New Sensation for Me

I had a spiffy time at church today. I am finally starting to blend in. Every so often, I realize it’s a little weird for white Southern lawyer to be part of the cast of characters at a church comprised mostly of Haitians, Jamaicans, and Cubans, but the sensation only lasts for a second.

I think the kookier Christians get, the more post-racial we are. Charismatics are pretty far-out. Now that I think about it, there are a bunch of interracial couples in the church, so maybe my theory holds water.

When I was in law school, there was an annoying level of tension between blacks and whites. It was really bizarre. I guess I found it strange because of my past experiences in an Assemblies of God church, where people were just people. Sometimes I treated black law students as though they were just like everyone else, and they did not welcome it. Many of them separated themselves from the rest of us. Crazy, given that this was in the late 90s.

I’m part of the church’s “armorbearer” team, which is a group of men who do everything from basic security to getting the pastor his Altoids. We had a swell meeting after the service. We’re really coming together. We’re getting our firearms policy straight, and we’re taking steps to get professional security training so we don’t screw up too much. It’s a wonderful club to be in. These guys get it done; that’s what they’re all about. We don’t get to hop up and down on the stage or star in the church’s videos. We just wander around behind the scenes, trying to make stuff work. The people in the more glamorous jobs have their own problems to contend with, so we try to make life easier for them.

There are other volunteer branches in the church that keep things moving. The parking guys. The ushers. The kitchen people. If I try to make a list, I’ll leave half of the volunteers out.

I finally got to root around in the kitchen and make pizza plans. If I can work it out, I plan to go up there tomorrow and try to make a few pies with their equipment. This is just R&D. I have a feeling it won’t be hard to find test pilots.

Their ovens only go to 500°, which is troubling. I’ll have to see if it causes a problem. My guess is that it won’t. I would think thick pizza would actually benefit from a lower temperature.

They have a weird commercial convection oven which could conceivably bake several big pies at once, and they have a traditional gas oven. I’ll just have to see what works.

I think the best approach is to sell slices. This place is not efficient, and to sell whole pies, you need to move fast. And you need to have lots of trays and screens and containers for dough. That would be a pain. And most of our customers won’t want a whole pie anyway.

I want to train the customers to like Sicilian. It’s less messy, and you get much more food for the effort and time. You can cut one pie into eight slices, and every slice is a meal. Except for the gluttons. A 16″ circular pie will only serve four, assuming you cut it in eight slices.

I’m really excited. I’m happy to volunteer in any area, but it’s nice to do something I’m actually gifted at.

It turns out there is a Gordon Food Service four miles north of the church, and there’s a Costco not far off. That means I can get everything I need, nearby. We may be able to get quality stuff delivered by Sysco, but we’re not there yet.

I picked up some starter items. Cutter. Cookie sheet. Tray. Screen. Sauce. Cheese. Yeast. Vinegar. That will make getting started a lot easier. They’ll still have to get a peel and a food scale, and we have to figure out how to make dough. They have a Kitchenaid stand mixer that says “Hobart” on it, but I don’t know if they have dough attachments, and I have to figure out how to use them. A big food processor would be nice.

Light olive oil is a problem. Everyone squeals about extra virgin so much, I assumed the light stuff would be cheaper. But I haven’t found a good price on it. I’m considering mixing extra virgin with safflower oil. You really don’t want a heavy olive flavor in your pizza oil. It works fine in rolls, but extra light is perfect for pizza crust. GFS has a blend I might try. Sometimes the cheap stuff works better than the good stuff.

I sure hope this works out. It would be something for us to take pride in, and it would give people from the neighborhood a reason to walk in the door. And the cafe has been a real challenge for the church, so anything I can do to make it work will be a good thing.

Today I learned something interesting about one of the armorbearer guys I hang around with. He’s an accomplished musician. He plays the trombone. He used to tour and perform when he was a kid. My cousin’s husband is a classical trombone virtuoso, and this guy actually knows who he is. Can you beat that?

I can’t believe I know another person under 60 who knows who Lester Young was. Man, I feel less alone.

Another of those funny God “coincidences,” I guess.

You’ll Still Need a Tray

Thanks, any and all who assisted with prayer this morning. Things went very well.

I have nothing to do for the rest of the day. What now? If there is one thing I hate, it’s idleness.

Shut up.

Can I bore you again with my supernatural weight loss? I made pizza over and over again for a month, and depending on how accurate my scale is, I either gained no weight or a pound and a half. Because I ate tons of pizza and God made it magically nonfattening? No. I mean, I ate plenty, but I’m pretty sure my permanent increase in self-control kept it down to a harmless amount. I don’t think angels are hovering around my maw, destroying calories miraculously as food gets caught in the gravity well. Although I rule nothing out.

I love pizza more than just about anything on earth, but once I got Sicilian figured out, I no longer had an overpowering urge to make it. That is completely bizarre. I never got tired of pizza in the past. I ate it every day for long periods. I had no problem with eating it twice a day.

As long as I had sauce, cheese, and flour, I had to make pizza until the supplies ran out or my arches collapsed. But I’m sitting here right now with no idea what I’m going to have for lunch, and I have delicious Costco cheese and two kinds of sauce handy, and the only thing I’m sure of is that I’m going to have something boring and healthy. This is like a crackhead turning down rocks in favor of Sanka.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to help anyone else get what I got. Nobody cares. When I talk to people about it, they start telling me all their diet secrets. That’s a completely different subject. No relevance at all. I’m not on a diet. I have diet secrets, too, but they don’t work. This is a different thing. I just eat less. No one understands. God just dropped it on me. I don’t even know why. I hope he shoves a few more presents off the back of his sleigh. Or chariot or whatever.

I’m right down here! Look me up on Google Earth. I’ll paint a big X on the driveway. Or maybe a yud.

Imagine Moses talking to someone about parting the Red Sea. The other guy would say, “Yeah, you can build a caisson with lots of slave labor and spend about ten years pumping the water out,” and Moses would go, “Dude, I just waved a stick.”

After a few minutes, Moses would throw up his hands and say “whatever.” Or “oy.”

Sometimes I feel like I’m talking Chinese. “God fixed me so I don’t overeat!” “Yeah, I’m thinking of doing Slim-Fast.” “No, GOD FIXED ME SO I DON’T OVEREAT.” I feel like Lego Darth Vader trying to make people understand he’s not Jeff Vader or Mr. Stephens, the head of catering.

Obscure reference. See Youtube. Search under Eddie Izzard.

I have to watch that now.

Not by Sight

Pizza, pizza, pizza.

I keep thinking about it.

I have my recipes fixed up, so I no longer have to make pizza every day. I used to make it every day because I wanted to eat it. These days, it’s just puzzle drive. But my gut doesn’t know the difference, so I wanted it to end. I haven’t put on weight, but it made me nervous anyway.

I have a burning urge to buy a defunct pizzeria, but I am trying to squelch it. Do I really want to work sixty hours a week, dealing with the public? Ack. That’s not an inviting prospect. I like the idea of squashing all competitors and becoming the pizza king of the Southeast, but I would have no time for myself. No tool time. No piano. No cornet. No music theory. No writing, period. Leave that stuff for the next life, because you can’t do it here AND run a pizzeria. God gave me some natural gifts, and I would have to abandon all of them, except the ability to make good food. It would be like cutting my legs off. I’d have to say goodbye to big parts of me.

I would much rather write. I got a couple of offers to write Christian books, but the people involved have not followed through. My pastor is just too busy to work on the book he and I were doing, and the other guy–the former addict turned rehab director–just wandered off. This is one of the frustrating things about Christianity. People start things they don’t finish. Even Paul did it. He started to travel to Asia Minor to spread the gospel, and the Holy Spirit put the kibosh on it, so he had to go somewhere else.

Another frustrating thing about writing for God is that you need a divine spark. You can’t just decide to write a book. God has to be in it. He has to give you the concept. Otherwise, it’s just you, doing what you think is right, without his guidance, approval, and favor. It’s not like being a Christian air conditioner repairman or a Christian car salesman. Those people just go from deal to deal without pausing. When someone comes in and asks to look at a used Taurus, you don’t have to get down on your knees and ask if it’s God’s will that you sell a car. The founder of Chick-fil-a is a Christian. I very much doubt that he requires his employees to pray before they agree to take people’s orders.

By the way, that company proves what God can do for you, if you’re receptive. I can’t understand why anyone would eat at Chick-fil-a, but they do. The food is ridiculous. A bland fried cutlet on a damp hamburger bun. Come on. How could that work? But it did, even though they refuse to serve on Sunday.

I remember seeing my first Chick-fil-a, years ago, in a mall. I thought, “Man, those people are idiots. That will never work.”

People said the same thing about the ark. “Water from the sky? Are you crazy? That will never happen. And what do you know about naval architecture, pops? Nothing, that’s what. I’m going to go home and sacrifice goats to Baal and make fun of you.”

I’ve been reading about The Book of Eli. It’s a big hit. Guess what that means? More Christian movies in a year or so. Almost all will be bad. Almost all will be packed with wrongness. Maybe two or three genuinely anointed films will squeeze out while the window is open. Is that God’s plan? Hard to say. It’s obvious, and God specializes in subtlety and unpredictability.

I read about Gary Whitta, the screenwriter. Judging by what I read, he’s not a Christian. Or maybe he is, but he’s not hardcore. He says he doesn’t think The Book of Eli is a Christian movie. He’s a video game expert. Can you believe that? But he wrote a movie that is extremely consistent with principles of charismatic Christianity, which non-Christians and even non-charismatics know almost nothing about. A mainstream Baptist or Catholic could never have the same understanding of this movie that a charismatic can have. Even if they understood, they wouldn’t agree with it. In fact, this morning I read a review by a well-known Christian blogger, and she clearly had no idea what the movie was about. It might as well have been two hours of quantum mechanics explained in Navajo.

The non-charismatic take appears to be this: God tells a guy to preserve the Bible, and God takes care of him while he does it, but there is a lot of mean violence, and there are dirty words, and the stuff that happens is not very plausible, so why are people going to this movie? That’s way off. If you’re worried about the movie’s premises making sense, you missed the whole point. For that matter, when you watch any movie, it’s generally a bad idea to let things like that bother you. Imagine trying to enjoy Bugs Bunny with an attitude like that. “Rabbits can’t talk! I want my money back!” Forget the Wizard of Oz. Forget Star Wars.

It’s kind of dangerous to start thinking God is sending you messages no one else can see. On the other hand, he does it all the time. The psalms are full of things no one could fully understand until after the crucifixion and the events in the Upper Room. Jesus spoke parables to ordinary people, and they didn’t understand, but the disciples got the true meanings. You don’t want to become a nut who thinks his toaster is commanding him to do stuff for God, but encrypted messages have been a big part of worshiping Jehovah since the dawn of history. He gave Nebuchadnezzar dreams he couldn’t understand. He wrote an incomprehensible message on the wall in Babylon. This is just how God is. It’s part of his modus operandi.

If you think God doesn’t speak in riddles, explain Ezekiel and the Revelation to me. Good luck with that.

Yesterday I heard a message from Perry Stone. He reminded listeners that Jesus predicted that many would be offended before his return. I understand “offense” to mean anger or strong disagreement aimed at God or the church. The Book of Eli may well provoke a lot of offense. Many charismatics are thrilled, and we’re saying, “We get it.” Some non-charismatics seem upset by the violence, and they think the movie is shallow. Unbelievers are just mad all the time, whenever Christianity makes it into a movie theater; they don’t need a particular reason. People like me will say, “This is what real Christianity is like. This is what walking by faith is.” Some non-charismatics will say, “Christianity is not about hitting people with swords and talking dirty!”, because they can’t comprehend the movie, and they won’t understand what we’re saying.

We’re seeing all sorts of offense already. Satan turns good into evil, in people’s minds. The church is under heavy persecution for opposing homosexuality. Millions are offended by our defense of God’s will. Suddenly, people who believe the Bible are bigots. We’re also under attack for teaching our kids that God created us. Suddenly, real Christians are ignorant. Faith equals rejection of logic. We’re anti-knowledge! We want to break into pharmacies and destroy the antibiotics. We want to smash all the computers. Evil! Evil! Christians are a plague!

One of the most plausible premises of The Book of Eli was that after the nuclear holocaust, people burned Bibles, claiming religion had caused the war. I find that completely believable. To an unbeliever, Christianity is just as silly and evil as wahhabist Islam. That’s a classic type of offense. The ancient Romans exemplified it.

This movie will probably be a powerful vehicle for offense. It will be a sword that divides. Oh, well. God took care of the fictional Eli, and he will take care of real Christians, too. People will attack us, but if you think about it, the longest any Christian can suffer here is about a hundred years, while God’s postmortem judgment lasts forever. We’re on the sweet side of this conflict, even if that isn’t obvious at the moment.

The Cheese Doesn’t Wear the Sauce

The latest pizza experiment was a success. I succeeded in trying something and finding out it didn’t work.

Some time ago, I posted some Youtubes of northern pizza guys making Sicilian. They put the cheese under the sauce. Claimed it kept the crust from getting soggy. Tonight, I tried putting cheese directly on the crust, but I also put some over the sauce. Result: silliness.

The cheese under the sauce didn’t really cook. It melted, but I wouldn’t describe it as cooked. And it didn’t mingle well with the cheese above the sauce. There was also some structural instability which made the cheese and sauce ooze over one side of the crust.

Waste of time. Still a fine dinner, but nothing like the world-class Sicilian I made last night.

My cooking method is still perfect. Worked like a dream. And the small pizza was a good idea. Fewer calories, more crust per unit of area, and easier to handle.

Hand me the Loupe

I have to quit listening to readers.

Reader HTRN mentioned certified San Marzano tomatoes, so I had to get out and drive and buy some.

Now Mike has recommended yuppie mozzarella sitting in water, and HTRN seconded him. So of course, I had a moment of weakness and bought some.

I paid $3.29. Not so bad, right? Wait. The label…can that be right? It says “1 3/4 oz.”

Arrgh.

I didn’t want enough for a whole pie, but that’s insane.

I did more research on San Marzano tomatoes. If you look around on the web, you can get La Regina brand in a #10 can for between four and five bucks. Of course, you have to pay for delivery, and you have to buy a case.

Pizza nuts claim La Regina is the best. They also say that if you get Cento, you want the ones with “Italian” below the picture on the label. I was not able to find those.

There is also a tomato known as La Bella, which is a San Marzano type, grown nearby. It gets good reviews.

Inevitable

It never ends.

Tonight I’ll be making pizza for dinner.

The other day, I realized my quest for small pans was not really necessary. You can make great rectangular pizza in a pan bigger than the pie. So tonight I’m going to make a 9 x 6 pizza, which is really the perfect size for a single diner. I want to see how it comes out. It will have a slightly higher crust-to-cheese ratio than a bigger pizza.

I also want to try putting cheese directly on the dough. Some northern pizzerias do that. But I don’t want to do it their way. They put mozzarella slices on the dough and then pour sauce on them. I want to put sliced cheese on the dough, add sauce, and then apply more cheese. The idea of sauce with nothing over it seems wrong to me.

This should be a marvelous pie. The cooking technique and other details are polished to the point where I can’t do much better.

My church has everybody on a 40-day project. Some are fasting every day. Some are doing a Daniel fast. I set aside one mid-day hour for prayer every day, and every Monday, I fast until six p.m. So when dinner time comes tonight, I think I’ll be in the right frame of mind.

There are so many things you can do to pizza, beyond what I’ve done. You can add preferments (stuff fermented in advance) to the dough. You can keep the dough several days to let it age. You can buy expensive yeast. None of that seems worth messing with. I admit, sourdough would be a nice option, but other than that, I can’t imagine anything making my pizza better. It’s that good.

Most cooks like to investigate every option and go through endless ingredients. They like to consult the foodies and crib from TV. That has never interested me. If you know what you’re doing, you can take three or four ingredients, use them correctly, and make something that will drive people wild. If you can’t make a dynamite dinner for four for $20, you have no business fooling with expensive ingredients, fancy theories, and foodies. They won’t help.

This is one reason I love Cuban food and Southern food. A Cuban joint can sell the best Cuban dinner on earth for ten bucks plus tip and make a profit. The meat Southern cooks love best is so cheap, it’s almost free. There is nothing wrong with taking the fancy route when it’s justified, but most people do it not because they’re enlightened, but because they can’t compete without crutches.

What do biscuits and gravy cost? Pennies a serving. How many people can do it right? Very few. I have never had good biscuits and gravy in a restaurant, but I make them at home, over and over. In a Southern breakfast, it’s better than the vast majority of $75 meals you can buy in Miami.

I can pay 99¢ per pound for tough pork and make wonderful barbecue. I can get ham hocks for nearly nothing. When it comes to food, “good” and “expensive” and “complicated” are things that have little relationship to each other.

Food is like anything else. There are sheep who think external trappings and jargon are what count, and then there are people who actually know what they’re doing.

I have to decide whether to have Stanislaus or Cento tomatoes on the pizza. I’m almost out of Cento. I don’t think I have enough for a pie. And it’s raining.

Stanislaus!

I am so grateful for the success I’ve had. Even if I never cook professionally, it is extremely satisfying.

Pizza is a Relentless Master

Life continues to be filled with weird “coincidences.”

Yesterday I made the best Sicilian pizza I can even imagine, and I decided to call Mike. Turned out he had left a message for me earlier in the day. Then he sent me a couple of cell photos of a Sicilian he was making. When we finally hooked up, he said he had to tell me about the phenomenal pie he had just made. He was nearly as excited about it as I was about mine.

Here’s a photo. Still waiting for him to send the photo of the finished pie to my email so I don’t have to forward it from my cell.

The way we work is so funny. I called him up and told him about the breakthroughs I had with my cooking method, and he listened, and he decided he had to make a pie. Then he ignored almost all of what I said.

For some reason, he decided to try high-end cheese. He bought some kind of weird mozzarella that comes sitting in water. I’ve never tried that stuff, because it looks pretty gross. He also got expensive provolone and romano. The pizza probably cost forty dollars to make. Maybe more. I guess it had to be more, because he spent at least thirty on the cheese, and he put a lot of meat on it.

He says he could not get the cheese to brown until he used the broiler. Nonetheless, he was thrilled with the results.

His method is a lot more work than mine. I don’t plan to try it any time soon. And that expensive cheese is not for me. I can make myself a wonderful lunch for $1.75, so upping it to ten or fifteen bucks is not appealing. But I’ll bet his pizza was magnificent.

I found something funny today on the web. Someone wants to sell a pizzeria for $14,500. I couldn’t figure out why it was so cheap. It’s in a nice location, and it’s equipped.

While I was rooting around, I found out it’s about fifty feet from a Papa John’s.

My guess? Some guy who made bad pizza got squashed by a megabusiness that makes bad pizza and charges less.

I’m seriously tempted. It may seem stupid to try to sell pizza in a facility nearly next door to Papa John’s, but I don’t think it would be hard. In fact, I think the location would be a blessing. People would grumble as they reluctantly headed to Papa John’s to pick up their disgusting ketchup pies, and what would they see? A new pizzeria a few feet away. What would you do? I know what I’d do. I’d try the new place.

Apart from that, Papa John’s doesn’t rely on foot traffic. They have no seats. So the market isn’t quite the same. And Papa John’s is in a death spiral right now because they don’t sell slices. Cheap joints like McDonald’s are killing them, because people don’t want to spend fifteen dollars for lunch. You can’t have Papa John’s deliver a two-dollar slice to you, but you can get a two-dollar sandwich at McDonald’s. I also learned that in at least in one area of the country, Papa John’s is killing its franchises by jacking up the franchise fee. If they’re doing it there, they’re probably doing it here.

I don’t even understand that. You pay 9% to Papa John’s, plus a one-time (supposedly) $50,000 fee, and in return, what do you get? The right to buy bad ingredients from their commissary, probably at bad prices, plus an obligation to serve customers bad Papa John’s pizza. You can’t make good pizza, even if you want to. You can’t sell slices.

So you’re paying for things that actually damage your business. The only positives are corporate support and the well-known name.

Fifty grand will buy a lot of local advertising. That nine percent would cover your lease, so an additional nine percent would go into your pocket. Where is the down side to going it alone?

I know why people get Papa John’s franchises. I think. It’s because they can’t cook. Franchisees aren’t cooks. They’re dentists and lawyers and businessmen who need to invest their capital. Papa John’s shows up and says, “Give us a giant amount of money, and we’ll tell you how to do everything, and you’ll get a better return than you could expect in the stock market.” So they plop down the cash and open bad pizzerias. And the pizza is just good enough to make their stores turn a profit. It works, but it’s not necessarily the best way to run a pizza joint. I think when a good pizzeria opens next door to Papa John’s, the new place is the predator, not the victim.

We used to have a bad Mexican place down here. I shouldn’t say it was bad. It was okay. It was a shiny chain restaurant. The Texas Taco Factory. The food was better than Taco Bell. It was edible.

Literally fifty feet away, some Mexicans opened a place called Taco Rico. It’s like a closet. It’s not clean. There is barely room for tables.

The Texas Taco Factory was always empty. It was funny. They had a big ol’ drive-thru sign and a freshly blacktopped lot with tons of spaces, and they had nice tables and chairs, and nobody went in. Everyone went next door, to Taco Rico.

The Texas Taco Factory is now a Starbuck’s. There is a second Taco Rico down the road, because the old one did so well. Taco Rico puts tables on the sidewalk out front, because they can’t handle their customer load.

And the food isn’t that good. It’s much better than the competition, but it’s nothing to get excited about. It was good enough to kill the Texas Taco Factory. That’s what matters.

A place that sold pizza, rolls, cheesecake, non-alcoholic beverages, and NOTHING ELSE would kill Papa John’s, if the food was really good. Near me, we have Papa John’s, Domino’s, the dubious and inconsistent “Miami’s Best Pizza,” Gables Pizza and Salad, Cozzoli’s, and Pizza Rustica. Those are all within two miles. Where would I get pizza, if I felt like buying instead of cooking? Dolce Vita, which is a ten-minute drive. I wouldn’t go to any of the closer places, unless I was feeling especially lazy. When you want pizza, you want GOOD pizza. The pizza world is a meritocracy, and pizza is never a commodity.

The Texas Taco Factory used to be a Pizza Hut. They couldn’t even survive.

I fired off an email, to the person selling the pizzeria. I could not resist. Maybe one day I’ll actually do this. But I’ll need to get Mike to totally abandon his career and his family first.

I can’t understand why he hasn’t jumped on my offer.

While Waiting to Whack Satan

Last week, I made the best pizza I had ever eaten. Then a couple of days later, I made the best pizza I had ever eaten. Today, just to mix it up and avoid monotony, I did the following: I made the best pizza I have ever eaten.

I’m actually freaked out, it’s so good. Not only is this the best pizza I have ever eaten; I did not realize it was possible for pizza to be this good. I know I sound like a nut when I say this, but I am genuinely shaken.

Funniest part: the pizza was mangled. I was lazy when I detached it from the pan to put it on the stone, and I put a hole in it. Then when I took it off the stone, an entire side tore off. I stuck all the pieces on my serving pan and ate it anyway. The torn-up, crusty pieces may have been the best parts.

The crust…

I am trying to describe it. Airy. Hot. Yeasty. Crisp on the edges. Crunchy on the bottom. Perfectly browned. Full of the buttery taste of cheap olive oil.

It got a tiny bit soggy under the cheese, and that actually made it BETTER.

I altered my usual cheese bill a little. What a change. My cheese is now unbelievably stretchy. Just sour enough to be interesting. Bland enough to work with the sauce instead of fighting it. Highly resistant to browning, but nicely crunchy at the very edges.

The sauce…I got lazy and used the Cento San Marzano tomatoes suggested by reader HTRN, all by themselves. I drained off the puree to make the flavor stronger. I was afraid they would be too weak, but the buttery cheese and yeasty crust combined perfectly with the comparatively mild sauce. I’m sure Stanislaus would have been just as good, in its own way, but this was shocking.

Let’s see. A pie has 12 ounces of cheese in it. That’s about $1.75, at Costco prices. That is not excessive. I can put that in a pizza for two people and charge enough to cover the cost. Not only would people line up to buy this stuff; they would trade their children for it. I would. Trade other people’s children for this pizza, I mean. But then I would also trade them for a glass of water.

It’s so good, I am worried about posting the changes I made. No one will use them anyway, and they are suddenly starting to look like trade secrets.

Pizza is a wonderful thing. If you open an ordinary restaurant, you don’t have to make good food, but you have to do a lot of other things. You have to pick a good location. You have to be nice to customers. You have to have great service. With pizza, quality is all that matters. If it’s good, people will do whatever it takes to get it. They’ll rappel up a cliff, to the worst location on earth. You can slap them when they order and make them pay with Burmese currency. They won’t care.

I thought I would go crazy and eat the whole pie, but I quit. When food is this amazing, you have a burning desire to eat it, but once you have a reasonable amount, you’re so satisfied, you don’t have to keep cramming it in.

This has to be from God. HAS to be. I could not do this.

Now I have to go put Shout on my shirt.

I Live the Dream

I have this pizza thing totally figured out.

Today I made a pie, and I made adjustments to make sure the crust was cooked correctly. It worked great, although I didn’t time it quite right.

Here’s what I made. First the whole pie.

Now the crust. Those indentations are from my fingers. I made them intentionally.

I made the sauce with a 50/50 mix of Stanislaus Saporito and Cento San Marzano tomatoes (no puree included), and it was excellent, but truthfully, I think either product is better alone than with the other. You gain some of each product’s strengths, but you also lose some.

As for the crust, I rotated the pan once while it was cooking on the bottom rack. I had a hot stone on an upper rack. After nine minutes, I moved the stone to the lower rack (turned out to be unnecessary) and put the pie on it. I left the pie there for two minutes and yanked it. The crust was crisper than a crust finished in the pan, and it was darker.

Oddly, pizza crust always looks more done in photos than it is in real life. This crust was just barely darker than I would have liked; I should have pulled it after one minute on the stone. But it wasn’t brown, the way it looks in the pictures.

You don’t really need a pan with steep sides to do this. The edges that rested against the pan are good, but the edge that stood on its own was also good, in a different way.

If you do this, make sure the stone is hot before you put the pie in the oven.

The reason I moved the stone to the lower rack is that I was afraid it would cool when the pizza hit it, and I wanted it over the heat. But the stone held more than enough heat to get the job done.

By the grace of the good Lord, I have utterly defeated Sicilian pizza. Now I have to find something to do with the rest of my life.

One Performed & One in the Works

I just saw The Book of Eli with my prayer group. I was shaken when I left. No movie has ever affected me so much. I can’t recall seeing another movie that demonstrated an insider’s understanding of Spirit-filled Christianity. Movies generally prove that the people who made them know virtually nothing about Jesus and Christians. It’s like watching Amos and Andy to learn about black people.

I don’t know if the screenwriter is a Christian, but however that script materialized, it is as though a very serious charismatic wrote it.

Unfortunately, I have not eaten today, so I can’t write about the movie until I make what I expect to be the finest pizza in the universe. I’m going to mix San Marzano tomatoes with Stanislaus sauce, and I’m going to put the pie on a hot stone for a minute or two after it bakes. If my understanding of the physics is right, this will be a pizza that has no equal. Hope it works.

The Summit is in Sight

The Sicilian I made was beyond description, and it was STILL flawed. I don’t know what to make of it.

I tried Cento San Marzano tomatoes on one half and Stanislaus Saporito on the other. I used a heavy dose of Costco cheese (13 ounces on 9 x 12). I baked it on my cheap, thin GFS cookie sheet, on the bottom rack.

This time, instead of forcing the tomatoes to stand on their own, I added sugar and white vinegar, just as I do to my regular sauce. Last time, with the fake San Marzanos, I held back the sugar and vinegar, because the tomatoes were touted as superior and fit to be served with only salt, pepper, and oregano.

This pie is now the best pizza I’ve ever eaten, beating the mark set by a pie I made earlier in the week. The heavy cheese, more than the sauce, made the difference. That Costco cheese is pure magic. I think elves make it. It brings out the best in the sauce and crust. It melts beautifully. It’s stretchy. It’s a pretty, uniform white. Can’t beat it.

The tomatoes were surprisingly good. If I am tasting what I’m supposed to be tasting, San Marzanos have a strange and satisfying aftertaste that goes perfectly with cheese and pizza crust. It adds a dimension to the pizza. Still, they’re a little weak. If I were making this again, I’d just use the tomatoes and dump the puree that comes in the can with them. As it was, I used very little of it. I suppose a real psycho would reduce the sauce.

The extra punch of the Saporito makes it better than the San Marzanos, but I would be very content to save the driving distance and use Cento tomatoes instead of driving all the way to Gordon Food Service. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say Stanislaus Saporito is 15% better.

I learned something new about baking Sicilian. You need to rotate the pie, just like they do in pizzerias. Until now, they’ve been pretty uniform on the bottom, but this one was a little off. From now on, I’ll give them 10 minutes, with a turn at 5. No, 7. The first two minutes probably don’t do anything.

Another thing I did to make it brown better: before I slid it in, I opened the oven door and let it cool until the bottom element turned on. I waited until it was red hot to put the pizza in. That way, I was sure I’d get a lot of radiant heat on the bottom of the pan.

I’m positive a disposable aluminum pan is the best thing you can use for Sicilian, but I don’t plan to try it any time soon. I’m thinking I might start using a flat aluminum cookie sheet. Aluminum carries and distributes heat better than steel, and tonight I noticed that the unsupported side of the pizza, in the middle of the pan, was very good. It didn’t have the fried nature of the sides that were supported, but it was browned more. That’s acceptable. To make good Sicilian at 550° in a home oven without a lot of aggravation and tricks, you need a pan that will get hot really fast and spread the heat well.

If there is better pizza than this anywhere on earth, I have yet to encounter it. I am astonished by it. I guess I could let the dough poof up a little more, or I could make a sourdough or something, but there is such a thing as gilding the lily.

I think I’m done making thin pizza. I love it, but it can’t compare to this stuff.

I’ll give you the sauce recipe.

INGREDIENTS

4 ounces Cento San Marzano tomatoes (real ones), beaten to a puree
1 teaspoon light olive oil
1/2 teaspoon sugar
generous sprinkle of salt
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon dry oregano
1/2-1 teaspoon white vinegar

That’s all you need to know.

Now I have to throw out half the pie. I should be arrested for defacing art.

I’m convinced God gives me recipes for a reason. Food this good, cooked by someone as ignorant as I am, can’t be a pointless accident. But what’s the purpose?

I Cannot Resist

This is really unfair. A reader mentioned a brand of San Marzano tomatoes he thought I needed to try, and of course, I had to exit my burrow and buy some. This is practically entrapment.

I just got some Cento San Marzano tomatoes, at my local grocery. They’re $2.99 for a 28-ounce can. I tried one. They have more oomph than the “San Marzano REGION” tomatoes I tried last night, but they’re not exactly bursting with flavor. They have some zing to them, which is more than I can say for the others.

I also found a 9″ square cake pan. I can’t tell if it’s nonstick or not. I hope not. I can’t use that around the birds, at 550°. It will give off poisonous gas. I stuck them outside, and I put the pan in the oven. I guess we’ll see what it does. If it doesn’t burn, it’s not nonstick.

It’s a quality pan, which is worrisome. I need an extremely cheap and thin pan. This one is thinner than the steel pan I tried yesterday, but it’s still a little thicker than I want.

I think the relatively high sides will be good for the cheese. They should block some of the radiant heat, which would make the cheese cook slower and give me time to get a nice brown crust. Another possibility: because this pan is small with high sides, I could throw a sheet of foil over it while the crust browns. It won’t touch the cheese and get stuck.

Stanislaus Foods claims it’s almost impossible to get San Marzano tomatoes, but then, they have incentive to exaggerate, since they sell California tomatoes. Their products are jam-packed with sweetness and tomato flavor, so I doubt the Centos will knock them off their lofty champion-tomato perch.

Time to make dough.

San Elsewhere

I’m doing something stupid, even though I know it’s a mistake.

People talk about San Marzano tomatoes a lot. The other day, I posted a Youtube of a pizzeria owner using a sauce made from San Marzanos (he claimed), salt, pepper, and oregano.

I’m pretty sure I tried canned Italian tomatoes in the past, and that I was disappointed, but I thought I’d double-check. I’ve decided to try them again. I’m making a Sicilian pizza with half real sauce (Stanislaus base) and half sauce made from Nina brand “Region of San Marzano” tomatoes. I’m only using the tomatoes on half of the pie, because I’m pretty sure the San Marzano half is going to be bad.

People are easy to fool. For example, there’s a company that sells “Key West lime juice.” What does that mean” It means “key lime juice,” right? Of course not. That’s what they hope you think. It just means lime juice which is in some way connected to Key West. I spotted that instantly the first time I saw a bottle of this stuff. If it was pure key lime juice, it would say so, prominently.

San Marzano tomatoes are the same way. According to Stanislaus Foods, real San Marzano tomatoes are virtually unobtainable. They’re heirlooms. The farms that used to grow them switched to hybrids, which aren’t the same. This, surely, is why my can of Nina tomatoes does not say “San Marzano tomatoes.” It just says they’re from that region. If they were the real thing, each can would have a battery connected to it, with a flashing sign screaming “SAN MARZANO TOMATOES.”

I don’t know what kind of tomatoes Nina uses, but they taste like a can. And it’s not the can’s fault. It’s lined with plastic.

Ninety-nine percent of shoppers will buy any can of tomatoes with the phrase “San Marzano” on the side and assume they got the real thing.

Another sad fact: people will tell you their pizza is great, or that the pizzeria near them is great, when they’re totally wrong. You have to put everything to the test. When people make their own pizza, they really wish it were good, so they tell themselves it is, when it’s awful. And when you live next door to a bad pizzeria long enough, you’ll start thinking it’s really good. I don’t know why that’s true, but I’ve seen it. It has happened to me. I fell in love with Pizza Town, a joint near Columbia University. There were a lot of good things about their pizza, but their sauce recipe was very crude. I think it was just Stanislaus Super Dolce plus water.

Maybe the Youtube pizza guy has found a brand of San-Marzano-type tomatoes that’s really good. Or maybe he’s lying, to keep his real ingredients secret. Or maybe his sauce just isn’t good.

I would guess that Nina brand is highly regarded. I got it at Costco, and they have a great track record when it comes to picking quality stuff. But I don’t really know.

You can’t trust anyone (except me and Mike), so you have to test everything you hear. Hence today’s ill-fated test pie.

I plan to use one of my new steel pans. That should be interesting. The seasoning isn’t really developed yet. I hope the dough doesn’t stick.

I’ll come back with a report. I’m sure of this: half of the pie will get an A+.

Tomatoes: Acceptable. Pan: Fail

I just tried the pizza, and man, am I bummed out.

The pans are no good. I’m sure they’re great if you parbake the pie or go through other contortions to make them work, but they’re useless for my method. The metal is apparently too thick. I baked the pizza for 18 minutes, and it never browned well on the bottom. I finally had to put it on the stove, which sort of worked, but overall, it amounts to this: the pans aren’t acceptable.

The tomatoes, on the other hand, worked. I was shocked. It’s not that they taste good. Their redeeming feature is that they don’t taste bad. In other words, they have very, very little flavor, but what flavor they do have doesn’t hurt the pizza. If you like sauce that’s just barely there, these tomatoes will make you happy. If you like tomato flavor, go with Stanislaus.

And his Mighty Pans

My Sicilian pizza pans arrived. I ordered two, in case I have to make more than one pie in an evening.

They’re really beautiful. The steel is very heavy, by pan standards. The wire supporting the edges is probably 3/16″ thick. The pans have that nice cold-rolled finish, too. I guess all I have to do is wash them and season them.

In retrospect, I think a couple of 9″ cake pans without Teflon would have been a better buy, but these will last for a thousand years, and I know I’ll use them.

It’s hard to adjust to having this kind of power. When you can have the finest Sicilian pizza imaginable, at a moment’s notice, it can really go to your head. I’m feeling pretty froggy right now.

I may buy a TELEPROMPTER!

I’ve Got a Little List

A reader says he’s going to try my Sicilian pizza recipe. Think I’ll hit the highlights, because there are certain points that are of special importance, and it might be hard to pick them out of my ramblings.

1. Use a thin steel pan, preferably seasoned. At the very least, use a generous amount of olive oil.

2. Let the dough rise very high before punching it down, and let it rise again after spreading it in the pan.

3. When you stretch the dough to fit the pan, turn it at least once so you’ll have finger indentations on the underside. This improves the crust.

4. Use at least 0.11 ounces of cheese per square inch of pan.

5. Use twice the amount of sauce you’d use in a thin pie.

6. Bake low in the oven, with no stone, at 550°. After 8 or 10 minutes, start lifting a corner to see how done the bottom is. Pull it when it’s brown.

7. If your broiler is coming on, put another rack in the oven up high, and put foil or a cookie sheet on it to keep the broiler from browning the cheese.

8. Use light olive oil, not the green stuff.

The more fat your cheese has, the less likely it is to get too brown. The risk is that too much fat will give you a greasy pie. Costco mozzarella is perfect.

I put oil on my dough, but not in it. On my next pie, I plan to bias the cheese toward the outer edges of the pan, because it tends to drift inward as the pie cooks. It seems like it’s impossible to put too much oil under the pie.

It may be that you can get a better result at a lower temperature, but I haven’t tried it, so I can’t tell you.

This method isn’t good. It’s perfect. It’s unbelievable.

Good luck.