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.

Forget Health Care Reform; This is Important

I’m making Sicilian pizza in my old Lodge skillet. This skillet is 12″ across, on the inside, at the bottom. I sanded it when I bought it, so the bottom isn’t as rough as most Lodge skillets.

I’m using two cups of bread flour, salt, pepper, yeast, and water. That’s it.

I let the dough rise in an oiled bowl. It stuck to the bowl, which is normal unless you add flour to the oil. It turns out this doesn’t matter, as long as you can get the dough out without mangling it. The imperfections you get from pulling the dough off the bowl disappear later.

Here is what I have right now. I oiled the dough (extra light olive oil), spread it out, flipped it (so the finger indentations would be in the bottom of the crust) and put it on top of a Pyrex bowl, which you can’t see here. The bowl is to keep the skillet off the warm stovetop. I want the warmth, but I don’t want so much of it the dough is adversely affected. As soon as the dough pumps back up, I’ll add sauce and cheese.

Ordinarily, for a 12″ pie, I use 2 ounces of sauce concentrate, plus water and other ingredients. I generally end up discarding a small amount of the sauce mix, because 2 ounces are a little too much. Today I plan to use a minimum of the whole two ounces. Sicilian requires more sauce, and it seems like Saporito (the sauce I’m using today) doesn’t extend quite as far as Super Dolce (my usual sauce). I’m pretty sure the Stanislaus website says it should be the other way around, but I call ’em as I see ’em. I’ll also use a full 8 ounces of Costco mozzarella.

The oven is at 550°. I plan to rest the skillet on the hot stone. I hope this crude Lodge skillet isn’t so thick it doesn’t heat up in time to brown the crust.

I hope I can get this silly thing out of the skillet. As of now, it’s loose, riding on a layer of oil.

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Here’s what I have now. I put 9 ounces of cheese on it, and a little over 2 ounces of sauce (measured before adding water). Looks pretty good. I wanted to flop it out of the pan and put it on the stone during the last two minutes, but I won’t be able to. The pan is too deep. The cheese would slide around and cause problems.

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Got a few more photos.

Here is the pie after I miraculously popped it out of the skillet. It didn’t stick at all, except for a tiny area where some cheese hit the iron. I stuck it on the stone for a minute after I got it out, to improve the crust.

Here are some slices, so you can get an idea of the thickness.

Here is the bottom of a slice. Oddly, no other slice got that dark. I should have photographed one of the others. This slice tasted off because of the burned area, but you can see the indentations in the crust, which are very important to a good Sicilian pizza.

Here is my assessment. Cast iron is not nearly as good as thin steel. The texture of the pie I made the other day was astonishing. This one was imperfect. It leaned toward leathery. The difference was small, but it’s the difference between good and sublime.

Another problem, as mentioned above: it browned unevenly. And the cast iron seemed to give it a flavor that is not right for pizza.

Last thing: to get the crust brown, I had to leave the pie in the oven until the cheese browned. Unacceptable. Burnt pizza cheese is an abomination bad pizzerias have taught Americans to like. Pizza cheese can have a small amount of browning, but this pie was at the limit.

I consider the cast iron experiment a failure. From now on, it’s thin steel or nothing. I can’t get pizza this good anywhere near me, but the other Sicilian I made was straight from paradise.

My online source for the correct pans is an outfit called Zesco. They’re expensive ($24.50 each), but they should last a hundred years. I’ll report when I get to try them out.

Incidentally, the cheap GFS pan I bought has no faults. If they made a smaller one, I would not have shelled out for rolled steel pans. If you can find a thin steel pan in a size you like, don’t bother with “authentic” pans. And bake the seasoning onto the pan, and never wash it.

67$ for Plain Old Skillet

Today I got blown out of the water while trying to snipe a Wagner skillet on Ebay. The Bible of cast iron collecting said the maximum value was $45, so that’s what I used as my high bid. Someone showed up and offered $67 at the last minute.

Is it me, or is Ebay disappointing these days? Cast iron prices are insane. Sometimes you get an okay deal, but skillets routinely go for prices far above the market rate.

I want to start making Sicilian pizza in a cast iron skillet. I don’t like round Sicilian, but cast iron seems like the perfect choice, and skillets are the easiest thing to come by. I want a big skillet I can dedicate to this, so it will develop a perfect surface. I have a crummy Lodge I can use, but I’ll need something better to replace it once I set it aside for pizza.

Maybe a square griddle or skillet is the way to go.

The Gordon Food Service pan I bought seems to work perfectly; it’s just too big. Any steel pan will work, if I can find the size I want.

I still haven’t used silicone bakeware. I don’t know if it will give me a crunchy outer crust, the way metal will. I assume it must be capable of doing this, because otherwise, who would buy it?

I just checked Williams-Sonoma’s site. Wow, what a mistake. Enough said about that.

Hmm…Lodge makes a square griddle that would be perfect. I don’t trust the rough surface, but maybe it would work. Now that I have a Multimaster, sanding the inside wouldn’t be too hard.

The best thing is probably to give up, order a couple of real pizza pans, and get on with life. But for today, it’s going to be my lame Lodge skillet.

“Your Lifelong Dream Just Went on Craigslist.”

This is really funny. Mike is pulling his hair out because I told him we should open a pizzeria. I’ve been sending him Craigslist links for pizzerias that are for sale, just to torment him.

There are three pizzerias we used to frequent when we were kids. It turns out one of them–Mario the Baker–is for sale on Craigslist, so I forwarded it to him. He’s losing it.

There is no way we could buy this place. They want 1.4 million, which is like 20 times what I could consider investing. I don’t think haggling will get us where we need to be; call me a pessimist. “How does thirty thousand sound?” No, I don’t think so. But it’s fun to throw the temptation out there. I think Mike would sell his kids for parts to buy this place.

Mario’s was pretty good when I was a kid, but it’s not good now. It’s barely acceptable. The rolls are nice, but I would steer clear of the pizza. They have a second store now, near me. I tried it twice, and I haven’t been back.

Mike says he has talked to the owner. They sell a thousand dozen rolls a day. He says the old owner was a guy who collected toy trains, and he sold out to a Cuban family. That probably explains the bad pizza. I’ve only known of one really good pizzeria run by Cubans.

I was lucky enough to live near a lot of Italians when I was a kid. There were a lot of Mafia families a few blocks north of us. In North Miami and south Broward, there are a number of good pizzerias. South of that…you are taking your life in your hands. People down here think bad pizza is wonderful. They don’t know the difference. Send them to New York for a week, and they’d cry when they got back on the plane.

Simplicity

I know I’m crazy, but I can’t help myself. I started looking at pizzerias for sale on Craigslist.

My problem is, I know nothing about running a business. That’s what scares me. But I know what kills most pizzerias. Bad food, bad locations, unrealistic prices, stupid hours, and bad service.

It’s surprising how little money gets you in the door. I figured it would be like $100K, minimum, but it looks like a lot of places are ready to sell out for much less. You could equip a small place, from scratch, for maybe $30K.

I think a smart person would go to each of these places and try the food. If the food is good, the location is good, and the prices are okay, it’s a bad buy, because they’re doing things right, and they’re still not making money. If the location is good and everything else stinks, it’s an open door. They’re doing something wrong, and you can fix it.

We have a place called Cozzoli’s, in South Miami. It’s the worst. Bad sauce. Weak crust. Cheese that tastes artificial (I don’t think it’s real cheese). They should make money hand over fist, because the location is fantastic. But over and over and over, the place gets bought by people who just can’t cook. People will eat mediocre pizza, but when it gets downright bad, they’re going to stay away. I could take that place and make money, if Cozzoli’s would go away. The key would be to get rid of their disgusting food, which you probably have to buy in order to be a franchisee. The problem is not hard to spot, but it’s impossible to fix, unless you have a talent for cooking. And very few people have that.

Pizza is the hardest thing there is to cook well. I tried for years and got nowhere. There are lots of pizzerias near me, and I only know two within ten miles that I think of as worth visiting. None come close to the pizza I make. I beat them all; no contest. Not even close. Only a tiny percentage of restaurants have recipes developed by people who know (and care) what tastes good. They think desire and service and hard work are all it takes, but if the food isn’t right, no one will miss you when you close. If the food is exceptional and you don’t have any other serious liabilities, you should make money.

For someone like me, the key would be simplicity. Sharply limited menu, with extremely good food. As few seats as possible. Minimal staff. I could manage to make pizzas and sell them to people. But overseeing a wait staff? Looking after a big parking lot and dining area? I could see myself making a real mess there. In order for me to get anywhere, I would have to start out with a place that, for all intents and purposes, was a vending machine with ovens. Like a Domino’s with two or three seats. Keep it clean, cook the food, and keep the books. No live music. No bar. No kiddie area with a big bin full of slobbery plastic balls.

All I have to do is convince Mike to abandon his life and move a thousand miles. That should be easy.

“I’m Sorry, but Mike Ate Our Inventory Again.”

I know I am smoking crack, but I am checking out the SBA website to find out what would be involved in starting a storefront takeout pizza place. All I need is a town up the coast where the pizza stinks.

Perfect, Mind-Blowing Sicilian Pizza

This is incredible. I can make Sicilian pizza. More than that, I can make the best Sicilian pizza on earth.

I made a pie today, figuring it would only be a good baseline effort. Somewhere to start. But it’s magnificent. If I had only cooked it longer and gone a little heavier on the sauce and cheese, it would have been the finest Sicilian pie imaginable. As it was, it shocked me. The smell that’s lingering in the house is still driving me crazy.

When this happens to me–and it happens a lot–is it luck, or does it mean God cares about good food? There has to be a reason he has given me so many good recipes.

I’ll tell you how to do it.

My local GFS didn’t have Super Dolce sauce, so I used Saporito. I added a little sugar to make it as sweet as Super Dolce. Other than that, I did everything the same. This is for a 12 x 18 rectangle.

INGREDIENTS

4 cups King Arthur bread flour (or any bread flour)
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons pepper
4 rounded teaspoons dry yeast
1 pint water

Activate the yeast in the water. Put the other stuff in a really big food processor. Mine almost died when I did this. You may as well break your dough into two portions and process them separately.

Mix the dry stuff. Start dribbling the water and yeast in. When the dough forms a coherent glob, stop adding water and process for one minute. You want it a little sticky, but you should be able to handle it. Seems like you want as much water in it as you can manage, without ending up with something so loose you can’t make it into a pie.

Form the dough into a smooth glob, oil it heavily, and put it in an oiled dish to rise. Probably best to use a dish that somehow resembles the pizza pan. In other words, round for a round pan, and so on. It will make it easier to make the dough fit the pan.

Punch the dough down when it rises. Let it poof back up a little. The more time it has to rise, the better the flavor will be.

Dump it in an oiled steel pan and mash it until it fits. Make the borders slightly higher than the middle. Don’t overdo it, because you can end up with a pie that’s so tall around the edges, the cheese runs into the middle.

Make sure the top of the dough is oily (light olive oil, not green), and let the dough rise some more. I let mine get up to about 3/4″ in height. You should flip the dough once while you’re making it fit, because this will make the bottom of it lumpy. That will give you wrinkles and air spaces that will give you different degrees of doneness on the bottom of the pie. This is a very good thing.

SAUCE INGREDIENTS

8 oz. Stanislaus Saporito or Super Dolce sauce
2 level teaspoons sugar (Super Dolce) or 3 (Saporito)
1/2 – 1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon white vinegar

Man, this was good.

1 teaspoon olive oil
2 teaspoons dry oregano – get something decent, not Badia
enough water to make the sauce loose – maybe a cup

I used 3/4 this much sauce, and it wasn’t enough. It might be wise to add a little more oil to the sauce. It got a little dry in the exposed areas, but that may have been because I spread it too thin.

Smear the cheese on top of the pie. Add 16 ounces Costco mozzarella. Cut it with good provolone if you want. I used half provolone on one side of the pie, and it was very good.

Mike was right on the money with the lighter olive oil. I am never using green olive oil on pizza again.

Bake in a 550° preheated oven. I rested my pan on a stone. I gave it 8 minutes, but I should have gone ten. The pan was on the middle rack.

This will be better if you can get the pie to come out so you can give it a couple of minutes on the bare stone, but my stone is too small for that. This dough is sticky, so make sure you use a pan that really works.

I need a smaller pan. The skillet idea comes to mind.

I can’t get over this.

Errand Turns up Cheese & Pan

I’ll be working on pizza storage today. I just got back from Gordon Food Service. Horror of horrors: they were out of Super Dolce sauce. I got a can of Saporito, in case the change was permanent. Saporito is very good; I just like Super Dolce a little better.

I looked around for steel pans for Sicilian pizza. I found a couple on Ebay, and I made an offer. It looks like the gold standard is a cold-rolled steel pan with a wire that runs around the perimeter under the lip for reinforcement. They’re expensive on the web, but Ebay has them much lower. While I was at GFS, I noticed they had steel cookie sheets for seven bucks, so I picked one up.

It seems like it’s a bad idea to wash anything that goes in the oven with a pizza. I don’t wash my screens. It would make them stick. I’m going to season the steel pans and leave it at that. I’ve seen steel Sicilian pans in pizzerias, and they’re never washed. Right now I have the GFS pan in the oven with olive oil. It looks like it may be stainless, in which case I am not sure seasoning it is possible.

I was annoyed to see that light olive oil is no bargain. I hit a grocery on the way home, and their price was $8.25 for 25 ounces. You would think extra virgin would cost more. GFS has a 50/50 blend of olive oil and some other oil. It’s cheap, and it’s probably a great choice, since street pizzerias use cheap ingredients. I’m thinking the smart move is good oil for the rolls and bad oil for the pizza.

GFS didn’t have loaves or bags of provolone. I picked up some slices. I’ll see how it blends with Costco cheese. No store I went to today had any interesting cheese. I can always hit Laurenzo’s market the next time I’m in the north end of town.

Mike and I should open a pizzeria. Seriously. Find a tiny store in a good location near South Miami and start baking. We’d be rich in five years. There is still no really good pizza here. An okay place opened near me a while back, but the location stinks, and we would be a lot better than an okay place. And we could put my cheesecake on the menu. Fat women would stampede the store like enraged buffalo.

GFS has Gold Medal “All Trumps” flour for $22.50/50 pounds. Not all that cheap, really. If I bought ten five-pound bags at the grocery, it would be 50% more expensive, so it’s not nearly as impressive as GFS’s other buys. I still want to try it, though. I’m incorrigible. They also had a brand called “Golden Tiger,” slightly cheaper. Can it be that the Chinese are expanding from tools to flour? It’s probably really good, until the lead and melamine kill you.

I ran by Whole Foods Market because I read that they sell sourdough starter. No dice. I looked for other stuff, such as cheese that might be useful. I think the cheapest cheese I saw was $11.99 per pound. Nothing in that store interests me. I think you have to be a complete moron to shop there. I couldn’t find anything I wanted. Not even an impulse buy. Every so often, when I want something unusual, it turns out they have it, but shopping there on a daily basis is like emptying your wallet directly into the toilet.

Super-organic natural food usually tastes funky. Am I the only one who notices? The store smells “off.” The beverages always have an odd aftertaste. The faux junk food tastes like real junk food that has a disease. The peanut butter is like sand and Crisco. The only good stuff is the normal food, like croissants and fresh seafood and so on. But why would you go to Whole Foods and pay twice as much, if it’s something you can get at a real grocery for less?

Am I too excited about good, cheap food? I can’t help myself. I’ll spend a hundred bucks learning how to make a two-dollar pizza.

Here’s a great Youtube find:

I’ve never seen pizza with cheese under the sauce, but I’m sure it’s great. This joint is in New Jersey, so if the pizza wasn’t good, they would be out of business. It’s not like Miami, where bad pizza can put your kids through college.

Here’s another good one:

Didn’t they both refer to San Marzano tomatoes? I should check those out.

More

From the Stanislaus Foods website:

ALTA CUCINA® “NATURALE” STYLE PLUM TOMATOES

The closest thing to Old Italy in America! Favored by restaurateurs serving the classical dishes of Italy’s urban “ristoranti,” Alta Cucina® “Naturale” Style Plum Tomatoes are Stanislaus’ answer to true San Marzanos, which are no longer available except at exorbitant prices.

Today, true San Marzanos are generally unavailable because small Italian farmers have consolidated and turned to mechanized commercial tomato varieties rather than the hand-harvested San Marzano. Although lax enforcement has allowed some Italian packers to get away with mislabeling tomatoes as “San Marzano” (when in fact they are not), in truth, the treasured San Marzano tomato has all but disappeared.

And that’s why we created Alta Cucina® “Naturale” Style Plum Tomatoes! Each can of Alta Cucina® is full to the brim with sweet, tender, ultra-premium plum tomatoes in “Naturale” style juice—packed from select tomato varieties chosen by Stanislaus for their fresh fragrance, exquisite flavor, and delicate “melt-in-your-mouth” texture.

More

Here’s a place that sells steel Sicilian pizza pans: CLICK.

Pizza is a a Lifelong Pursuit

My church is going crazy these days. Unlike the major news outlets, which will be gone from Haiti in a week, we are engaged in a long-term effort, and because of the earthquake, it’s going to be ramped up. All sorts of stuff is happening. They even have me writing copy for them.

Trinity Broadcasting is all over this, and our church is going to be their main resource in the Haiti campaign. I suppose that makes sense, since most of the people who attend are Haitian. On top of that, our pastor has hooked up with Friend Ships Unlimited, and they have a boat on the way from Lake Charles. It’s going to dock in the Port of Miami and go back and forth between Miami and Port au Prince. The people making this stuff happen are working late hours and going without sleep. It’s pretty impressive.

The services this weekend were largely aimed at Haiti. The Saturday service was converted to a time of prayer, and we heard a lot about the crisis in the other services. Attendance was heavy.

One of the church’s pastors–an older gentleman of Haitian descent–was in Port au Prince when the earthquake came. He spoke to us. He said the ground shook for four or five minutes. Ordinarily, he would have been some distance out of town–he only goes to Port au Prince when he’s on the way back to Miami–but on this occasion he was in Port au Prince a day earlier than usual.

He said he was in a hotel, on the second story, when it hit. The ground moved vertically as well as horizontally. He had to hold onto a doorframe. When it was over, he went out in the short street where the hotel was located, and six people were already dead. One was a little girl whose head had been severed. He also found a woman whose hand had been amputated when her fallen ceiling pinned her wrist against her refrigerator door. She was trapped for six hours like that. The hand was severed, but the arm was still trapped. She had to stand and wait while rescuers freed her.

The neighborhood was white with concrete dust. It must have been like 911.

When the quake was over, no one at church knew whether this man was alive or dead. He managed to hitch a ride to Miami on a military flight, and he arrived in the sanctuary without notice, much to everyone’s relief.

We work with Mission of Hope. They have a big campus outside Port au Prince. It was far enough to be spared significant damage. I suppose now it will be bursting with people who need help.

I don’t know all that much about our involvement, because I have never participated in it. I guess that will change. I don’t know what they’ll want me to do.

There are tons of good charities working on this. I doubt it matters which one you help, as long as they check out. If you want to find out about our organization, you can find it at this link.

I still don’t know what’s going on with their plan to put me to work in their cafe. I hope they follow through on their plan to get a pizza oven. I don’t know if it’s practical, though. I rarely eat anything more complicated than cheese pizza, but most people want a lot of toppings, and that makes the whole business much more complex and bothersome.

My flour education never stops. This weekend, I learned some people use flour made from durum wheat, which is the same stuff used to make coarse semolina. You can’t get fine semolina flour around here, as far as I know. Whole Foods doesn’t have it. I’d like to try it. I’ve also learned that Gordon Food Supply sells a brand of flour that’s very high in gluten. That would be fun to try, although if I don’t like it, I’m stuck with a huge bag of useless flour. I’m sure it would be great, but these days, I tend to lean toward low-gluten flour, and by that I mean 3 grams per “serving,” as defined on the label.

I had read that Caputo 00 flour was low in gluten, and I repeated it, but this weekend I found an “expert” website bearing a claim that 00 flour is actually high in gluten. I don’t know what to believe. I guess I could look for a Caputo label, online.

Man, I love the Internet. Apparently, it’s 11.5% gluten, which is high.

I had read that it was low in gluten, and that the things that made it special were its purity and the fineness of the grind, but apparently I was deceived. I don’t like it in pizza, so it doesn’t matter, but I don’t like being wrong, either.

You can get flour that’s 14% gluten. That must be interesting. Sometimes when I make pizza, I add gluten with a spoon, so it’s not like you’re limited to what you get in the bag. Gluten is easy to buy, and it beats working yourself to death trying to find the ultimate flour.

Costco cheese continues to exceed expectations. I have learned that a lot of the things I do to make pizza work are actually necessary only to compensate for bad cheese.

I put white vinegar in my sauce. It turns out the reason I need that is that most cheese has no flavor. With Costco cheese, I can reduce it or omit it. I also add olive oil to my sauce. I didn’t think it had much effect on the cheese, but it does. If I go over a tablespoon in two ounces (weighed as it comes from the can) of Super Dolce sauce, the oil rises up into the cheese and makes the pie too oily. This doesn’t happen with Gordon Food Supply Primo Gusto cheese, but it’s a problem with Costco mozzarella, so I have to drop the olive oil down to a teaspoon or two. It’s good to be able to reduce the olive oil, because the oil I have degrades the taste of the sauce a little. Oil oxidizes in the bottle before you buy it, and I think that gives the sauce a slight cardboard taste. Mike says the answer is lighter, cheaper olive oil, but if the olive oil is reduced, I don’t have to worry about it.

Someone advised me to add cheddar to my cheese. This pumps up the fat content and adds sourness, which you need. Works great with Primo Gusto, but there is no need to do it with Costco cheese. It might be nice to cut it with a good provolone or scamorza, however.

Mike advised me to underlay the mozzarella with grated Romano. Again, it depends on the mozzarella.

I’ve noticed that Costco cheese has a smoky smell. I was afraid I had gotten something on the bag, but it turns out the smell comes from the cheese. I guess it has a fragrance because it’s quality cheese.

I have read that Gordon Food Service will special-order Grande Cheese, but you have to buy a whole 30-pound case. I don’t think it’s worth it. I know it’s fantastic cheese, but things are going so well now, what’s the point?

I may run up to GFS and get more sauce to freeze. I plan to make more frozen dough portions. They don’t save time, because it takes a couple of hours to turn frozen dough into a pie. But they do minimize the mess and the work. If you can plan a meal three hours ahead, frozen dough will work for you. If you have to have pizza faster than that, because you can’t anticipate the need, forget it.

You’re better off planning ahead and freezing dough or refrigerating it for a day, because the flavor and texture will improve a little as the dough sits. If I could manage to make sourdough portions, I’d be in paradise. You can’t do that on the spur of the moment. Freezing and sourdough crust go together naturally. I should order some starter.

I could also freeze dough for garlic rolls, although I don’t know if I’d ever use it. A small pizza is a reasonable meal. It won’t make you fat. Add two garlic rolls, and you’re way over budget. Maybe on rare occasions I could fix myself three or four rolls, but it’s risky.

Freezing entire pizzas would be great, but you need a very big vacuum sealer. I don’t see it happening.

The major breakthrough that made all this possible was the decision to use the food processor to knead dough. If I had to use my hands or a mixer, I would never have been willing to make pizza often enough to learn anything. The food processor turns it into a three-minute job, from kneading the dough to putting the food processor parts in the dishwasher. The actual kneading is a little over a minute, and the dough is perfect.

Sooner or later I need to get my Sicilian working. I never found a steel pan I liked. Maybe the best thing is to use a big cast iron skillet. If I dedicate one to pizza, I’ll be able to develop a finish that will assure stick-free crusts. I can make excellent thick-crust pizzas just by using more dough in my regular recipe, but I like the pan-baked crusts they make in New York. They’re a little oily and very crunchy on the outside. My thick crusts are plain old pizza crusts. Wonderful, but not Sicilian. Ordinary pizza crust is like baked bread, which must be why you have to use a stone. A stone lets the crust dry as it bakes. Sicilian is sort of fried on the bottom.

This stuff never ends. But it’s okay. I remember a time when my pizza was disgusting. Now it’s always great; the only issue is whether it has the precise characteristics I imagine before I make it.

I Need Cheap Olive Oil

I called Mike about my pizza confusion. He had sage advice.

I am using olive oil that is too good. That’s why the flavor of my dough is wrong when I use oil. He uses the cheapest olive oil known to man. Three dollars a liter. It has almost no color. I tried to get cheap oil, figuring that was what pizzerias used, but I guess I didn’t go cheap enough. You want something with almost no olive flavor. If it’s green, leave it on the shelf. Virgin olive oil is green, so you want the slutty stuff.

He has a great new invention. He plans to roll pizza ingredients up in dough and then cut the roll in slices and bake them. This would be like a stromboli, except a stromboli is baked as a complete roll. I think baking the slices will give a much tastier result, with more browning.

He likes my idea of freezing dough, sauce, and cheese and stapling the bags to each other as a sort of pizza kit. I have to pat myself on the back for that one. Sure beats starting from zero every time you want food.

He showed his son how to make pizza dough in a food processor, which is something I showed Mike. Now the kid will be the emperor of his dorm. I am proud.

Mike refuses to make pizza with no oil in the dough. Can’t reason with him on that, but his results are beyond reproach.

He thinks I should use oil in my garlic rolls, even if I don’t put it in the pizza. And he uses regular biscuit flour, not the high-gluten stuff. He says he would only use bread flour if he were trying to impress someone. Not sure what that means.

I think bread flour is better for rolls, but I can’t deny the perfection of biscuit-flour pizza crust. It’s worth noting that 00 flour, highly regarded by pizza snobs, is actually low in gluten. Many people assume otherwise.

Interesting stuff. The puzzle has no unique solution.