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.

And When I Die With Them, I Keep Them

Last night I watched Jazz with Marv and Maynard, and I enjoyed some Knob Creek and a Coke chaser. Then I went to bed, and while I was getting ready to sleep, I started thanking God for all the little pleasures in my life.

It was quite a list. It seems like the more mature I get, the better I am able to enjoy things. I eat less than I used to. I drink less. I quit smoking cigars. I try to curb my baser appetites, and I try to be more responsible. And I believe God works in me, making these things happen. As excess disappears from my life, the things I enjoy stand out more, perhaps because they’re not lost in the background noise of constant overindulgence.

Let’s see. I enjoy squeezing my pets and conversing with them. I enjoy the food I cook. I enjoy working on my musical skills. I love listening to good jazz and classical music. I love shooting and reloading. I look forward to having breakfast with my dad once a week. I love using my tools. I smile every time I see the ridiculous diesel pickup I bought. Every time I walk into my church, I feel like a kid running through the gate at Disneyland; I always know something good is going to happen.

The time I set apart for prayer and study is wonderful. Every session is a miniature Sabbath. It’s a sanctuary no one can intrude on, and more often than not, I sense God’s presence, and I feel like I’ve gotten a breakthrough.

You can have too much stuff in your life. You can have so much going on, you can’t appreciate any of it or do any one thing well. That’s very natural for me, as anyone who reads my blog knows, so I’m very glad God is adjusting me. Who knows? One day I might actually sell one of my motorcycles or even my flamenco guitar.

I’m keeping the milling machine and the Powermatic 66, however.

Covetousness. That was my problem. It’s not so much that I wanted what other people had; it’s that I wanted things that wouldn’t really bring me satisfaction. I used to buy stuff and then fail to enjoy it, because I thought too much about the things and not enough about the effort and time involved in deriving pleasure from them, so they sat and rotted. I still like to get toys, but now I get good use out of them, and I think that is because God is changing me and guiding me. It’s pretty unusual for me to regret spending money or time these days. I generally get a good return.

Somewhere in the Bible, it says something about how sad it is when a man has something he can’t enjoy. That’s what life without God is all about. You get rich, but you end up in rehab. You become famous, only to find that the thing you want most is privacy. Things like that happen. We don’t know which way we should go or what we should do, so we turn up blind alleys and end up with things that don’t bring us happiness. On the other hand, God promises us that if we’ll listen, he’ll guide us. He says, “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye. Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee.”

We don’t know what we need or what we want. We can’t know. The world is too complicated, and we’re not smart enough to see all the angles. Only God can know. So he gave us a system in which we obey him and listen to him, and he gives us what we should have. He gives us things that are truly satisfying, and which have lasting value. And at the end of our time, we don’t stand before God poor and blind and naked, which is what happens to people who amass the wrong kind of wealth. The stuff we take wrongly, we lose. We only keep that which we were intended to have.

I wish I could go back in time to about 1971 and slap myself. But like the relatives of the rich man in the parable about hell, I would not have listened.

Long ago, when I thought I was about to have a comic strip syndicated, I cut photos of sportfishing yachts out of magazines, and I taped them to walls and so on, to give me motivation to work. That seems funny now. What if I had succeeded? I’d be a big, fat, conceited (more than I am now) lout who thought he made it without God’s help. I’d have shallow friends who drank all the time and never set foot in a church. I’d have no relationship with God, because I’d think I didn’t need one. The yachting crowd is coarse and venal; I know them. I would have gotten sick of them in two seasons. I’m much better off with the folks who attend church on Saturday night.

I thought I knew what I needed, but I wasn’t even close.

I don’t know where I’m going, and I admit, I wish God would hurry up, but I know that things are better than they used to be, and the trend is positive, and it’s a trend I can trust. I’m not building on sand.

I don’t know if buying a cornet was a good idea, but it will be fun for at least two months, and it will cost very little. I actually prayed about it, and I really felt like I should try it. Weird.

I feel like a piece of rough lumber somebody is jointing and planing and sanding into shape. Life gets more enjoyable all the time. I even appreciate the problems and setbacks. Now they seem to have meaning, and every one ends up blessing me. It’s hard to harm someone who walks with God, because God takes everything you throw at him and makes it a help to him.

All that stuff Jesus said; it looks like it’s actually TRUE. That’s wild. I never thought he was lying, but it’s still impressive when I see his words confirmed.

Not for Me

People are sending me links to a story about making pizza in a cast iron skillet.

I appreciate the information, but my Sicilian literally could not be any better, and I don’t have to go through all those gymnastics to make it. I do it the same simple way pizzerias do it. On top of that, I can make it any size I want and any shape I want, as long as I can find a thin pan in the desired size and shape. With a skillet, you’re stuck with skillet-size, skillet-shaped pizza. Would you serve a 9″ pizza to four friends? I’d probably be killed for that. I can make an 18″ square pizza, just like the pros.

The skillet pizza reminds me of the “mom hamburger” Eddie Murphy used to talk about. His friends would go to McDonald’s, and his mom wouldn’t let him go. She’d make him a burger at home, with Wonder Bread. He’d be in the yard with his mushy bread, trying to keep the meat from falling out, and his buddies would be at McDonald’s, having what they actually wanted. This is what most homemade pizza is like. I’ve made many bad homemade pizzas; I know the pain.

If you use my methods for Sicilian and thin pizza, you’ll do very little work, you won’t use up a lot of time, and you’ll get pizza just like what you buy on the street in Manhattan, only–in most cases–better. It’s hard for me to see any reason to try another way.

I belong to a pizza forum. These people use language I don’t even understand. They talk about “hydration,” and how you have to have a certain precise amount of water in the dough to make it work. You know how I measure the water in my dough? I poke it with my finger. It’s always–ALWAYS, I’m saying–perfect. Making pizza is extremely hard; why make it worse by requiring people to buy burettes and gram scales?

Here’s something I’ve noticed in life. When people obsess about the equipment they use for a task, and they get drawn into a thicket of details, very often it means they’re not getting good results, because they don’t know what they’re doing. Oscar Peterson could make fantastic music on an upright piano; it’s the amateurs who think they have to have a Fazioli.

When I was wandering lost in the pizza wilderness, I worried a lot about equipment and so on. Now I know that stuff doesn’t matter. I have a screen, a stone, and the right ingredients. I’m golden.

Try my method. All you need are a stone, a screen or some semolina, a peel, and a food processor. Get Stanislaus sauce. Get Costco or Grande cheese, or buy sliced whole milk mozzarella at a deli. Use my recipe. You’ll win every time. Well, you might have a few false starts, but you’ll win every time, after that.

Sometimes people complain that they tried one of my recipes and it didn’t work. This almost always means they thought they were smarter than me, and they changed something. If you use my pizza recipe, follow it to the letter at first. Don’t ruin it the first time out. Once you get it to work, THEN you can change it to suit your tastes. It really works. If not, you’re the problem.

You don’t need special flour. It doesn’t matter what your tap water is like, unless it’s truly disgusting. You don’t need a special oven. Just make sure you have top-notch tomato sauce and cheese, and you’ll be fine.

Maybe the skillet pizza is great. I have no motivation to find out. When you have Sophia Loren at home, why go on a blind date?

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“Sometimes people complain that they tried one of my recipes and it didn’t work. This almost always means they thought they were smarter than me, and they changed something.”

I read that, and it occurred to me that God probably says the same thing all the time. Often, about ME.

Gap in Skillet Collection Filled

I finally have a decent #7 skillet

I got a #7 Griswold large logo skillet a year or two ago. The finish on the inside was not perfect, and I delayed in sanding it down, and one day I somehow managed to put another pot in the skillet while the pot was wet. Some kind of electrolysis occurred, and the skillet pitted in two places.

After that, I ordered one from some dealer, and I got a good price, but it had a tiny wobble in it, which is no good for a glass range. Also, the handle had some odd sort of pitting on it.

Last week I Ebayed a third skillet, and it’s perfect. I have it in the oven right now, at 550. I’m hoping I can get most of the crud off without resorting to the clean cycle, which could warp the skillet.

I’m thinking I made a mistake when I concluded that cast iron skillets were wrong for Sicilian pizza. I reached that conclusion after baking with the skillet on a stone. Now that I bake Sicilian on the bottom rack with no stone, I’m inclined to try a skillet again. Maybe the pitted skillet would be good enough to use for this. A #7 skillet is a good size for a one-person Sicilian. It’s about 64 square inches, so about the same as an 8″ square pan.

I called Mike about my latest Sicilian, and he went to the store while we were on the phone and made me give him the particulars. I don’t know if it will work. He’s using store cheese and Pastene sauce, which is not comparable to Stanislaus. The cheese can be made to work, if he tosses it in a little olive oil before he cooks.

Should be interesting. He and I used to hog down Sicilian together by his parents’ pool table. When I think of the food our parents let us buy, I wonder if they were trying to kill us. On Friday nights, my parents used to go out, and they left me enough money to get a large pizza and a whole bag of garlic rolls, and you better believe I ate the whole order, every time.

I hope he gets good results. I owe my pizza success to his tutelage.

The [Greg] House of Pizza

I can see I’m going to have to throw out my mozzarella.

I’m going crazy, wondering whether I need to remove the stone when I make Sicilian pizza. I intended to go a few more days before my next experiment. I’m waiting for some smaller pans to arrive. I don’t want to go through a pound and a half of cheese every time I want to do a trial run. But curiosity is too strong for me, so I’m going to make a half-size pie in a full-size pan. I can’t make myself stop.

I hope it will work. I think it should. I’ll cram it into one side of the pan, and only one side of the pie will be unsupported. It should be firm enough to stand up and not collapse.

Unless it isn’t.

I’m starting to think Stanislaus Saporito may be better, for my purposes, than Super Dolce. The flavor is a little different. The biggest difference is that Super Dolce is sweeter, and they make a product that corrects that. It’s called “sugar.”

I have to get a nine-inch square pan. I’ve decided that’s the perfect size for lunch. It’s actually slightly bigger than the perfect size, which is 7.5″, but I don’t think anyone makes a steel pan that size. To roughly equal the calorie content of a thin 12″ circular pie, I need a square Sicilian pie 7.5″ on a side.

Wait, that’s wrong. That pie will have the same amount of flour but less cheese, since the cheese on a Sicilian isn’t twice as heavy. It’s only one and a half times as heavy. Man, this is going to take some algebra.

Hmm…it turns out a 9″ square pie is pretty close. The bigger pie has 1.4 times the area, but you use 1.5 times as much cheese per square inch on a Sicilian, so you have to factor that in, and it looks like you get about 7.5 ounces of cheese, which is within spec for a 12″ pie. The sauce calories are negligible compared to cheese and flour.

I still have to do the flour calculation. Looks like it’s 1.4 cups, instead of 1 cup for a 12″ thin pie. That adds around 160 calories.

Okay, whatever. Nine inches is about right. Probably.

I wonder if thin Sicilian is any good. If I halved the dough, it would still be thick enough to be Sicilian.

They probably don’t even eat this stuff in Sicily. It’s like English muffins. Here’s a tip: don’t bother buying them if you have British houseguests.

Okay, I’m wrong. Wikipedia says they really come from England, where–no kidding–they call them “American muffins.”

In any case, I’m making a half-size Sicilian today. I don’t even care if I get to eat it. I just have to know if it works.

I care a little.

Peace

My soul is finally at peace. I just made the best Sicilian pizza I have ever eaten. In fact, it’s the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. It’s almost exactly what I would dream of, if I dreamed I was eating Sicilian.

Here’s the crucial info, in brief. Bake your Sicilian at 550°, on a lower rack, in a thin steel pan with baked-on seasoning. If the top starts to get too dark, put a cookie sheet or a piece of foil on the rack above it, because your broiler may be kicking on. To get a darker bottom crust without burning the top, go low in the oven. If you like your cheese brown, go higher.

This pizza took a surprising 13 minutes to cook. I had it too high in the oven during the first 8 minutes (bottom too rare when I lifted up a corner), so I put it on the bottom rack during the last five minutes, and that baked the crust. It wasn’t quite as well-done as I would have wanted; I underestimated by maybe 30 seconds. Next time, I’ll put the pie low in the oven from the beginning.

Using half the pan did not cause any problems. I was afraid it would burn the seasoning off the empty side, so I stuck part of a broiler pan under that side, but during the last 5 minutes, I had nothing under it, and it was fine. The unsupported side didn’t bake against steel, so it wasn’t quite as tasty as the other four sides, but it was very good.

To help you out, I’ll give mathematical information. The pie was 9″ by 12″. I used two cups of bread flour. The base of the sauce was four ounces (by weight) of Saporito. I used 12 ounces (by weight) of Costco cheese. These proportions are just about perfect, but you might want to go to 14-16 ounces of cheese.

The cheese will try to migrate to the middle, so make sure you pile it high around the edges. I ran the sauce to 1/2″ of the sides, which was perfect, but I should have worked harder to make sure the cheese covered the sauce completely, and I should have fixed it so there was a little more near the edges than in the center, to compensate for drift.

That Costco cheese…you haven’t had street-pizza cheese until you’ve piled Costco mozzarella high on a pizza. It’s chewy and buttery, with tons of stretch. Honestly, I think it’s better than the Grande cheese I bought. Might be better if they aged it longer, but even with the pre-shredding and the cellulose powder, it’s a dream come true.

I would say I am now like the Vladimir Horowitz of Sicilian pizza, and that in time, I’ll be the Sviatoslav Richter. Right now, I’m the Oscar Peterson. Later, I’ll be the Art Tatum. After that, people will build statues that look like me, and some day, they’ll name a tomato after me.

The pan is totally non-stick. The crust could not be better. The cheese and sauce are flawless. The recipe is simple and foolproof. What a day. I feel like I was just crowned Miss America. I’m even against gay marriage.

Maybe now I can quit making pizza for a while.

Pizzumentary

Today I’m documenting my Sicilian pizza. Here is the pan. Seven bucks at Gordon Food Service. I seasoned it with lard before I used it for the first time, but it stuck a little. Since then I’ve been adding layers of baked-on lard, and you can see how much has accumulated. It’s very clean. There is no oiliness to it. The baked fat is like varnish. I’m hoping to build up a nice thick layer over the years.

Here is the dough. That’s four cups of flour. I was low on bread flour, so I used regular all-purpose flour and added around a tablespoon and a half of gluten. I’m sure it will be great. I used the small plastic blade in the Cuisinart, because this load of dough was really too big for the main blade. I want to get a Robot Coupe commercial food processor with a bigger bowl, but maybe it would be smarter to get a stand mixer. It would be a lot slower, but what’s an additional four minutes?

There is no oil in the dough, but I oiled the outside. The outside of the crust on a Sicilian pizza should be fried, more or less. When the pan gets hot, it fries the crust a little, giving a little crispness to it. I plan to oil the pan pretty heavily. Worked last time.

I don’t want this much pizza, but the small pans I ordered aren’t here yet. I can freeze the excess. I suspect you could get a good result with a disposable aluminum pan and PAM, but I don’t feel like experimenting.

I’m using Saporito sauce, plus water, vinegar, salt, sugar, garlic powder, and oregano. Fresh garlic is too good! The cheese: COSTCO! It really works!

More as the pizza develops. I hope I don’t do something stupid and ruin it.

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The dough rose like crazy, so I oiled the pan and spread the dough out. This may be too much oil.

Here’s the dough in the pan. I think this stage is called “proofing,” but I know more about cooking than jargon.

Here is the cheese I love. I know pizza snobs will sneer, but I use what works, and this is it.

I used 6 ounces (weight) of Saporito sauce. I don’t know if I’ll apply all of it, but I mixed it. I have a pound of cheese weighed out. This should be spectacular. Assuming I can pry it off the pan.

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Here’s the dough with sauce. You could eat that sauce as an entree. Stanislaus tomato products are incredible.

Here’s the dough with sauce and cheese.

Have to run.

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I’m an honest man. I admit it; I still have a little work to do. The sauce is perfect. The cheese is perfect. The dough is perfect. But I need to fine-tune the cooking technique, and I need to use more sauce and cheese. I think the magic numbers are 8 ounces and 24 ounces. This pie was a marvel, but the crust was not done as well as it should have been, the ingredient balance wasn’t optimal, and the cheese got browner than I like.

Here’s the pizza. I had no idea what to do with it, so I cut it right on the stove.

Here’s the underside. It’s done, but just barely.

The answer is probably to give up the stone and bake on the rack. That will get the bottom done faster. Right now I’m going 12 minutes, and I need to be down around 8 or 9. I thought the stone would bake the bottom faster, but it doesn’t. If I can bake the dough faster, the cheese will not be as brown.

I could throw foil over the top after a certain amount of time, to prevent browning while the bottom cooks, but that’s stupid, if I can just remove the stone.

I’m surprised how much cheese and sauce this thing needs. You can’t just use the same amount you put on a thin pizza with the same area.

The flavor is right on the money. No pizzeria could do better. And the parts of the crust that are fully done are sublime, so I know the rest of it will taste the same, once I get it to brown more.

One other interesting thing: I need to form the dough into a large rectangle before it rises, so I don’t have to stretch it so much. I stretch the dough and then flip it and stretch it some more, and this gives desirable finger indentations in the bottom of the dough. They improve the texture and flavor. But if you stretch it too much after you flip it, you end up pressing a lot of these indentations out. Much better to start with a sheet of dough that doesn’t have to be worked as much.

Anyway, the best Sicilian you ever ate can be made in your home oven with great consistency and no special equipment. That’s news the whole world should want to hear.

I am Now Self-Actualized

I think I have the pizza-pan situation figured out. I need thin steel, not cast iron. And I need three sizes. First, 12 x 18, to serve more than one person. Then 12 x 12, for a serious meal for one person or a small meal for two. Then 9 x 9, for a normal meal for one. Cast iron is out. Steel works, so there is no need to look for another answer.

I don’t know what to do with all this power. I pretty much have pizza under my thumb, so I can’t continue eating it every day with research as my excuse. I guess the smart move is to bag and freeze the cheese and sauce and have pizza maybe twice a week.

I’ve reached a point where it’s hard to think of anything new I want to learn to cook. I guess cheese poori and certain Indian appetizers and entrees would be good, but I can get a good cookbook for that; I don’t need to be original. Same for Chinese.

It’s unbelievable, now that I think about it. I can make the best pizza in Miami. I can make the best cheesecake anywhere, as far as I know. My barbecue is the best I can find anywhere near me. Prime rib is a joke. Aged steaks are simple. I can cook everything I really care about. God has really blessed me.

If only I could eat this stuff every day.

I guess now I should focus on small, healthy meals that are easy to fix. To me, that means meat or fish, plus non-starchy vegetables. Dull, but cheap and fast.

My dinner menu is embarrassing. Here’s the kind of thing I fix: two tiny pork chops fried in olive oil with no breading, half a can of greens, and Brussels sprouts with salt and butter. I really can’t eat more than that without fattening up. My current routine (admittedly derailed by pizza research) is one serving of oatmeal at breakfast, a sandwich and some pickles at lunch, and a little-bitty dinner. I’m changing that now; the small, sad-looking dinner, which is the largest meal, will come in the middle of the day.

I like vegetables, so eating things like greens and sprouts is not a problem. As far as I know, all Southerners like vegetables. I don’t know why. I always hear about people who won’t eat vegetables. They hate broccoli. They hate spinach. I don’t get it. No one in my family is like that. One of the best Southern meals is hot cornbread, soup beans, and fresh, raw vegetables. Southerners aren’t fat because they don’t eat vegetables. They’re fat because they also eat Moon Pies and chili-cheese-slaw dogs.

I’ve been watching Ken Burns’s Jazz for a few days. I love this documentary. I own a copy. Sometimes the BS can be hard to take; I don’t know why so many successful young black men talk crap, when their achievements stand for themselves. But generally, it focuses on the music, with a surprisingly fair approach to race relations.

Actually, I do know why so many successful young black men talk crap. It’s because Martin Luther King died and Jesse Jackson lived. They pattern themselves after the sideshow act, instead of the greater man who preceded him and died without leaving a substantial video or audio record. King didn’t live long enough to make the kind of impression Jackson has. That’s truly unfortunate. Slogans and chants and doggerel and transparent sophistry are no substitute for character, brains, and dignity.

Now that I think about it, Malcolm X was about fifty times the man Jesse Jackson is, and he died young, too. He had a weakness for slogans, though.

Anyway, I keep watching these videos and marveling at the music. Louis Armstrong is astonishing. He’s like Mozart. He was so good, it didn’t even make sense. Greatest jazz instrumentalist who ever lived. Arguably the greatest vocalist, although you would never know it from garbage like What a Wonderful World. I think THC had pickled his brain by then. They say he smoked every day. Some defend his later work, but far as I can tell, he said all he had to say before he hit middle age.

And people say dope won’t hurt you.

I’m glad I never cared for drugs enough to stick with them. I have never understood the appeal of pot. Sometimes I think other people smoke dope to be more like people like me. Some people have no sense of humor and no creativity and no ability to relax unless they’re high. If you have those things naturally, maybe dope seems pointless. People take drugs to compensate for shortcomings, so my theory makes sense to me. I admit, I’d love to have natural self-confidence comparable to what stimulants provide.

To get back to jazz, Bix Beiderbecke was another superhuman talent. Seems like he could do absolutely anything except quit drinking. He didn’t consider himself a pianist; his instrument was the cornet. But I have a couple of his piano recordings–stuff he played on the spur of the moment, almost as a lark–and the things he did are like nothing anyone else was playing at that time. It’s like a fusion of Debussy and Thelonious Monk.

He was never able to get it together, and he drank himself to death before he turned thirty. Maybe some people are too talented and too creative to lead happy, successful lives. Maybe the human body can’t contain them.

As I listened and watched, I wondered why Christian music couldn’t have this kind of quality and creativity. It’s not as if musical creativity didn’t exist before jazz. Stuffy classical musicians killed it, out of ignorance and misplaced worship. In the times of Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin, a classical musician was required to improvise. It’s virtually forbidden now, but the greats used to sit and make up melody lines on the spot, just like jazz musicians do now. Liszt could take sheet music for an orchestra and play it on the piano, at sight, while making suggestions and criticisms as they occurred to him.

American popular music was pretty weak (Turkey in the Straw, heaven protect us) before jazz and the blues, and improvisation in classical music was essentially banned, so it’s no wonder most popular music, including the Christian variety, is second-rate. Why can’t a Christian pianist sit and improvise brilliantly during a worship service? No reason at all. They used to do it. Maybe blue notes and certain jazz rhythms would be somewhat out of place, but those things aren’t essential to spontaneous music.

I keep banging away at sight-reading. Yesterday I amazed myself by playing a triplet correctly, while staying in time. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that before. I used to break measures into twelve beats and practice slowly, I think. I need to start journaling my progress, so I don’t get discouraged. I still can’t play anything, but I’m making substantial headway.

I should thaw out some tiny pork chops. I hate to miss out on a fine feed like that.