This is Better Than the Holy Hand Grenade

Guess what I ate today?

THE BEST PIZZA I EVER HAD.

It’s getting monotonous, typing that once a week.

Not really. It’s actually pretty great.

I worked in my church’s kitchen today, making Sicilian pizza. I branched out from cheese and added pepperoni.

Ordinarily, pepperoni is not my favorite topping. It tends to be very greasy and salty and acidic, and sometimes it’s too spicy. I don’t like spicy stuff on pizza. It’s not that it’s bad. It’s just that non-spicy stuff is usually better. I don’t even use black pepper in the sauce. So I was very shocked when I tried a slice of pepperoni pizza I made. It was phenomenal.

We were not able to find pepperoni at Costco or GFS, so last night I had to pick some up at a Super Walmart. It was 36¢ an ounce! Insane. And I thought each pie would take about four ounces. But when I was applying it today, I found that I used less than an ounce per pie. I guess I could have doubled it, but an ounce covered the pie pretty well.

It was perfect. There wasn’t enough pepperoni to stink up the pie or make orange grease run off of it. It was more like a seasoning than a topping. It gave the pizza character. The pepperoni scent mingled with the yeasty crust aroma and danced in my nostrils. I’m going to start using pepperoni at home. I never thought I’d do that.

Well. I guess I won’t do it at home. At least not often. I don’t have the metabolism I need to eat pizza at home.

This stuff would kill, with thin-sliced green peppers, onions, and GFS faux kalamatas. For nine bucks a gallon, those things are superb.

I got better at timing the services today, so we sold maybe 12 pies this time. That’s 50% more than last week. I’m not sure of the number, but that’s probably right. I went through about 84 ounces of prepared sauce.

I sold three pies in boxes, undivided. It’s a big confidence booster when someone orders a whole pie and waits 8 minutes for it. I was ready. I bought boxes at GFS last week.

I laid a lot of dough out in advance today, so when pies were required, I’d have the stuff ready to go. This made a big difference. I ended up throwing out four unbaked crusts, but as I pointed out to someone who asked me about the dough in the trash, we threw out 80¢, and if we have used even one crust, we would have made $12.00.

We had a problem with people seeing the pizza and thinking, “Hmm…church pizza.” Next time, we’re going to advertise it as “made from scratch” or something. It’s no good to make pizza from scratch if people think it fell out of a cardboard box from Sysco.

Thin pizza will be easier to do, although we may need another stone for mathematical reasons. When you stretch a Sicilian, you have to let it rise for at least an hour afterward, if you really want it to knock your customers unconscious. Thin pizza goes from toss to screen with no resting. I could make three dozen dough portions at 8:00 and sit on my butt after that. No more cranking up the industrial mixer three times a day.

That thing is a pill, by the way. I am not stupid enough to tell people not to get Kitchenaid K5-A mixers, because I know they rock for many purposes, but for pizza dough, it’s just wrong. With a food processor, I’m always done in under three minutes, and I never have a significant problem, and the dough is consistent. With the K5-A, the mixing is very slow and haphazard, and you have to keep fiddling with the hydration (i.e. “water”). And it’s a pain to use, too. I don’t want to go into the mechanics, but it’s no fun at all.

People kept coming into the kitchen to ask if I had REALLY made that pizza. I enjoyed that. They kept saying it was the best pizza they had ever tasted. How can you top that? That’s the best praise you can hope for. They were asking me to teach them to make it.

I have an apprentice now, by the way. Ricardo. He will be meeting me on Thursday so we can bake for the lunch crowd. I have to plot and scheme to convince him that the worst parts of the job are actually the best, so he’ll want to do them all the time. But I have a feeling I’ll fail.

For the rest of my life, I will be convinced that God showed me how to make Sicilian pizza. Luck like this is too far-out not to have an explanation.

Perhaps my Brain Can be Useful on Occasion

I don’t know what’s going on with ammunition prices. I’ve found factory 9mm for under ten bucks per box, but I still get “sale” ads by email, advertising it for sixteen dollars. I think I would have to be high to buy that.

A while back, I got five boxes for something like $10.50 each. Acceptable.

Small pistol primers are getting more common. Back when Obama still had new-car smell on him, they were selling for double the usual price, if you could find them at all.

I’m even finding Swiss GP11 ammunition for the old price now, and they no longer make it. When the current supply vanishes, people will have to buy something else. So it’s very nice to see it coming back down.

I’m still getting comments about the Romney Rage incident. I’m sorry, I cannot support a guy who appoints himself Meter Maid and grabs other passengers to make them straighten their seat backs. This is the very opposite of the conservative philosophy. You don’t butt into someone else’s business and insist they give you something that belongs to them, and you don’t break the law in order to do it. An Air Marshall wouldn’t have done what Romney did. Law-abiding law enforcement officers don’t touch people until it’s necessary.

There are countless examples of leftist intrusions that are fundamentally similar to what Romney did. Union bosses won the right to enter private property uninvited, to organize. Social workers can abduct your kids and put them in foster homes without due process, if they don’t like your policy on spanking. Where I live, you can be fined or jailed for cutting or trimming a worthless mangrove tree–which you own–that obstructs the dock at your five-million-dollar mansion. Meddling is fundamentally a leftist concept, and so is demanding handouts.

When you buy an airline ticket, you rent the space around your seat, and that includes the space it takes to recline. It does not include the space the seat in front of you occupies when it reclines. You have no more right to that space than you do to another guest’s bathroom, when you rent a room at a hotel. If you want a favor, you ask nicely. You don’t give orders, and you keep your hands to yourself. If there’s a dispute, you call the nice flight attendant and work it out. You don’t play airline vigilante.

You have to wonder what kind of person Romney is, to think he had the right to treat another person this way. And it doesn’t help that Romney is a rich white conservative and the offended party is a black Democrat rapper. This is not the kind of PR we need, when we are trying to attract minorities to our side. The story that came out of this is “Spoiled White Conservative Batters Black Passenger on Plane; Authorities Blame Black Passenger.” It’s a highly credible story. This kind of thing does happen. It’s more credible than the story Romney’s hired mouthpiece put out.

Even Epic Beard Man behaved better than Romney, and he was off his medication at the time.

Good fences make good neighbors. That’s how I feel. It’s not about selfishness. It’s about preventing confusion and disputes. It’s about maintaining peace and civility. Most people who don’t understand that are not prominent conservatives.

Mike called today. The pizzeria idea is driving him insane. I should probably quit pouring fuel on the fire. But he’s not going to move down here, so I guess it doesn’t matter. Maybe if he dreams about it until he can get out of DC, he’ll put in time preparing to open a proper business. Maybe it will be good for him.

I’m learning stuff about pizzanomics. For one thing, it’s a mistake to worry about excess inventory. I want to make dough for 20 pizzas tomorrow. Maybe we’ll only sell 15. So what? The dough for five pizzas costs a dollar or two. THROW IT OUT. Who cares? The profit on one pie is about nine bucks. You’re betting two dollars you can make forty-five. That’s a good bet.

I’m also falling in love with toppings. Topping five pies with a seventy-five cent onion is a good idea. You charge seven-fifty for the topping, at one-fifty per pie. That’s a net profit of $6.75. You don’t do as well with meat, but you still profit to some degree.

We need a soda dispenser. I have no idea what a fountain soda costs, but it has to be less than a can, and it’s faster. Right now, people have to step out of line, go to a small fridge, and take sodas out. Then they get back in line. When business is good, the sodas are warm. That needs to change. Who will buy food, if they have to chase it with warm soda? At the very least, the drinks should go in the walk-in.

Christians are wonderful people. But we are not known for our efficiency.

I plan to make a cheesecake. I’m going to the store to see what berries are available. I may try frozen pie cherries, if they have them. If I dump a cheesecake at the church’s cafe tomorrow, we can find out whether people will buy it. And they will. Then they’ll start asking for it. Then we’ll have to have it every week. Then we own them.

For God, I mean. Yes.

Better get to the store while the sun is shining.

“Shut Up. And Go and Change Your Armor.”

Last night I got what may be the worst downer comment in the history of blogging:

Steve, I have been following your blog for years. I feel like I know you and I like you. You are talented and interesting writer. Over the last year or so, I have become more and more alarmed as I have watched you ricochet from one project to the next, committing more and more of your psyche and your money. I have an awful feeling I am watching a potential train wreck of self-destructive behavior.
I am a retired physician (anesthesiologist), old enough to be your father. Steve, I tell you if you were my son, I would have you in the office of the best psychiatrist around as soon as possible. Please don’t be offended, I just felt I needed to say something in the hope of preventing a potentially bad outcome.
The comment by Carl Williams has encouraged me to write this note which I should have done sooner. Please listen!

I’m sure this guy means well, but that seems a tiny bit over the top to me.

I’m eccentric. No doubt about that. But I’m not crazy. Crazy people see flaming bats flying at their heads, and they do other things, like wetting their pants and claiming to be Jesus. I only have one of those three symptoms.

I’m not nuts. I’m just a pentecostal Christian who has a lot of hobbies. That may be a mental illness, but it’s not a severe one.

I’ve been to shrinks a couple of times in my life. Even given the general ineffectiveness of psychiatrists, had I been truly insane, they might conceivably have noticed.

The first time I went to college, I got very depressed because my family was driving me up the wall, and I went to a doctor who gave me pills which didn’t do anything. Even then, I wasn’t out of my mind. I was just bummed out.

I also tried shrinks for ADD treatment, which didn’t work either. It works in short spurts, but you can’t be ADD-free all day. At least I couldn’t. I got to the point where my base Ritalin dose (the amount I was ALLOWED to take, which doesn’t include cheating before physics tests) was 60 milligrams per day. This is roughly what a team of Clydesdales would require, if they had ADD. I still couldn’t get all-day relief, so I quit.

After that, I relied on coffee. You need Ritalin to study physics. For law, coffee is more than adequate. Law is just not that hard.

Lawyers hate it when I say that. Which is why I say it. Okay, maybe I need to grow up a little. Who can resist needling lawyers? What other professionals have B brains and A+ egos?

I guess I gave people the impression I was interested in advice about whether to open a pizzeria, but I’m not. I’ll either do it or I won’t. It’s nice to get advice on the little details, but the overall issue is well within my decision-making capabilities.

I’m not as excited about it as people think I am. I’m very gung-ho about helping my church sell pizza, but I’m ambivalent about opening my own place. It would be a business, not an amusement park. Running a pizza shop is not quite the same as visiting one on your kid’s birthday. Businesses take up time, and they often fail. And sometimes the proprietors get tired of them, after the businesses succeed. Then they’re stuck.

The thing is, I have this feeling that God wants me to do this, either for the church, or for myself, or both. Doors keep opening. And people are trying to discourage me, which is often a sign that the enemy is disturbed or scared by something a person is trying to do. This can be a powerful indication that God is with you. A voice that rises up inside you and tells you to stop may be from God, but random strangers making irrational, unfounded predictions of disaster are not sent by God. The predictions have to come from somewhere, however.

Remember the twelve spies. They went into Israel and looked around, and ten came back and said the Philistines were going to mash the Hebrews like bugs. Two pointed out that God is a pretty big asset to a conquering army, but by that time, God was highly annoyed, so the Israelites wandered in the desert for a generation. Without pizza, I might add.

If you had to guess, who do you think put the pessimism in the minds of the spies? My guess: the worst loser in the history of creation. The universe’s first loser.

Then, of course, there is the story of David and Goliath. “Okay, who do we have to fight the nine-foot-tall giant?” “Well, we have a skinny guy who can’t wear armor because it falls off.” “Right. And what’s his weapon? A bow? A big spear?” “Hang on, I’ll check.” Pause. “He says he’s going to use a pebble.” “You mean like an exploding pebble? A nuclear pebble? A pebble that breaks up into laser-guided cluster bombs? Are angry angels going to pop out of the pebble and smite these creeps for us?” “No, he says he found it in the creek.” “Fantastic. Is it too late to start worshiping Dagon?”

And what about the guy who buried his talent of silver in the sand instead of investing it? As I recall, his master did not give him a prize.

Last night I was thinking about this, and it came time for me to take Maynard out for his daily bird abuse recreation. I’m not a big fan of Jentezen Franklin, but for some reason I sent a contribution to his ministry last year, and he sent me some CDs I was not really interested in hearing. Night before last, I stuck one in the DVD player, but I didn’t get around to turning it on. Last night I decided to play it while Maynard was out.

One of the first things Franklin said was, “Who has been dumping on your dream?” Man, that woke me up. He started talking about the people who discouraged Bill Gates and Martin Luther King, Jr. and other successful people. He said Dr. Seuss was rejected 43 times by publishers, only to go on and sell 210 million books. The people at Digital (remember Digital?) told Gates there was no reason for anyone to have a computer in their home.

I listened to the entire CD.

When I was a kid, my family dumped on my dreams constantly. In fact, they even dumped on my belief that I was able to accomplish ordinary things which could hardly be called dreams.

They made me feel like my gift for writing was nearly worthless; a novelty talent on a par with the ability to do card tricks. They convinced me I could not succeed in life. They told me what was wrong with me, but they never helped me improve. I even had relatives who tormented me when I talked to girls, to the point where it discouraged me from making an effort. Can you imagine that? That’s pure Eastern Kentucky. Keep your loved ones small, like stunted tomato plants, so you can control them and keep them from taking up your valuable time. Then when they end up bitter and unsuccessful, you can criticize them for that, too. This attitude is one reason Kentucky is the great success that it is today, leading the nation in toothlessness and illiteracy.

Because of the way I was raised, I was very sensitive to the importance of refraining from beating down loved ones. It seemed like every time I wanted to do anything, a voice rose up and filled me with fear and weariness, and I quit, and by my twenties, I understood how harmful misguided families could be. If you ever want to learn how to fail in spite of overwhelming ability and opportunity, move to Eastern Kentucky. We’re the best. We’ll have you failing in no time, and you’ll make your kids fail, too.

When I heard Jentezen Franklin talking about this, it all came back to me. Some of the things I’m hearing and reading now, from people I know and in comments, are no different from the garbage that was poured in my ear while I was growing up.

Funny thing; my dad thinks a pizzeria is a great idea. He has often talked about the high failure rate of restaurants, in idle conversation, so he’s not unaware of the risks. But here he is, talking about how great my pizza is and how opening a shop would be a smart move. He is literally more optimistic about it than I am.

God heals families. God heals lives. My family used to be the biggest problem I had. Now God is working on us. We’re all changing, and my dad is my best friend and a source of strength to me. As the Bible says, God can throw salt into a poisoned well and make the water sweet.

I don’t know where the pizza path will lead. I’m not worried about it. God is going to put me in the right place, now that I’ve quit insisting on running things.

And if I’m crazy, does it really matter? Remember what Dilbert’s friend Wally said when the doctors said he was nuts: “Apparently, I’m insane. But I’m one of the happy kinds!”

Eye for Pie

I can’t stand it. I think I’m going to run by a pizzeria which is for sale. I know this is silly. I can’t help myself.

Is it Wrong to Seek After Leasing?

I just saw the most amazing Craigslist ad. Some dude is giving away a pizzeria. He claims it’s equipped, but I see ads where he’s selling equipment.

The lease is $1000 per month. You just take over and start baking.

Arrggh.

ARRGGH.

I will not do this. Really.

That’s a tough deal to beat, though. Unless the pizzeria is next door to a plutonium spill, it can make money. And 0 is a very good price.

Say I take this offer. I incorporate so I have no personal risk. I invest three months’ rent. I spend maybe two grand to get the place running. I keep it open for a month. If it works, PROFIT! If not, an interesting month and a very manageable loss.

But HOMESTEAD? I wanted to get closer to church, and this is farther away. Homestead is a much nicer place to live than Miami, but I figure it’s 45 miles from church.

Goes to show what is possible, however.

I’m trying to get my church to buy a slicer. We need to sell toppings, and a slicer will enable us to prepare them. It will also make cheese way cheaper. Once we’ve been through a hundred pounds of provolone, the slicer will have paid for itself. That’s fewer than 300 pies.

Toppings are the secret to wealth. Slice a fifty-cent onion and charge $4.50 to put it on three pizzas. That’s a marvelous piece of arithmetic.

We also need a soda dispenser. It would kill our beverage costs, and we’d be able to charge the same amount and give free refills.

Pastor Marcus, who runs the church cafe, says we’re going to have a second cash register working on Sunday. This will mean volume. So instead of selling 8 pies (like last time), I’d like to shoot for 30. Then the following week, I’d like to make thin pizza, too.

I know a guy who wants to learn to make pizza. I’m planning to train him so I won’t be alone with the work. I hate to give up valuable baking secrets, but I’ve decided to trust God and give what I know to the church. Either someone will steal this from me and open a business with my ideas, or God will help me hold onto what he has given me. But I don’t feel right about hiding things from the church. Pastor Marcus doesn’t care one way or the other, however, so my decision isn’t firm.

How did life get so weird? How weird will it get later?

I’m dying to find out.

Latest Development

Man, this is bad. I’m making pizza all the time, and now I’m getting so fat I’m going to have to go back to the clothes I was wearing last year.

NOT!

Had you going, I’ll bet.

Until recently, I had two pairs of jeans I found comfortable. I put my size 36 jeans in a bag for Goodwill a long time ago, and I’ve been wearing smaller ones. Last week I wore a pair while I made pizza for my church, and while I was there, I made the mistake of pulling on a belt loop because my jeans were sliding. I ripped the ancient denim below the loop. And jeans are cheap cotton. They don’t mend well.

That left me with one pair of jeans to get me through the winter, which has been surprisingly cold so far.

Today I got up, and it was about 50 degrees outside, so I started looking for my remaining pair of safe jeans. I couldn’t find them, but I remembered another pair. A while back, I tried on several pairs of jeans that had been moldering in my closet, and one pair almost fit. I set them aside in a drawer, so I’d know where they were when I got small enough to put them on.

Today I decided to take another crack at them. I showered and dried off, held my breath, and pulled them on. They FIT.

I’m not claiming they’re the ideal size. I’m an inch away from true compatibility with these jeans. But they work. I can walk. I can breathe. I can bend. I can tuck my shirt in without going critical and showering the neighborhood with slow neutrons and gamma rays.

Let’s hear it for God! Richard Simmons has nothing on my weight loss expert. A lot of diets can give you a temporary reduction, but who can fix it so you slowly slim down while perfecting pizza recipes? Only one guy, as far as I know.

One of the worst things about being fat is that you will have several wardrobes. You’ll have your fat wardrobe, your one-month-into-your-doomed-diet wardrobe, and your thin or “real” wardrobe, which you will only be able to wear about one month out of every three years. You’ll call it your real wardrobe because you want to think your lowest weight is your natural weight, and that your fat is a temporary aberration. But your real wardrobe is probably your fat wardrobe.

I want to have one wardrobe. Period. Two wardrobes are one too many. I could not do this on my own. I was able to keep fat off for a year or so, and I was able to avoid truly overwhelming obesity, but that was about it.

When I ate, I felt something pushing me. “One more bite.” “You can do it.” “Starve yourself later to make up for it.”

Now that voice is very weak. And something else–something new and unearned–rises up in me and says, “Push the plate away and enjoy tormenting your enemy.”

People keep using the word “diet” to describe what happened to me. I get sick of it. I’m not on a diet. I’m just not a fat person any more. “Diet” robs God of his glory. He did this for me. A diet is something you do for yourself. I’m middle-aged. If I were able to control my weight through strength of character, don’t you think I’d know it by now?

God willing, I’m going to drop another 13 pounds or so. Then people who meet me won’t even suspect I used to be fat. I’ll have to show them photos.

Yesterday I wrote about the stuff God is generously doing in my life, and someone left a nice comment suggesting I have a brain tumor. It left me wondering. Why do people have such a powerful desire to deny God’s work? We’ll do almost anything to find an alternate explanation for a miracle. We’ll make idiotic claims. We’ll say a cure for cancer was psychosomatic, for example.

Give that a try, if you have cancer. Seriously. Sit on your couch for an hour a day and say, “My body has cured my cancer.” You’re still going to die, believe me. I apologize if that makes you feel bad, but you know…you’re still going to DIE, if this is your approach.

And why is a near-magical psychosomatic cure somehow easier to swallow than a miracle? We know of no physical mechanism by which this can occur; there is no direct connection between a positive mindset and a cure. Science has shown that a good attitude is good for your health, but it won’t destroy a big tumor. Psychosomatic cures are a fantasy just as dubious as the fables the lunatic Charles Manson used to make up for his followers. Just as groundless as L. Ron Hubbard’s fairy tales about Xemu and the Thetans. If you can believe something like that, with no evidence at all, why can’t you believe in the power of God, which is supported by the testimonies of countless credible individuals?

A while back, I was instantly healed of a kidney stone, while praying about it in my church’s parking lot. I had no idea a brain tumor could do that! It’s amazing what a brain tumor can do!

FYI, regardless of what you may have seen in B-grade John Travolta movies, brain tumors do not make you brilliant or inspired or cause you to see miracles. They give you headaches. They blur your vision. They make you vomit. You become incontinent. You lose the power of speech. They cause dementia. Look it up. I know someone who is at a high risk of developing brain tumors, so I’ve checked into it. And I saw miracles over twenty years ago. If I have a brain tumor, it’s the slowest-growing tumor in history.

I can think of some reasons why people deny God’s power.

For one thing, people like to sin. Fornication is tremendous fun; let’s admit it. Drugs are a blast. Stealing and cheating bring you great things you otherwise could not get. Violence is cathartic and relaxing. Abusing and dominating other people make you feel strong and important. Selfishness takes a big load off your mind, because you don’t have to worry about other people’s problems.

Sin is enjoyable. And if God exists and has power to act in this world, sin has to be minimized and shunned. No more clubbing and taking a different honey home every night. No more cocaine. No more weed. No more drunkenness. No more materialism. You even have to give up revenge. It’s only natural that people will look for ways to avoid believing in God, with all that at risk.

People also deny God’s power because they don’t see him working in their lives, and they want to convince themselves that this is how it’s supposed to be. It’s not that they’re not doing what’s right in God’s eyes. Their stale denominations and their unproductive doctrines are just fine. The problem is that people like me lie about our supposed miracles. We’re holy rollers and kooks. Christians (or Jews) are supposed to suffer and be defeated in this life, and we’re supposed to be grateful for it and not question it. Nuts like me will be judged for our heresy! Oh, we’ll get ours! We’ll suffer, big time! Hopefully!

Our healings and blessings are either demonic or somehow stolen from God. The real servants of God are the ones who are strong enough to admit that miracles and prophecy ceased permanently a long time ago.

If you admit I’m telling the truth, you may have to admit that some of your doctrine is wrong. I can understand resisting that. I don’t like admitting my doctrine is wrong, either, but sometimes it is. And here I am, losing fat and getting my prayers answered and becoming better able to be a blessing to other people. Am I supposed to quit? Seriously, am I? Are you insane?

I recall the story of the blind man Jesus healed, in the ninth chapter of John. People with bad, man-made doctrine tried to make the blind man condemn Jesus as a magician and a sinner, and instead, he heaped ridicule on them, saying, “Why, this is a marvelous thing, that you do not know where He is from; yet He has opened my eyes! Now we know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does His will, He hears him. Since the world began it has been unheard of that anyone opened the eyes of one who was born blind. If this Man were not from God, He could do nothing.”

The book of John also says, “Then they reviled him and said, “You are His disciple, but we are Moses’ disciples. We know that God spoke to Moses; as for this fellow, we do not know where He is from.”

Look, perhaps it’s possible for a charlatan to perform self-serving miracles that offend God, yet which are somehow derived from God’s power. Fine. But when that happens, there is an element of sin involved. There is an evil purpose. Someone makes money from it, or someone steals God’s glory, or man’s will is exalted above God’s. Where is the evil in what happened to me?

1. I made no money from it, nor did anyone else, nor did anyone receive any type of earthly advantage.

2. I credited God and admitted I couldn’t do it on my own.

3. It happened outside of my will; it wasn’t my idea, and I didn’t even ask for it. I’m not like the rabbis in the Talmud who created a calf golem because they were hungry. I didn’t do this. It came as a surprise.

4. I’m trying to help other people get the same thing, even though my only likely reward is contempt.

It’s dangerous to see every ostensibly good thing as a gift from God. You can harm people badly by doing things for them. Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light, and he works miracles. Satan blesses people in order to ruin them, and sometimes false doctrine gives impressive short-term results, like the dark side of the fictional force. I know all that. But sometimes you have to apply a little common sense and think for yourself. If Abraham hadn’t thought for himself, he would have taken over his dad’s idol-making business, and the Jews would not exist.

Call it a tumor. Call it schizophrenia. Say aliens did it to me. Sit up nights violating Occam’s razor, constructing elaborate explanations to make it go away. I can’t stop you. But don’t expect me to listen to your nonsense.

Can’t Buy This Nowhere

Here is a Sicilian made with no-knead dough and Provolone on top of the mozzarella.

The crust is fine. The no-knead approach gives it more of a biscuity texture, which I like, and the oil blend gave a very nice flavor. Pure light olive oil is a little better, but this is excellent.

The provolone seems to brown up in a more appetizing way than mozzarella. I prefer mozzarella to be browned as little as possible, but the provolone was actually enhanced. Not sure why.

My new GFS quarter-sheet pan performed flawlessly. This is the first pizza I’ve made in it, and it didn’t even try to stick. And I did everything wrong, mooshing the overly wet dough into the pan and even letting it rise there.

Because the dough was slightly too wet, it tried to stick to my stone, so now I’m doing a clean cycle. Great pizza, however.

Half Perfect

I made garlic rolls using no-knead dough and a 50/50 blend of olive and canola oils. Photos:

They were pretty good. I would not ordinarily use blended oil in rolls, but I don’t want to go to the trouble of making a pizza right now, so I used rolls for research purposes.

When you go from 25% olive oil to 50%, you get enough olive flavor to detect, but not so much it would wreck a pizza. I can’t say whether the blend would have olive oil’s buttery flavor in a baked crust. Maybe I’ll bake a crust to find out.

I used all-purpose flour in the dough. The rolls were on the tender side. I assume the flour is the reason. The lack of kneading might have something to do with it, but I tend to think gluten is at the heart of it. I would have used a different flour, but I had run out.

I guess I’ll give up and make a pizza crust.

You Want Olives? I Got Olives.

I can’t resist a food experiment.

I just got back from Gordon Food Service. I picked up a bunch of pizza boxes, which I am going to foist on the church whether they ask for them or not. You can’t tell people to take pizza home in a bag. I’m sure commenters will make Steve Martin references. I also got some interesting ingredients.

First, I bought a jug of canola oil mixed with olive oil. I realize this goes against my visceral hatred of canola (properly known as “rape oil”), but hear me out. Extra-Virgin olive oil is too strong for street pizza. It’s fine on rolls, but it makes pizza taste bad. Right now, I’m using extra-light olive oil, but for some reason, it’s more expensive than extra-virgin.

I want to make the finest street pizza possible, but I don’t want the church to eat high ingredient costs. I use around a tablespoon of oil per pie, which means the oil costs more than the flour! It’s something like fifteen or twenty cents per Sicilian. If the cheap stuff works better, the cost goes down to something like four cents.

If this stuff doesn’t work, I can use it to freshen up the blacktop in the driveway.

My second purchase was a big jug of Kalamata olives. Pitted. They sold me about 70 ounces (dry weight) for nine bucks. Curiosity is killing me. GFS-brand black olives are more expensive than this. I have to see what they’re like. I may swipe about a third of them and give the rest to the church.

Provolone is an annoying issue. A loaf costs $2.80/pound. Sliced, it runs around $4 per pound. And we have no slicer. I can make excellent pizza without provolone, but if I really want customers to roll on the floor and hallucinate, provolone will help.

I bought two pizza trays. They’re more expensive than I thought. But I needed to replace the one I cut up for a pizza-serving tool, and I need to make a second tool for myself. Still a bargain compared to commercial peels, and they work much better. I got a quarter-sheet pan to replace the one I left at church. Those quarter-sheet pans are dynamite.

On the way home I picked up Cento cherry tomatoes and Cento “Italian” peeled tomatoes, which are supposed to be their best sauce tomatoes.

I have learned that some pizza ovens are better than others. It looks like the winner is a company called Veroforno. Their ovens, made in Italy, consume much less gas than ordinary ovens, and they don’t have hot spots, so the pies are easier to cook. I have been wondering what the big expenses of making pizza are, and it turns out gas is one of them. People who use Veroforno ovens claim one oven can save them $500 per month on gas. If that’s the savings, the whole bill must be pretty bad. So if you open a pizzeria and start making money, a Veroforno oven might be a fantastic upgrade. But a real man can make great pizza in a Kenner Easy-Bake, so it’s not like the perfect oven is a big priority.

I’m so glad I’m packing my head with such important facts.

Razor Wire to be Installed Soon

Cell photos of my pizza area at the church. I can’t figure out why this phone needs 1600 by 1200 pixels to produce blurry photos.

Dubious Marketing Leads to Window of Opportunity

I’ve been tormenting Mike about pizza for weeks now. Today I think he snapped. He says he’s considering getting a small oven and partnering with some guy who has a panini shop. He says the guy opened across the street from a big high school, and he has no parking, and he sells panini and coffee, and he wonders why he’s going broke.

A puzzle.

Ordinarily, hungry high school kids will make a beeline for the nearest panini and latte.

Mike will do great, if he manages to do five lunch hours in a row. People will say what they always say. ” I can’t believe it! I finally found a good pizza place!” Then a month later, he’ll have to turn customers away, because he has no capacity for crowds.

I hope he doesn’t tell the other guy how to make pizza.

I’m reading up on ovens. I really don’t care about high-temperature pizza. The best pizza I’ve had in my life was made–wait, I was going to say it was made in conventional Bari or Bakers Pride ovens, but that’s not true. The best pizza I’ve had in my life was made in my GE Best Buy oven and my church’s convection and regular gas ovens. After that, Bari and Bakers Pride. After that, I suppose the fancy ovens fit in somewhere.

I understand what they do. They burn the crust a little and make the outside of it hard. Whoopty-doo. What if your customers are among those rare individuals who don’t really care for burned food? Right now, my big worry is excessive browning. I have a wild suspicion that this will be a bigger problem in an oven that burns hot enough to melt foil.

I’ve had lots of pizza from wood-fired ovens. It’s not particularly good. I know that’s heresy, but I don’t care. I’m used to the majority being wrong. A yuppie/metrosexual oven is a lot of aggravation, just to get a niche taste that isn’t all that wonderful.

We have a chain here that advertises coal-fired ovens. That sounds disgusting. Coal is full of tar and weird chemicals. I’m surprised it’s legal to cook with it. Coal has kerosene in it, doesn’t it? They call kerosene “coal oil.” Coal doesn’t smell all that great when it burns. I guess they must have a way of keeping the fumes away from the food.

Anyway, I haven’t tried the coal pizza, but I’ve been told it’s not as good as the best conventional pizza available here. And the best conventional pizza is about a letter grade below my pizza.

This is the craziest city. It seems like almost everyone knows what good pizza tastes like (except Cubans who have never left the county), but almost nobody can make it.

If I end up doing this for real, it will be in big fat stainless ovens powered by gas. Let the metrosexuals reinvent the wheel. I just want to make good food.

Pies of Piety

My church’s first made-from-scratch pizza day went very well. I cranked out 8 Sicilians. The last two sold before I baked them. The pastor made me send two slices backstage after the first service, at ten a.m.! And one of his daughters in law, who bought part of the last two pies, described the pizza as “life-changing.” One of my armorbearer buddies tried it and confirmed what I already knew: “better than Steve’s.”

Steve’s is the place two blocks from the joint I’m tempted to buy. Steve’s is very popular, and there’s nothing wrong with the pizza. But it isn’t life-changing.

I can’t shake the belief that God handed me this recipe. I’ve been making very good thin pizza for a long time, but Sicilian has been a puzzle. I started working on it recently, and it progressed by giant leaps until it was so good, it was better than I had realized pizza could be. The first time I tried to make it was on January 18, and even that first pie was the best Sicilian I had ever had.

We need to make changes at the cafe. We need to time the pizzas to match the ends of the services. We had some people receiving cold slices today. We need to buy some boxes. I sent a friend’s wife home with a pizza in an aluminum pan. We need a second cash register. And we need to be ambitious. I can make 20 pizzas on a Sunday, no problem. We can sell that many, once word gets out. We should be able to unload another 20 on the weekday of their choice.

We also need better communication. Somebody threw out around seven pounds of flour, probably thinking it was a bag of trash.

I think they were worried about working me too hard, but my concern is that they won’t make enough pizza. As long as I’m standing there, they need to make use of me. They don’t pay for labor, so every pie is mostly profit. The more they sell, the more the church makes.

If we could start attracting attention, it would not be hard to sell a couple hundred pizzas a week. That would net the church a hundred grand a year, more or less.

I need to streamline production. I need to start rolling the dough into rectangles and letting it rise in the pans instead of in containers. Doubling the size of the pizzas would help, although not a great deal. One problem with doubling the size is you lose a lot of crust, and the crust is a big feature of Sicilian pizza.

The pans I seasoned worked great. Two of them had a couple of sticky places, but that won’t happen again, now that they’ve been used. I wiped them down and hid them in my prep table. Those things are absolutely vital. I don’t want somebody making scrambled eggs in them.

It’s shocking how fast you can make pizza in one little convection oven. I baked two pies at a time, but I could do six, with practice. Each pie takes around eight minutes to bake, including toasting the bottom. I figure I could do approximately 25 an hour, if I didn’t have to do anything else.

It doesn’t take much room, either. The two little tables they gave me are all I need for preparation. Cleanup wasn’t bad at all. Twenty minutes, if people would get out of my way.

I used the food processor today, but I’m thinking next time I’ll just take a big bowl and make five pounds of no-knead flour at a pop. The food processor is faster and easier for small batches, but I can only do two pounds at a time.

This is a breeze. I can’t believe everybody’s not doing it. Well, yes I can. They can’t. Just like they can’t kill a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. You need to be hooked up.

To run a small pizza place, you need one person during really slow times and two to three when it picks up. This is doable.

I enjoyed the notoriety today. I got a cheer before I left. And now people will be nice to me. In case they need me.

They were already nice, though.

I ate one slice, and I paid for it. I don’t want to set a bad example by cheating. I wasn’t going to eat pizza today, but I skipped breakfast, and I was in a hurry.

Man, I’m looking at what I wrote, above. Two hundred pizzas a week equals a hundred grand for the church. In a store, it would be less, because I’d pay rent and utilities and so on. On the other hand, I’d sell a lot more than two hundred pizzas a week. Today people were happy to pay $2.50 for a four-by-four-and-a-half-inch slice. I wonder what the street price is. The food cost is about $4.00 for six slices, so we netted eleven bucks a pie, or at least we will when people stop throwing flour out.

Let’s see. Flour cost: eleven cents. Sauce: twenty cents. Cheese: $1.65-$2.10, depending on what I use. So the pies cost $1.91-$2.41, plus a piddling amount for the tiny quantities of oil and seasonings. Figure on using Grande cheese in the future, and it’s on the expensive side, so about $2.40 per pie. Sell the pie for $15.00 as slices or $12.00 as a pie. The net on a pie is at least $9.60 before paying rent, employees, utilities, and so on. Add toppings, and you have what amounts to a license to steal. A dollar-fifty (Papa John’s price) for ten cents’ worth of onions or four ounces of cheap meat. The meat may not make you much money, but the vegetables sure will. And then there are rolls and soda. I don’t think cheesecake would be a big profit generator, because it’s expensive to make, but it would get people into the store, for sure.

As for toppings, let’s say mushrooms, onions, green peppers, and ham. Figure a dollar of profit on the ham and roughly $3.50 on the other junk, so maybe $4.50. Now you’re netting around fourteen bucks on the pie. Does that look right? I have never paid the bills at a pizzeria. Surely if you sell fifty or a hundred pies a day, you can find enough gross profit to survive.

The pizzeria I’m looking at now can cook twelve pies at once, and a thin pie takes seven minutes. Call it ten minutes for a thin or thick pie. Seventy-two pies an hour. Something like that. That’s 14″ pies, and my Sicilians are only 9″ by 12″.

I felt good about the convection oven until I wrote that. Three times the pizza, in the same time, with about the same energy cost. Probably.

I think the key is not to compete with the bottom-feeders. Then you end up looking for cheese made from soybeans and guar gum, and your pizza is bad, and the chain next door can sell equally bad pizza for less. If selling bad pizza were a good idea, Papa John’s wouldn’t be struggling right now, and they are. Besides, who wants to be known for doing something really badly? John Schnatter isn’t a chef. He’s a bean-counter. There is value in that–he’s rich–but there isn’t much satisfaction. Not for me, anyway.

People say the pizza market is bad, but at the good places, customers form lines around the block. That will always be true, unless we have a full-blown depression.

Fun to think about.

I better go shower the deep-fryer smell off myself. Although I will miss it.

While I’m gone, check THIS out. Like you haven’t already. Chris gets better every week.

More Stuff Happens

I’ll tell you what. My walk with God is turning out to be more like a ride at a water park. Don’t push. Just close your eyes and yell.

I saw someone interview Kari Jobe. With a big smile, she said God was “just wrecking” her. I get it.

This morning I hit Denny’s for my weekly prayer group. The guys around the table were ordinary Christians like me. Not pastors or teachers. But every time one opened his mouth, I felt like I was hearing God say, “Now, Steve. About the problems you’re having. Here’s what you do…” It was all on target. To some extent, I get that in the church’s services, but the things I hear in the small group are laser-guided and highly specific.

I talked to one of the guys about pizza. Two, actually, but I only talked to one about the business side. The other guy just wants to help in the church kitchen.

The other guy says he would be interested in getting involved, if I open a pizzeria. This would be a great help to me, because I’m just one person, and you can’t run a pizzeria by yourself. Even a small operation will require six-day-a-week labor, plus all the duties of management.

Right now, pizzerias are folding all over the county. I don’t know if that’s normal. It probably is. People who know nothing about cooking think they can learn it all from going to a food convention or buying a book written by someone who can’t make good pizza. Then they use bad ingredients in order to save money, and they’re undercapitalized, and they go belly-up. That’s my guess. The cheap ingredients have unquestionably been in play at a number of the places that have failed around here, and I’ve only seen one pizzeria with good food go out of business. In my entire life, I mean.

Anyway, pizzerias are available cheap. I can get into one for the price of a nice car, and that includes food, rent, and utilities for several months. That’s just insane. If I go out of business, who cares? I mean, okay, I care. But I won’t be busted.

If the first one works, I could buy two or three new ones. As soon as I can find people to man them, I mean. Eventually, I could run a circuit, consulting at each one to make sure they don’t do anything stupid.

If I did really well, I don’t know what to do with the money I’d be paid; I’d be thrilled just to have my long-dreamed-of armed compound north of Dade County, with a concrete wall and razor wire, plus trained roaming badgers with lasers on their heads. I would need to find good Christian causes to give to.

One of my problems has been the requirement that I only partner with Christians. That’s not negotiable. You can’t discriminate when you hire, but you can definitely discriminate when you choose partners. It’s not the same thing. There are no laws against it. So while I would eventually have employees of every stripe, they wouldn’t be high on the food chain, and I would not expect them to interfere with God’s efforts to make the business work. There would be no rainbow stickers on the doors, and all employees with carry permits would be allowed to provide for their self-defense.

I will not partner with a heathen regardless of whether people hate me for saying it, but I will definitely need management-level people to help me. That means I need competent Christians. Suddenly, they’re popping up. One has, anyway. Extremely solid guy. An excellent prospect.

I’m thinking the best thing is to retain over 50% of the ownership, so I can insist on my vision for the company. I want to keep the limited menu and my recipes and ingredients. But I want anyone who functions as a partner to be compensated well. I want to be a ruthless dictator, but not a stingy one.

I was hoping Mike would be available, but he’s trapped for another year and a half. That’s a bummer.

In months past, I just rolled the pizzeria idea around in my mind for fun, but now I’m starting to feel like I’m on rails, headed for the pizza business. Almost as if I have no choice. Which is fine and dandy by me. I would not mind living like Jacob, finding favor and guidance regardless of what my enemies do.

Waking up after my wedding with a homely girl, however…that I can do without.

I’m up for anything. I feel like I’m seated in the Tilt-a-Whirl car with the restraining bar firmly in place, and God is doing all the work. I could never have made this happen, and without the little shoves and nudges, I would not have made this decision, but if he wants to put it in motion, I’m on board all the way.

My judgment has always been…not spectacular…so if God wants to steer the bus, it will be hard to complain. In spite of my staggering talent for complaining.

Is this really going to happen?

Life is just too weird.

Pizza Tools for Cheap

Here is my new pizza peel.

Sweet, right? Took five minutes on the table saw, plus a little work with the bench grinder and angle grinder. Now I can lift a 12″ x 9″ pizza out of the pan with minimal risk of a disaster.

A few minutes ago, it was a 16″ pizza pan. If I felt like it, I could make a handle for it in about fifteen minutes and then use the peel from now on. Maybe I’ll do that. It will work just as well as the peels I can buy, and the total cost is under four bucks.

Man, I love having power tools.

More

Now improved!

The Workmate was essential to getting the bend right without a press brake. Is there anything it can’t do?

I am a Businessman

It’s turning out to be an interesting day.

I was distressed to learn that GFS charges tons of money to slice their cheese. Their provolone sells for under $3.00 per pound in a block, but it’s way higher in packaged slices. The figure escapes me, but I think it was something like six bucks. I started looking for a Craigslist slicer, figuring we might get a donation in exchange for a tax receipt, but then I decided to check out food service prices.

Costco mozzarella is swell, but you have to go get it. They don’t deliver in Miami. Grande makes wonderful cheese, but it’s wholesale-only. I decided to call Grande and see who the local distributors were. They gave me a rep’s number, and he referred me back to GFS, so I got a quote out of them. GFS referred me to a salesman who does their route business (as contrasted with walk-in), and the salesman said he might be able to do better on the price. That puts me below the Costco/GFS price and at least close to the price of Costco mozzarella by itself.

Oddly, Grande’s shredded cheese costs about what their blocks cost.

Anyway, the cheese problem is fixed. Either we get a slicer and keep doing what we’re doing, or we go with Grande. Week after next, they’ll give me some samples to play with!

I still need a small peel to pull little Sicilians out of the pan. I went to the local Ace Hardware, hoping they’d have steel dustpans, and sure enough, they did. For eight bucks. I bought one and kept the receipt. Then I hit Home Depot to look at their sheet metal. It’s flimsy and very expensive, so I didn’t buy.

While I was at Home Depot, I realized I had $3.99 aluminum pizza pans with thick rims. This is like 10% of the Home Depot cost for the same square footage of really thin, useless metal. So I’m going to put a pan in a clamp and hit it with the plasma cutter or use the table saw. In about two minutes, I’ll have a suitable piece of aluminum, and then I can bend it to suit my needs. I’ll keep the rim on one end to serve as a handle. You can’t beat that. I’m only out the cost of a pan, and I can grab a new one at GFS at my convenience.

Honestly, I do not understand metal prices. You would think the people who sell metal would realize they should charge less for raw materials than manufacturers charge for things made from them. I don’t know where I could get an 18″ circle of thick aluminum, but I’ll bet I’d have to pay thirty bucks.

This is tremendous fun. The people at my church feel like I’m doing them a favor, and that’s true, but I get to polish up my pizza technique and find out about the business. And the pizza is going to be fantastic. It will be a success in terms of sales, although I don’t know if the church will break even. Surely they will, though. No tax and no labor costs. If God continues to be as kind as he has been so far, we’ll do great.

The Bible criticizes people who make sanguine predictions about their businesses without mentioning the importance of God’s favor, so I try to throw it in when I talk about my expectations.