then those spirits have other spirits working for them. Demons spread delusion and anger, among other things. I think demons are what cause people to believe the facially absurd myths they subscribe to now. You can’t think a man is a woman without supernatural help. You can’t think a few unjustified police shootings are a big deal, while completely ignoring thousands of murders, unless something external has warped your perception.

I no longer have any doubt that the apocalypse has started. The Bible shows that it starts before the rapture and tribulation. The apocalypse is a process involving multiple events.

I don’t think hate and murder are going away. I am confident covid is here to stay as well, although the Omicron variant’s characteristics make me wonder if covid will continue to be a major threat to life. Maybe a worse disease will hit soon, or maybe there will be a much nastier variant of coronavirus.

Shortages are now routine, and they seem to jump out of nowhere to bite us. I have no reason to think they’ll get anything but worse.

Speaking of men who are alleged to be women, I read that a man on a women’s college swim team has been setting women’s world records. I guess I should grieve, but I can’t help finding it funny. You can’t grieve continuously. A guy named Lia Thomas, at an Ivy League school where everyone else swims slowly, is rewriting the books. He beat a competitor by 38 seconds, which is, I am sorry to say it, hilarious. He literally had time to get out of the pool, dry off, grab a Gatorade, take a seat, and watch the real girls finish the race.

This news is upsetting a lot of people, but I say may he go to the Olympics and sweep the golds in every event he can manage to participate in. Let’s not even stop with swimming. Let’s put him on the women’s track team. Let’s have him box. He might do really well. May others like him obliterate every women’s sports record. I look forward to a day when every women’s UFC competitor is a man, and actual women are afraid to compete.

Why would I say these things? Because the pimple needs to come to a head. Leftism bears putrid, diseased fruit, and society needs to see it. Also, I dislike spectator sports because they are destructive to Christianity. No one seems to understand the hostile relationship between spectator sports and Christianity, but it has a very long history. I’d love to see every spectator sport destroyed. More steroids! More cheating! More eunuchs! Let’s get this over with.

Where are the tennis eunuchs? Serena Williams needs to be exposed as a fraud. I guarantee you, there are male athletes out there who are willing to take hormones and drive her off the court. I want to see them get out there. What are they waiting for? They could become millionaires instead of settling for jobs as low-paid club pros. Castration can take you from mediocre male to world-class female, and no one can stop you if you want to do it. The courts will protect you. Fans will cheer you; even the ones who secretly feel sick to their stomachs. They will be too afraid not to.

There are no known pro tennis eunuchs on the tour now, but people my age recall one. His name is Renee Richards. He was a journeyman male pro in the 1950’s. Then he must have listened to too many Helen Reddy records, because he had himself castrated and started competing with female tennis pros.

You may think he proves eunuchs won’t ruin women’s tennis, because Renee Richards didn’t become a Wimbledon champion. Of course they will. Richards competed as a woman two decades after he competed as a man! He was over the hill, and he still made it to the women’s doubles final. He was ranked in the top 20 when he was middle-aged.

Richards himself now admits it isn’t fair for eunuchs to play women. He has said,””Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion.”

I can’t wait to see more men out there. The truth needs to be made clear.

In other news, I succumbed to temptation and got myself a used Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven. I found it on Ebay. It looks like it has never been turned on.

I couldn’t restrain myself. I started thinking about rib roasts. The one thing a non-rotating oven can’t seem to match is the crust a rotisserie puts on all sides of a roast. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like the $70 I’m betting is a reasonable risk.

I could have bought a new Showtime, but they just don’t sound good. They turn too slow, and people say they’re flimsy. The old ones are Korean, which says a lot for Ron Popeil, who could have gone Chinese right from the start. The South Koreans make wonderful things. The new ovens are from China, so no one should be surprised if there are issues.

I’ll probably use it about once a year, but it will be a good tool to have on those rare occasions when a rotisserie is the best option.

I think I can quit adding food equipment for a while. My kitchen isn’t perfect, but you can make nearly anything in it without wishing you had one more tool.

Thank God I don’t like high-temperature hipster pizza, which requires a special oven. If I did, one more expenditure would be imminent.