I Need a Diesel Mixer

I can’t help fiddling with pizza-production methods, in order to make things work more smoothly at my church.

Today I did some calculations and came up with a recipe for about 220 ounces of sauce. That will knock twenty minutes out of a typical day.

I wanted to find out what size mixer I would need to make dough using an entire 25-pound bag of flour. The answer? In a vertical cutter mixer, 40 quarts. In a planetary mixer, 60 quarts. A good used planetary mixer runs $3500. Used vertical cutter mixers are hard to find.

It turns out Bosch makes a very good bargain for pizza chefs. The Bosch Universal Plus mixer with a stainless bowl will allow me to make dough for 14 pizzas at once. It will take nearly nine pounds of flour. That’s not too bad, for the $440 price. That would get me down to two batches of dough per day, which beats eleven.

I’m not sure why anyone buys a Kitchenaid mixer. I wouldn’t touch one with a ten-foot calzone. The capacity is low. They’re not durable. They’re messy. I don’t get it.

A dough sheeter would be great. I could fire the dough into it, mash it into oiled pans, and be done with it until it was time to bake. I just need to find one that costs under a hundred dollars. Hey, maybe if I plant some magic beans, they’ll grow into one.

I suppose I could get clever and glue a 9 by 12 frame to a plastic cutting board, dump the dough into it, and roll it out until it more or less fit. That would save time.

I don’t want to lose the hand-forming. I just want to reduce it to a minimum. It doesn’t matter what shape the dough is when it begins to rise. If it’s nearly the shape of a pizza, it will make the job go faster, and it won’t hurt the quality. It would probably improve the dough by reducing the mashing and trauma.

My cheese frustrations continue. I might go ahead and buy a loaf of provolone and see how hard dicing it is. If I can do it in half an hour at home, it will obviate the need for a slicer, and I’ll be able to use cheap cheese from now on. I may also make a pie using only provolone.

I want to start cranking out thin pizza, but unless someone shows up to help, it will never happen.

Last night my old man took me out for dinner, and he said it sounded like it would not be possible to turn the cafe into a serious business. It’s hard to make people think about money when their big goal is saving souls. He thinks I should learn what I can and then open a place.

The pizzeria I visited turned me off because they said they grossed $600-$700 on a typical day. I thought that represented a lot of work and very little money. Now I realize their business was slow. That figure probably represents 40-50 pizzas. I churned out over 20 by myself, with bad equipment. With decent equipment, one cook could easily do 60 pies a day.

That little shop should have been able to produce 24 pies an hour, more or less.

Let’s see. Say I do 24 pies an hour, and the food cost per pie is $3.00, and I sell them for and average of $13.00 (more like $14.00 in practice). That gives me $240.00 per hour to pay for rent, gas, power, and so on. A place with a more realistic floor plan would be able to make 72 pies per hour, so $720.00. Surely a decent place with two full-size double ovens could make $3000 per eight-hour day above food costs, before talking about toppings and soda. That’s over $70,000 per month. You would think it would be possible to make a living.

Whoops, I’m wrong. Their oven holds 12 large pizzas, so figure 48 pies an hour, at full tilt. Two of the larger ovens will do 128 an hour. So you would think you could do maybe $5000 per day, after food costs, if your pizza was good enough to attract customers. Did I misplace a decimal somewhere? Seems like you should be able to survive.

I must be underestimating the impact of the slow hours.

Tomorrow night I cook again. I’m going to do my best to be ready to produce 20 pies over the course of one service. I’ll experiment with the provolone, and I’ll get a container suitable for the big cheese recipe, and we’ll see if things speed up. Maybe I can get them to round up an assistant to spread the cheese.

Better head to GFS.

Volume Volume Volume

I just made about five million pizzas.

I arrived at church this morning at 7:30, and I quit working at around 3:30. I am not sure how many pizzas I actually made. I couldn’t keep up with demand, but then I’m pretty slow.

Judging by mozzarella usage, I made 22 pies. But that sounds high.

I weigh the mozzarella, and I use 7.5 ounces per pie, and I went through over ten pounds.

Anyway, it was easily the most hideous spectacle that has ever been witnessed. Pies were all over the place. Cheese was airborne during much of the day. Fans peeked in to gawk at me. I brought two pies out, and some kid said, “Now that’s what I’m TALKIN’ ’bout! God BLESS you, sir!”

I need a pizza Renfield, to spread cheese and eat spiders. Mostly the cheese thing. Spiders haven’t been a problem.

Even if his name isn’t Renfield, I need an assistant. It’s out of control. And we need a 30-quart mixer, because making dough 58 times in a 5-quart mixer is killing me.

My methods are getting more streamlined. I measure the flour and water to the gram now, and I put the water and yeast mix in the bowl before the flour. That reduces the dry stuff that ends up in the bottom of the bowl, and it makes things mix better and more predictably.

Here, let me give you a present: 580 grams flour, 340 grams water (with 1 teaspoon yeast per cup added), 2 teaspoons salt, 2 teaspoons pepper. That should be nearly 100% reliable, if you use flour like mine. I’m using Golden Tiger high-gluten flour, so I guess any bread flour will be pretty close.

Do I recommend Golden Tiger flour? No, because it seems like every flour makes good pizza. But Golden Tiger works.

If we sold 19 or 20 pizzas today, which should be about right, the church made at least $200. Net. Okay, net not including electricity and gas, but work with me here. I’m talking food cost. If we could get people to come into that cafe every day the church is open, we could bring in $50,000 per year. That’s certainly more than I intend to donate. It’s worth the effort.

If I keep this up, I should be able to make the church $15,000 per year on our current schedule. They need to get with it.

They were trying to discourage me from making more pizza toward the end, because the people who work in the cafe like to clean up and get home early. But I knew the pies would sell. I told Pastor Marcus I “guaranteed” it, although that was a huge lie, because if they hadn’t sold, I would have just dumped the dough in the trash. I had unbaked crusts for three pies left over at the end, and I said a prayer that someone would take them, and one of my armorbearer buddies called and said they needed three pies. Then a fourth guy showed up and said he wanted one, and he was SOL.

Late in the day, I pointed out that we had made a three-figure sum, and that if I had to throw out two entire pies with pepperoni, it would amount to six or seven bucks. But if we sold them, it would be twenty to twenty-four bucks for the church.

It’s hard to make Christians think in terms of capitalism. I think I’m the only person there who cares at all if the place makes money.

The pizzeria I looked at grossed something like $700 per day. That means they sold maybe two and a half times the pizza I sold today, using a huge mixer and a bona fide oven, without a bunch of people getting in the way and selling other stuff and socializing the way they do at church. That place was probably open twelve hours a day. We ran five and a half hours today, and most of the last hour was dead time, and we only had one person making pizza, using pretty bad equipment. This is not that hard. I was there for two and a half hours getting ready, but that time would be greatly reduced if we had the right equipment.

If I had a real mixer, I could make dough once a day. I could work the yeast amount out so I could make the dough days in advance. If I could do that, I’d kill half of the work. Today I had to make two-pizza batches, what, eleven times? Insane. And every time, I had to wash my hands over and over, because I was doing repetitous jobs involving flour and oil. With a real mixer and a dough sheeter, I could fire out twenty-five pizzas at a shot, dump the doughs in oiled pans, and stack them on racks to rise. I’d only have to touch the dough once, so I wouldn’t spend an hour and a half a day washing my hands. Little things like this add up.

I also had to make sauce, which is a pain. From now on, I’m making one huge batch a week. It keeps forever. It’s stupid to make 75-ounce batches the way I’ve been doing. The sauce cans hold 107 ounces, so from now on, I’ll do 200-ounce batches. Each one will use a whole can.

I bought a huge can of cheap Berio olive oil and I got a 2-liter squeeze bottle, like the ones athletes drink from. Now I have no oil mess to deal with. I used to pour oil out of a jug, dripping all over the kitchen. That’s behind me.

I need a wall clock. The church will never get around to buying one. For three bucks, I can actually know what time it is, instead of guessing when a service is going to end and a giant crowd is going to hammer the cafe. As it is now, I have to remember to fish out my cell phone and check. That’s fun, when I have pepperoni grease on my hands. I could wear a watch, but clocks are better, especially when you’re working with a big mixer that can break bones.

I bought the church a decent kitchen timer. The one we had refused to stick to anything; the magnet was pathetic. I could never read it. And the alarm was horrible, and the controls were counterintuitive. Now I have one I can stick to the stainless steel wall by the convection oven.

This is all tremendous fun. I hope it will make money for the church, or that it will make money for me if I can’t get them to take it seriously.

I better call Mike and make him eat his liver.

I am a good friend.

Cheese Blend Fail

I made another experimental Sicilian pizza today, with around 75% Grande Cheddar Blend and 25% Grande East Coast Blend. I was hoping it would have the baking qualities of Grande Cheese, with more flavor than the East Coast Blend.

The verdict: I can barely taste the cheese. I thought pure Cheddar Blend was sour when I put it on a thin pizza, but on a Sicilian, it tastes like water.

There is nothing wrong with Grande cheese. No one questions the quality. But it’s not working for me yet. I still have to try their 50/50 mozzarella/provolone blend.

Pizza is amazing. Before an experimental pie goes into the oven, I always think I know how it will taste, and I’m wrong all the time. No other food is like that. It makes me realize how blessed I am to have a couple of recipes that work perfectly. I could have spent another five years making bad pizza.

I think I’m going to quit using the food processor at home. Non-kneaded dough is superior to food processor dough, in my opinion. The food processor is so fast, it can be hard to mix the dough just enough but not too much. Now that I’m weighing stuff to the nearest gram, I should be able to make dough with a wooden spoon and a bowl. It’s very easy to adjust ingredient amounts when you use a food processor, but with other methods, it’s a pain. When you have the amounts nailed down in advance, however, you can blend your ingredients with confidence regardless of the method.

I’m pretty sure.

The Grande rep says he’ll drop off some 50/50 when he gets his hands on it. After that, the Grande trials will be done, and it will be time to get started on Sysco cheese.

New Book Idea

I’ve been thinking about the pizza joint I checked out yesterday. It’s an interesting deal, but I doubt it will get any takers. It will probably be available a month from now, for nothing, to anyone who will take over the lease.

The place is so small, the number of pizzas it can produce is limited. The owner said a really good daily gross was a thousand dollars. So if it ran full-tilt every day, it would bring in, what, three hundred grand? It has been suggested to me that I might net 10%, and if that’s true, I’m looking at $30K per year. Yow.

If I had a college-age son, this would be a great project. I could turn him loose with this place and tell him he had a year to make it work. I think that would be a better education (and cheaper) than ten years at a university. But for a middle-aged guy with other fish to fry, it’s not a great move.

I have an idea for a Christian book, so maybe I should put this pizza thing on the shelf for a while. It has occurred to me that one of the biggest problems with Christian books is that they’re extremely vague. They say things like, “Stand on God’s word!”, and, “God is holy, so you be holy!” What do these things MEAN? Imagine yourself as a beginning Christian. The stuff you would find in many Christian books would sound like gibberish.

What if someone wrote a book that was clearer and better organized, without strange Christianese phrases obfuscating the meaning? “This is the story the Bible presents, reduced to basics.” “These are the things you need to do, in order to live a blessed life and experience God’s power.” Nobody writes that way. Christian authors tend to have the same problem mathematicians and physicists have when they write books. Without realizing it, they write in a way that only works for people who already know what they know. I know people have tried to provide help for new Christians, but they’ve been very ineffective.

I used to dream of writing physics texts in plain English. Understanding the writing of physicists is harder, for bright students, than understanding physics itself. I never fulfilled that dream, but maybe I can do the same thing for Christianity.

You can write five thousand words and give new converts everything they need to know, to put a solid foundation under their efforts. But no one does that. Instead, they write stuff that only makes sense to people who are already knowledgeable.

Of course, some people would disagree with what I wrote. But if that was a problem worthy of consideration, how would it be possible for anyone to write a Christian book?

God has a long history of providing us with knowledge in a non-sequential and encrypted way. Our job has been to understand it through the revelation power of the Holy Spirit, and then to present it to each other in a more digestible way. My project would be a prime example of the way this process works.

I wanted to write books for my church, but they’re just too busy, and I can’t wait any longer. Maybe they’ll eventually find time, but while they’re doing other things, I should get busy with my own work.

Intriguing Rathole

I made pizza at church last night. Every Tuesday, they have a big youth-oriented (i.e. “musically loud and annoying”) service, so I was called in to do my thing. I should add that it was a fantastic service, apart from the pain it caused my middle-aged ears.

I made a total of 14 pies, and of course, after they were gone, somebody wanted one. We should have unloaded 18.

I bought a slice for myself; I was starving. I still can’t believe how good this stuff is. Most Sicilian is like wet bricks. Mine is so light it practically floats.

People kept coming in to the kitchen to view the freak of nature who made the pizza. They could not believe it was made from scratch. One girl keeps asking me for tips on making it. I told her my cheesecake was even better, and she asked if I had a son about seventeen years old, so she could marry him.

This morning I checked out the $20,000 pizzeria from Craigslist. It’s a former Jerry & Joes. It makes a Domino’s look like Mama Leone’s. I’d guess the square footage is about 600. Seriously.

Jerry & Joes is a small chain. I’ve only had their pizza once, about ten years ago. It was actually pretty good. They claim they use real cheese.

The place is a real rathole, which makes it all the more tempting. One person could run this place solo. I could open up, limit myself to the lunch crowd, and sell pies four hours a day. If it looked promising, hire lackeys and extend the hours. If not, close the business permanently when I get bored.

The oven is an old Blodgett. It holds six 16″ pies or eight 14″ pies. It goes to 650°, so it will satisfy my temperature needs. The stones are cracked; I don’t know if that matters.

They have a three-door wall refrigerator about nine feet long and seven feet tall, plus a home fridge in a corner. They have two stainless prep tables, plus a three-door refrigerated prep center. The mixer is an ancient Hoover that will accept 22 pounds of flour. That’s irritating, since the smallest commercial bags are 25 pounds.

There is no range, so if I made garlic rolls, I’d have to prepare the sauce at home. Not a major issue. I could make a few gallons at one weekly session and refrigerate it.

The kitchen is pretty filthy, and it’s not what you would call aesthetically pleasing. The tile is messed up. The suspended ceiling is grubby. The whole place needs a good scrubbing. The owner left the coolers full of rotting stuff. That will start smelling nice in a few more days. I’m surprised it doesn’t reek already.

The shop is divided into two areas. The outer area is about ten feet by twelve, and it has a counter and two small tables. The rest is kitchen and staff bathroom. One nice thing about this place is that there is no way for diners to see the beat-up kitchen in any detail. Pretty up the outer area, and you have a fine dining experience. The rear part has to be clean, but it doesn’t have to be cute.

I found the real poop on the lease. The owner’s son speaks English, and he gave me the lowdown. The rent is $975, and it can’t go up, because there are seven years left on the lease. They considered that a selling point. I consider it a negative. Commercial rents are going down, and it’s hard to find tenants. If I take this place, I’m stuck with that lease. I guess I can incorporate and skip out if the business fails, but that seems lame. I suppose it isn’t, though. The whole point of incorporation is to limit liability and encourage people to run businesses without risking their personal wealth.

Here’s how I see it. It’s not worth $20K. The only value comes from the equipment and the community’s knowledge that pizza can be found at this location. I don’t get their recipes. I don’t get franchise support. I don’t get the benefit of their reputation. I have to buy into what may well be a sucker lease. I think this place would be a good buy at maybe $5K, assuming everything runs and that there is some way to avoid getting hooked on the lease.

This is a lot of fun, but I also have an idea for a Christian book, so maybe good judgment will win the day, and I’ll be satisfied making pizzas at church.

For a while now, I’ve felt as though I were on rails, traveling toward pizzeria ownership. I wondered if God was in it, because so many strange pizza-related things were happening. Maybe he’s behind this, but maybe he’s not, and if he’s not, it’s a very stupid idea. I’m going to try hard to determine his will and follow it, regardless of where that leads.

Like Psalm 127 says, “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” I don’t want to get involved with any more activities that God will not bless and cause to succeed.

Cheap Pizzeria

This is what I call temptation.

Pizzeria. Exactly the type I wanted; basically a Domino’s plus a few seats. Cost: $20,000 (asking). Equipment included. Gas, power, phone, web, water, trash, and rent: $1615, max. Located in a busy area near a mall and lots of apartment complexes. And it’s near the county line, so it’s in the direction of AWAY FROM HERE, which I like. In fact, it’s ten minutes from my church, via a major traffic artery.

Arrghh.

Arrrrrrgggghhhh.

I may have to drive by this place.

Production Increases

I really enjoyed making pizza at church yesterday. It was my biggest day so far. I made either 14 or 16 pizzas, I think. I’m not sure. I was too busy to keep count.

I’m streamlining the process. I used to let the dough rise in plastic containers and then plop it into oiled pans. After that, I stretched it and covered it and let it rise again. This approach is not good, because you get oil all over a bunch of plastic containers that are hard to wash. You have to scrub each one three times to get it clean. Yesterday, I put the dough directly into the pans, stretched it once, and let it rise. Much better.

The problem with this approach is that you need a lot of pans. We only have ten. Fifteen would be better.

We still have no food processor. I’m not sure they understand why this is a problem; they seem to think their mixer is no good. The mixer is excellent; it’s an old commercial Kitchenaid made by Hobart. It’s just no good for making dough. It’s extremely messy, it mixes flour and water very poorly, it won’t mix dry ingredients at all, it’s a pain to use, and the dough turns into cement between batches.

These things are popular with people who don’t know any better, but a food processor blows them away. It contains almost all of the mess. It mixes all the ingredients thoroughly in about fifteen seconds. You can close it up to keep the residual dough from drying out between batches. I should be able to make three pies’ worth of dough in under three minutes with a big food processor. It takes ten minutes to make two portions in a mixer, and then you have to worry about keeping the residual crud from drying, and then you have to clean up a big mess.

I don’t know what I’ll do if I open a pizzeria. Pizza chefs tend to use commercial mixers, but I don’t like them. I’ve looked around, and it’s possible to get huge food processors with 24-quart bowls. Let’s see. A 3.5-quart Cuisinart will do 4 cups of flour, and that’s two Sicilians. You would think a 24-quart job would do about 14 Sicilians at a time. Is that right? I think so. If you were doing really good business, you’d only have to make dough a few times each day.

Another possibility is to start weighing ingredients precisely so I can come up with a very reliable formula. One of the problems with using a mixer is that it’s very tough to get the proportions right. For some reason, you can add three or four teaspoons of wet ingredients to dough that looks dry, only to discover you’ve made it too wet. The food processor doesn’t have this issue. Precise weighing might fix it, but then I’d still have to fix the other problems, and there would be no way to avoid the mess. That’s just the nature of a mixer.

Three of my friends bought entire pies yesterday, and the pastor ordered three slices at 10 a.m.! You can’t beat that kind of support. One of my friends had never tried this stuff. His comments? “It lives up to the hype.” “It’s the best pizza I’ve ever had.” I love it. It’s great when something works.

I now have people offering to assist me. I already taught one guy how to make Sicilian pizza.

I may run up to Tamarac this week to take a look at a place that’s for sale. I have to think about it.

Gun Show!

First up today, two prayer requests.

I guess everyone knows Chile was hit by an 8.8-magnitude earthquake. This defies comprehension. The Port au Prince earthquake measured 7.0, so the Chile earthquake was ten to the power of 1.8 as intense. According to an online exponent calculator, that means it was 63 times as strong.

What earthquake intensity means, when measured numerically, is not clear to me. But this was an extraordinarily powerful quake.

When you get done praying for relief in Chile and the safety of all the people who are now threatened by tsunamis, consider adding a word for my friend Linda. She works for the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Tomorrow she is having a cataract removed.

Today I went to a gun show with my prayer group. I enjoyed it a lot. I tried to give good advice to a couple of guys who were considering buying pistols. I steered them toward Glocks and Springfield XDs. One friend of mine was looking at cheaper guns. I think that’s a mistake. You save money up front, but then you don’t know what you have when it’s time to face a burglar. Will it fire? Will it jam? Bad time to have to worry about things like that.

I saw some okay gun prices, but ammunition was ridiculous. Twenty bucks for 9mm. Forty bucks for primers. The Obama ammunition bubble is behind us, or at least the peak is. I can buy 9mm for between ten and eleven bucks a box, and primers are back down to $30.

I saw a Saiga-12 for $489. That was a good deal. But it occurs to me that Saigas are only worthwhile for gun nuts, because you have to take off all the estrogen-oozing Hillary hardware and convert them back to real AK47s.

At breakfast, before the show, our group leader talked about the concept of fences. This is what our pastor is covering in his new series of sermons. The idea is that we have barriers in our lives, to keep us from getting into things we shouldn’t be messing with, and to keep evil out. Some barriers are intangible–rules–and others are physical.

We begin our lives in cribs, with bars around us. Then our parents expand the space we’re allowed to move around in, as we become better able to control ourselves. As we grow, the rules also change, and our freedom increases.

I find this concept interesting, because it ties into the concept of strongholds. We talk a lot about Satan’s strongholds, such as addiction and abuse, but we don’t talk much about God’s strongholds, such as the family, the home, the physical body, and the church. We are supposed to be like walled cities, and we should monitor our “gates,” which include our eyes, ears, and senses. We should control the people and things that go in and out of our homes. We should try to keep our churches pure.

A lot of people think an adult can’t be harmed by exposure to bad ideas and immorality, but that’s not true. You’re never too old to be subject to negative influences.

On the way back from the show, I stopped by church and grabbed some pizza cheese. I want to do an experiment. The other day I made a thin pizza in the church’s conventional gas oven, and it was very, very good. But judging from the time it took to bake, the temperature wasn’t as high as the temperature in my own oven. So I want to bake a pie at 500° here at home, to see what the result is like.

Pizza “experts” always yammer that you have to have a ten-thousand-degree oven to get a good pizza, but they’re wrong about all sorts of things, so I want to give this a shot and see what happens. The oven at my church was set on “Broil,” which should have been over 600°, but the pizza took eight minutes to bake, so clearly, it was not that hot.

I’m making the pie with non-kneaded dough. It’s a pain to make, because it’s hard to get the water-to-flour ratio right, but I think it should give a better texture than kneaded dough. I need to start weighing the ingredients so I can come up with exact amounts. That will make the corrections and additions unnecessary. When that happens, non-kneaded dough should be faster than kneaded dough.

I’m also considering giving up activating my yeast. I recently learned that there is a difference between active dry yeast and instant dry yeast. Supposedly, anyway. The directions on my instant yeast say you can mix it directly into the flour. I’m a bit wary of that advice, but it can’t hurt to try it a few times to see how well it works.

Eventually I’ll reach the point where I throw three ingredients into a bowl, stir it for ten seconds, microwave it for fifteen seconds, and eat it.

Maybe not. But the process does get shorter and simpler with time.

My Busy Agenda

It’s another exciting day. I just got a new lead on Costco mozzarella.

I use Costco’s Kirkland shredded mozzarella in my pizza. It tastes fantastic. But I can’t get it delivered to my church.

Today somebody on a forum told me a company called Foremost supplies the cheese Costco uses in its retail pizza. It’s not unlikely that this company also makes the cheese Costco sells in bags. I’m going to give Foremost a call.

I’m also going to run by Costco today or tomorrow and buy a slice of pizza. If the cheese they bake is the same as the cheese they sell, I should be able to tell.

UPDATE: I called Foremost, and while I can’t get them to tell me much, they did say they sell cheese to Sysco. This is pretty funny, because I already told the church’s Sysco rep their cheese did not interest me. I said I’d be happy to try a sample, but he hasn’t come across with one. I better fix that.

I am told that the big advantages of Grande cheese are that it bakes well and reheats well. The reheating thing is something I never considered. I make small pizzas at home, so reheating is rarely an issue. I don’t know what it means when a cheese reheats well. Does that mean it stays rubbery and crunchy, or does it mean it softens up? My cheese blend is softer after reheating than when originally baked. Maybe that’s good.

I’m also told I’m supposed to add other cheeses to Grande to compensate for the mild flavor. But that jacks up the cost. Grande runs about $2.75 a pound right now. Grated cheese costs maybe three times that much. Not a bargain.

Right now, using Costco and GFS, I can average about $2.50 per pound, and the taste and texture are perfect. Nothing to add.

Tomorrow I’m going to a gun show with my prayer group. That will be fun. My gun show motto is, “Look, but don’t buy.” I haven’t seen many good deals at shows. But I’ve seen fun products and hilarious T-shirts.

I have amazing news for Second Amendment believers. I guess I’m late to the party, but I just learned that Classic Arms is selling beautiful Czech Vz58 rifles for under $500. I paid way more than that, and I felt like I got an okay deal.

These things are similar to AK47s, but they’re lighter, and they ship with 30-round magazines. Unlike AK47s, which are miraculous bargain rifles mashed out of sheetmetal, these are real guns. The receivers are milled. Czechs make good stuff.

When I got mine, there weren’t all that many accessories available. Now you can buy sweet aluminum foregrips with rails. It ruins the funky “Guns of Navarrone” look of the original Czech fake wood furniture, but you can put a flashlight and laser on the gun, without screwing anything to the barrel. I tried a barrel-mounted rail thing, and the screws came loose at the range, even with Loc-Tite. I guess the shock of firing was too much.

Bonus: you can get a foregrip made in Israel. Strike a blow against anti-Semitism.

Maybe I should just screw a rail to the fake wood. It’s not like I’d be defacing a Rembrandt. I could keep the look and still have a laser. Or I could give Loc-Tite another chance.

This is the kind of gun you would expect to see Steve McQueen carry in a war movie. That alone makes it worth carrying, even if you get killed by someone with a more modern gun like an AR15. Although the AR15 is probably not as useful at close range. This baby folds, and it has that big magazine. When you fold the stock, it doesn’t interfere with firing.

Gun nuts will yell at me now. “MY AR15S NAME IS LURLENE AND SHE WIL WASTE YU AND YUR PUNEY COMIE HAND ME DOWN.”

Another interesting gun: Classic Arms has a Polish AK with a US milled receiver.

As you can see, I have many important things to think about today.

Cheese Test

I had an interesting experience today.

I went to my church to make pizza for the lunch crowd. Sadly, they just made a decision to quit making lunch on weekdays, so today was my first and only effort. But I made it count.

I had three bags of Grande cheese, provided by a rep. I was hoping this stuff would be at least as good as the blend I already use, because it would be cheaper, and I’d be able to have it delivered instead of driving to get it.

The cheese I really wanted to try is half provolone and half mozzarella. The rep was out of it. I won’t have it until next week. Today I had whole-milk mozzarella, East Coast Blend (whole-milk and part-skim mozzarella, blended), and Cheddar blend (mozzarella, cheddar, and provolone).

I made a number of pies, including Sicilian and thin pies. And the decision was unanimous: Costco rules. My old blend, made from Costco mozzarella and GFS provolone, is better than any cheese I used today.

I should add that on the Sicilians, I combined Grande with GFS provolone. On the thin pies, I used Grande by itself.

The whole-milk mozzarella bakes beautifully, without burning. But it has very little flavor. It’s buttery and stretchy. There is nothing offensive about it. But the pizza didn’t have the addictive flavor I got with the other cheese blend.

The East Coast Blend was very similar, except that it browned. And it didn’t brown in a particularly appetizing way. I’ve noticed that browned provolone tastes much better and has a much better texture than browned mozzarella. The East Coast Blend didn’t taste all that great browned.

The Cheddar Blend had a nice sour cheddar kick, but as I wrote last night, oil pours out of it. Not oil, really. Butterfat. It’s a little excessive. Add two fatty meat toppings, and you’d have a grease pond.

This is quality cheese. And I know you can make excellent pizza with it. I’ve had many great pizzas that were made with Grande cheese, unless they used something else and lied about it. But it’s not ideal for my recipe.

The mozzarella/provolone blend is my last hope. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have to keep using Costco cheese until I find something new.

A guy on a forum suggested a five-cheese blend sold by a food service company called Roma. I may try to track that down. Another guy says Grande’s reliability and cooking qualities are what make it great, and that you’re expected to soup up the flavor with added cheese.

It’s shocking how pizza can surprise you. Ingredient changes can make gigantic differences in your product, and they may be changes the natures of which you can’t anticipate. If Edmund Kean had been a pizza chef, he probably would have said, “Dying is easy. Pizza is hard.”

I also taught a friend how to make pizza today. He had no real problems. After another lesson, he should be able to fill in for me.

I used the church’s second oven today, for thin pizza. That thing is wonderful. The pizza crust gets nice and hard on the outside, and the dough blows up well, and the bottom of the crust gets well done. I don’t think I can make it work for Sicilian at the thin-pizza temperature, but maybe I’m wrong.

In case you have a commercial gas oven, I’ll tell you what I did. The oven has a 575° thermostat, and I turned it past that to “broil.” It has no broiling element, so “broil” just means “real hot.” The stone gets too hot to crisp up a Sicilian crust, but it’s just right for thin pizza.

They want to start doing pizza on Tuesday nights, when they have their “Rendezvous” service. The pastor’s son presides, and about a thousand people show up.

Things are getting very consistent now; the bugs are falling out of the system. We should be able to produce excellent pizza with good reliability in the near future.

Test Pie

I’m making a thin pizza with Grande Cheddar Blend. I can’t resist.

This stuff appears to be mozzarella and provolone, for the most part. If that’s true, maybe it will give me an idea what their mozzarella/provolone blend is like.

LOOK, I’M GOING TO MAKE THE PIZZA. This is the best rationalization I could come up with, so leave me alone.

More

I tried it. It’s extremely oily, which is fine, if you like oily pizza. The taste is very good, but no better than Costco cheese combined with cheddar. I can’t really detect the provolone. Would I buy it again? No.

Now what do I do with the remaining four pounds, ten ounces?

Give me Strength

This is glorious. The Grande cheese rep just came by the house and dropped off about TWELVE POUNDS OF GORGEOUS PIZZA CHEESE.

I have samples of East Coast Blend, Cheddar Blend, and Mozzarella.

Dang it. I have to share this with my church.

Maybe I can tell them a heathen stole it.

Let’s all Trade Pizza Futures

The new pizza peels I ordered for the church arrived. I was amazed to learn that you can’t buy a 9″ wide aluminum peel anywhere in Miami, but there it is. I got two for the church and one for me.

I’ve been getting info on the pizza business. I talked to some people on a forum for pizzeria owners. What a downer. They say quality pizza won’t bring you business. They say it’s just your ticket into the game, and that marketing is all that really matters.

The places near me that do well do almost no marketing that I’m aware of. The thing that sets them apart is their pizza. Bad pizzerias (except for the big chains) almost invariably go out of business, while the few pizzerias that serve good stuff do well. But that doesn’t mean the forum people are wrong.

I do take issue with the claim that you have to have good pizza to get into the game. Here, the overwhelming majority of pizzerias are bad. All you need to get into the game is money. You need good pizza to stay in the game, however. Unless you have megacorporation backing that enables you to sell bad pizza at such a low price no one cares about the quality.

The forum guys say it’s a mistake to call anyone’s pizza “bad.” I don’t buy that, either. When you get together with people and talk about local pizzerias, you’ll find that there is a high degree of agreement on which pizzas are good and which are bad.

I’m trying to figure this out. It could be that the majority of these guys are hacks who have no idea what good food is. That’s pretty likely, actually. I wouldn’t say that to them, but if you’ve been around a while and you’ve eaten pizza at many restaurants, you know there is a lot of bad pizza out there. And no pizzeria owner thinks his own pizza is bad. They all think they’ve got the best pizza on earth. If these guys are hacks who put out a mediocre product (and think it’s wonderful), then it’s only natural that their perception would be warped. If you can’t make good pizza, the only changes you’ll see in your profits will be due to marketing and cost-cutting, so you’ll tend to assume those are the only things that matter.

On the other hand, look at Budweiser. Every time you take a swallow, you get just a little bit of a gag reflex, because the beer tastes soapy and sweet and stale, and there is virtually no hop taste to balance it. It’s barely beer. But Bud is the biggest-selling beer in America, because they have great commercials. That thing about the gag reflex is absolutely true; it’s why people insist on keeping their Budweiser extremely cold. When it warms up, you can taste it, and that’s a problem. Bud is a giant, even though every sip gives you a slight urge to vomit.

Some business fields are meritocracies, and others are not. Law tends to be a meritocracy. If you beat other lawyers, you’ll get clients. You just have to avoid making incredibly dumb business decisions. You have to have a real office, you have to return phone calls, and you need an ad in the yellow pages. You have to have a filing system and maybe a clerical. If you do those things, you’ll be okay. If you’re a good lawyer and you fail, it will probably be because you’re not capable of running a business. If you’re a bad lawyer and you succeed, it will be because you know how to manage a law office (where other people do the work) or because you know how to promote yourself in a way that compensates for your incompetence.

Medicine is not a meritocracy. Patients have no idea whether they’re getting good care or not. We lack the education required to make an intelligent evaluation. We have to guess. Doctors get business by giving comfort and refraining from offending people. When a person says he has a good doctor, he usually means the doctor is polite and helpful and doesn’t overcharge or overtreat. The last two doctors I went to will have my business for the foreseeable future, simply because they were courteous and quick and professional. Are they good at curing people? How would I know?

I haven’t seen my urologist for a long time. He’s a nice guy. But I don’t plan to go back to him. First of all, he went to college on a basketball scholarship, and his fingers are the size of bananas. Don’t make me draw you a picture. This is not a quality you want in a urologist. Next time, I want an Asian or a dwarf. Second, his receptionist is so rude, she seems to be mentally ill. When I had my second kidney stone, I called for an emergency appointment, and she was so snotty, I decided to stay home and do nothing.

In some businesses, promotion and customer relations are everything. In others, you can be a complete jerk who lives in a mine shaft, and if your work is good, people will beg you to take their money.

Writing, surprisingly, is something of a commodity. By that I mean marketing is more important than having a unique and valuable product. Everyone in the universe thinks he can write, so the applicant pool is so big, marketing is the only way to get noticed. This is even true of niches, such as humor. There are probably fewer than five really good print humorists working in the US today, but many untalented people make a good living writing low-quality humor, simply because they found the right hookups.

Actually, I can’t think of five really good print humorists.

I’m inclined to think the forum guys are wrong. If they were talking about burgers, which a monkey can make, I’d say they were right on target. Burgers are a commodity. Buy five ingredients and a gas griddle, and you’re a chef. That’s not true of pizza. Buy the best ingredients, go to pizza trade shows, talk to experts all day, do exactly as you’re told, and you will still probably make bad pizza, unless someone else writes your recipe. And you have to have a little talent just to recognize a good recipe.

To make burgers, all you need is a strong back. Pizza takes talent and a watchful eye.

If you make bad pizza, you’re competing with Domino’s and Papa John’s, and they’re going to kill you with low prices. If you make good pizza in South Florida, you’re competing with maybe twenty restaurants spread out over two counties. That’s how it seems to me, anyway.

Nonetheless, I am not so confident in my assessment that I’ll run out and sign a lease. My plan is to see what happens at church. If neighborhood people start showing up for pizza and we have to upgrade the production methods, I’ll know I’m onto something. If not, I’ll type out my recipes, turn them over to other people, and find something else to do.

My House Needs Fiber

I had a moment of clarity last night, unfortunately. It can be very relaxing to be wrong and not know it, so it’s always upsetting when I get an epiphany.

I had the TV on because one of the birds was out of the cage, and I happened to see a show called “Hoarders.” It’s about people who fill their houses with junk, until the rats take over and the kids have to sleep on piles of boxes.

The show bugged me. I’m not a true hoarder, but I’m related to one, and I have lots of hobbies, and I’m absent-minded. Put it all together, and you end up with a person with lots of junk, who puts stuff down in the wrong places and forgets it’s there for weeks or months. Hoarding Lite.

I got up and started relocating things. I had a pile of books and gun parts by my bed. I made room in a closet and stored it. I took tool-related items off the dining room table and put them in the garage. I threw out a number of stupid and worthless items.

Of course, I will need all of those items very badly today. That’s how decluttering works. As soon as the garbage truck drives away, you need whatever is in it.

I hate clutter. It’s like living in a little dirty crevice. It probably raises your blood pressure. But I have a clutter-prone personality. It’s like Felix and Oscar are in my head, duking it out like Rock’em Sock’em Robots.

I have a feeling that the Holy Spirit reduces clutter. Hear me out. When you’re not living for God, you do stupid things with your time and money. You will wander down fruitless paths, involving yourself in futile pursuits. That’s because only God can guide you in the direction you’re supposed to take. Result? You end up with stuff you weren’t supposed to have. Not just stuff, but time obligations. For example, you may give up church because your talented kid has sports practice every day, or simply because you want to squander time watching football on TV. You might end up devoting three hours a night to drinking beer. You may find yourself at a strip bar three times a week, blowing your money.

When God takes over, your priorities and desires change with time. Suddenly, you don’t need an entire closet for your porn collection. Or, like me, you may want to get rid of your delicious Cuban cigars. You find yourself selling things and giving things away. Life becomes more streamlined. You start discarding the things Paul referred to as “dung” so you can make room for the pearl of great price.

I still have a rolling toolbox full of gun stuff by the dining table, and a lot of my canning supplies are sitting on it. I have to move that to the garage. I have to throw out or give away some of the garage objects I will never need. I think it’s safe to throw out my old PC cabinet, and I need to Craigslist my brewing kegs.

I really need to get rid of the Super Genie Lift I inherited from one of my dad’s tenants. A guy at my church said they’ll take it, but it may be ten years before they get around to coming for it.

One of the reasons I don’t like Miami is that there is no space here. I’d like to have a home with an outbuilding for my hobbies. Here, that would run maybe three million dollars. A hundred miles north, maybe two hundred and fifty thousand. Cities are for limited people. If your only hobbies are TV and clubbing, Miami is perfect for you. Add three hobbies, and you’re out of luck. You need to move and get more room.

Last night I thought about my grandfather’s house in Kentucky. It had five bedrooms, including a little spare bedroom that held some of his guns and my grandmother’s sewing stuff. It had a big kitchen, a full dining room, a full living room, a big den, a second den in the basement, a second kitchen in the basement, tons of extra basement square footage, a big foyer, and three baths. It also had a tool shed and a barn, plus a carport and a concrete patio.

Mind you, this was not a mansion. It was just a nice red brick home. It brought $120,000 when the heirs sold it.

THAT is living. Bring your tools. Bring your cooking equipment. Buy three smokers. Get four gun safes. Get a bass boat and an RV and five motorcycles. No problem!

My idea of an ideal home is a three-bedroom CBS house with a big commercial-style kitchen, terrazzo floors, and no curtains, with nothing on the walls except maybe NRA calendars. Put a 1500-square-foot building out back with lots of room for musical instruments, tools, and storage. Give me two acres or more to grow food. I’m done. Let me live there until I die. You would have to hold me at gunpoint to get me to leave that house to go to paradise.

Forget antiques. Forget rugs; they hold dirt and stains and smells. Forget hardwood. It rots, termites eat it, and it makes noise. Put a drain in the kitchen floor so I can spill things. Tile the kitchen walls all the way to the ceiling. Get me white dishes and cups from a restaurant supply house, and put in a deck oven for pizza. Kill every plant that isn’t grass or something that produces food. Give me an entire room for Maynard and Marvin. That’s luxury!

The “stronghold” concept is well known among Christians. Satan has spiritual strongholds we have to conquer. The Canaanite cities Joshua destroyed are symbolic of these strongholds. Addictions and bad habits are strongholds. Bad attitudes are strongholds. A physical illness or poverty may be a stronghold. We’re supposed to break these things down by spiritual warfare.

It has occurred to me that God has strongholds, too. Every human believer is described as a house or a temple or an embassy. We belong to the nation of heaven, even though we live on earth. Within us–within our “walls”–God’s ways prevail. And we have to strive to keep Satan out, and we pray in the Spirit to build ourselves up, so there is something stronger than Satan within us, to repel attackers.

Similarly, a Christian’s home can be a stronghold. It can be an embassy of God. That’s what I want. I know life isn’t supposed to be a breeze, but we’re supposed to live in victory, and it seems to me that within our homes, Satan should be relatively powerless. A stronghold home should be a place where a Christian can retreat and recharge. We have to fight the enemy everywhere else. At home, we should have more peace.

A home should be like a military garrison. You defend it and keep it free from invaders, and from time to time, you make excursions into enemy territory and do damage. Then you retreat back to the garrison and prepare for your next assault.

This is what I want. I don’t want fancy furniture or snooty neighbors or a location shallow people would crave. I want a fortress where I can find a little relief.

Before the clutter show, I say a show called American Pickers, about two guys who go around talking old people into selling them valuable antiques below the market price. They went to visit a man who had twelve buildings full of junk. They had a hard time persuading him to sell them anything. He had to be 75 years old, and this stuff was falling apart, but time after time, they would show him a rusty object and ask the price, and he would tell them it wasn’t for sale. It seemed to me that this guy was in the same boat as the hoarders. He’s going to die, and all that neglected, decaying stuff will be loaded up in dumptrucks and destroyed so the new owners will be able to use the buildings. Crazy.

I also caught a few minutes of a show called Intervention. You can probably guess what that’s about. I plan to record it from now own. It’s helpful to see how tough professional addiction counselors are. It reminded me of an important truth: if you don’t fix a loved one who has an addiction–if you withdraw and wait for them to change, and it doesn’t happen–it doesn’t mean you didn’t try to help. It means the addict didn’t try. Every bad thing that happens to an addict as the result of not trying is the addict’s fault. If someone asks you why you’re not helping, say, “Shouldn’t you be asking why the addict isn’t trying?” Don’t fall for blame-shifting. If you accept even the smallest particle of blame, you might as well be handing the addict a bottle of pills.

It’s funny how I happened to tune in to three very instructive shows, on a night when I was just trying to find entertainment while I communed with my pets. Dang these “coincidences.” They are swarming on me.

But This Chair is so Comfy

I think today is going to be the day I mount a 3-phase motor on my drill press. The South Bend vise I ordered for it arrived last week, so now the motor is the only major issue.

I have a 2-HP motor that was supposed to go with my lathe. It’s a little large for this job, but I don’t think it will cause a problem. The frame designation says it should fit.

Maybe it’s time to think about a mortising attachment, if I can find one cheap.

I miss fooling with my tools. Pizza has really gotten out of hand.

I bought stuff to create a new 220 socket. I should really have four of them. Why play musical sockets?

I need to put a handle on the pizza-removal tool I made for church. The radiant heat from a 500-degree oven heats the tool pretty fast, so if you use it to remove two pizzas from the oven, by the time you get to work on the second one, the tool is surprisingly hot. I suppose I can make a metal coupling from the sheet aluminum I saved, screw it to the tool, and attach a short wooden handle to it.

I want to get a dust collector. I have fooled around long enough. Dust problems have discouraged me from woodworking. But the machine I wanted is no longer available for credit card points, and I can’t make myself pay actual money.

Okay, here I go. I’m going to grab the hammer drill and get to work. Look out. The dust is going to fly.

In a minute.