Not Happening

I give up on store cheese. This is my second pizza topped with bagged dairy-aisle cheese, and they both tasted a bit like vinyl. The deli cheese was much better, and the cost was roughly the same. With toppings, questionable cheese is okay. Without, the flaws are too obvious. The deli cheese was oily, but the texture and flavor were magnificent.

I still can’t believe how much you have to water commercial pizza sauce down. If it’s thick enough to hold a small peak, it will be overpowering. Like ketchup.

Adding one tablespoon of gluten to two cups of flour killed the tossing problems.

Putting whole-milk cheese over part-skim cheese reduced the burning, but it didn’t eliminate it. Interesting effort, in any case.

Now someone, come take the rest of that gallon can of sauce away.

Do I Still Got It?

This will surprise you. I decided to make a pizza for lunch.

I was annoyed that the last two were imperfect. I’m supposed to be telling other people how to do this, so I need to stay on top of my game. I might have told someone to toss a pizza crust with no fat in it, and when it looked funny, my grand reputation would have suffered.

I stuck some olive oil in the dough this time. I’m also going to try my trick of mixing part-skim and whole-milk cheeses, with the whole-milk cheese on the top to reduce burning. Wonder if that will work.

I wish I had Mike’s confidence with tossed crusts. He knows no fear. He throws them around like they stole something. But he had to eat maybe a ton of pizza to develop that skill.

He makes a really neat crust. I can’t remember whether I Youtubed it. His crust has a big roll around the outside, and the inside is a film. When it cooks, the inside part is very, very thin, but you get a big balloony handle to hold it with. I love that. Wimps who refuse to eat crust wouldn’t like it, but I do.

I also consulted my book for the sauce recipe. I’ve tried so many, they run together in my head.

I’ll let you know if it’s any good. I have done well with Sargento cheese in the past, but it was combined with toppings, and toppings make bad cheese seem better.

Catastrophe

I am starting to think this flour is just too low in gluten to form into a decent pizza. I bought all-purpose Martha White, figuring it would be good for biscuits. Ordinarily, all-purpose flour for biscuits makes a fine pizza, but this stuff may be too extreme. I can’t figure it out. The crust started holing on me at 10″.

I give up. I added a tablespoon of gluten to the next batch.

I made a few rolls with the failed dough. Very nice.

Don’t Forget the Oil

It’s amazing how helpful it is to write down your recipes.

On Saturday and Sunday, I made pizza, with hand-tossed crusts. And I had a couple of problems. The main problem was that the surface of the crusts dried out as I worked it, giving a peculiar texture and increasing the probability of holes. I also forgot to add vinegar to the first batch of sauce. It was still very good, but it’s hard to believe I forgot.

I generally like oil-free crusts. I think pizza should be a little leathery, and withholding oil does the trick. But I started making oil-free crusts back when I was rolling pies out with a pin. A pin won’t let the surface of the dough dry and break up. I guess it mashes the dry bits on the surface against the wetter bits inside, and you end up with a smooth crust. When you toss a crust, you don’t get that effect, so you can have problems. From now on, I’m putting oil in my tossed crusts. I think this information is in the book, but I didn’t remember it until the pies were made. The pizzas were still good, but they were not as pretty as they should have been. And I had one crust tear so badly, I gave up on it and made rolls out of it.

I think you absolutely have to have oil in your dough when you make rolls. A pizza has a lot of stuff on it that compensates for a lack of oil in the crust, but you don’t want to bite into a roll and taste oil-free dough.

Yesterday’s pie was experimental. I wanted to try part-skim mozzarella mixed with whole-milk provolone. I made a pizza on Saturday, using whole-milk cheeses, and it was a little oilier than I wanted, so I thought I’d see what cutting the oil in the mozzarella did. It wasn’t that great. The cheese burned in some areas because it lacked fat. And the texture was not as good as sliced whole-milk deli cheese. The mozzarella I used was bagged Sargento cheese, and the provolone was Land O’ Lakes sliced cheese.

Now I wonder: what if I put mozzarella on the pie and then covered it with a thin layer of provolone? The high-fat provolone should prevent the cheese from burning.

I can’t remember whether I tried different temperatures when I was writing the book. Some people seriously recommend 425 degrees, which would reduce burning, but maybe their recipes are no good. And maybe they recommend lower heat because they use bad cheese.

I don’t know. Sooner or later, you have to say a recipe is finished. You can’t keep working on it forever. I’ve made one great pie after another. That’s good enough.

I had some interesting thoughts about guns this weekend. Last week I realized that the notion that longer barrels were more accurate didn’t really make sense. At least, the idea that a longer barrel provides better guidance doesn’t make sense. You may not understand this if you don’t think like a physicist or an engineer, but it should be obvious to people with the right background. A bullet is in very tight contact with a barrel, right up to the muzzle. If there are directional deviations in the parts of the barrel before the bullet gets near the muzzle, they will be completely erased by the last inch or so. Think about it. Say a bullet is headed in a certain direction two inches before it reaches the muzzle, and then there is a bend in the barrel, amounting to a fraction of a degree. What’s the bullet going to do? It can’t keep moving in the original direction. It would have to go through the side of the barrel to do that. It will have to change direction and adopt the path forced on it by the last two inches. You would expect the last part of the barrel to determine the direction the bullet takes.

Again, this will be a tough thing for people who gave up science after high school to understand. I’m trying to make it as obvious as possible. Either you see it or you don’t. One of the great frustrations of physics is the difficulty of explaining things to stubborn lay people who are positive their wrong ideas are right. My mother went to high school with a girl who said it was possible to exceed the speed of light, because she was able to turn off her bedroom light and get in bed before the room got dark.

I Googled around, and sure enough, I found a page in which a gun expert said he shot very small groups at fifty yards, using 3/4″ of rifling. I suppose you still have to have a certain amount of length, to get the velocity up, but it looks like added length doesn’t help guide the bullet.

So I started to wonder. What was the point in having any twist at all in the first half of a barrel? You would think it would add resistance to the bullet’s motion. I wondered why it wasn’t possible to make a barrel with rifling that was straight up to a certain point, with the twist added toward the end. You’d think the bullet would gain velocity faster, due to the lower resistance, and you’d get a more efficient gun.

This idea has been rolling around in my head since Saturday.

It occurred to me that maybe a bullet can’t take the stress of a sudden twist, when it’s already moving fast. Maybe it would come apart, or maybe it would slow down to the point where you could blow up a barrel. That led me to wonder whether it was possible to make a barrel with a progressive twist. It could be nearly straight at the breech, and then it could turn faster as you approach the muzzle.

I don’t know. This stuff is really interesting. I know that if I knew where to Google, I’d find that all of these ideas have already been considered.

Anyway, now I believe I understand how my short-barreled Glock 26 can be as accurate as my 1911s.

I think I may get the crown on my Smith & Wesson 686+ done. Since the last part of the barrel is so critical, I would like to have a recessed crown I can’t ding up. And God knows what I’ve already done to it in the past, with cleaning rods.

Nothing with guns is simple, I guess.

Research Never Stops

It’s the Sabbath, but a man still has to eat, so I am going to make another pizza. I think the combination of part-skim mozzarella with a little provolone may be a smart idea. And I’m going to try it with supermarket cheese. In the past, I’ve gotten good results with Sargento shredded cheese, so I picked up some Sargento mozzarella and some sliced Land O’ Lakes provolone.

I had a problem with my pizza yesterday. I now hand-toss my crusts, even though I’m terrible at it. They tend to be thinner than rolled crusts. The one I made yesterday wasn’t thick enough to resist being pressed into the screen, so it stuck in places, and I had to rip it a little to move it to the stone. I lost a fair amount of the pie, but it was still excellent. In fact, the areas where the peel shoved cheese under the pie during the tearing were especially good.

I’m not completely sure the thinness of the crust was the problem; I inadvertently used a clean screen, and they tend to stick. The best ones have grease baked onto them.

Mike is having some kind of hideous food orgy today. I blocked out the memory of most of the things he told me he was fixing. I remember this phrase: “my theme is bacon.”

He said he’d send photos.

Pizza

I have an assignment for some loyal reader.

Make my pizza, using my book. And for cheese, use a quarter-pound of aged provolone and three-fourths of a pound of low-moisture, part-skim mozzarella. Preferably sliced, not shredded. I don’t care what kind of crust you use, or which sauce. Tell me what happens.

I just made a pie with that combination, except that the mozzarella was whole-milk. It was excellent, but it was actually a little too rich. Provolone is a fatty cheese, and when you add whole-milk mozzarella, maybe you’re overdoing it slightly. Hard to say. The problem may be due to the fact that I was too lazy to get olive oil, so I used around a tablespoon and a half of melted butter in the sauce.

The crust was perfect. The sauce was perfect. If you can’t get Stanislaus sauce, Bonta will not disappoint you.

The sauce was this, more or less.

1/4 cup Bonta
1/4 cup water
1/4 tsp. garlic powder
1/2 tsp. oregano
1/2 tsp. sugar

I forgot the pepper, I think. And the salt. But it didn’t matter.

Reflective of my Healthy Priorities

Here is what I call a productive day of running errands. I went to Home Depot to get stuff to add more shelves to the garage. Then I swung by Publix to get deli cheese to make a pizza.

I felt I had gone long enough without nature’s perfect food. And since I now make better pizza than any restaurant in Miami, there was no point in buying it ready-made. I had two gallon cans of Bonta sauce slowly aging in the cupboard, and as much as I wanted to hoard them, I knew it was time to let one of them go.

Bonta is good sauce. Not my favorite, but good. I don’t think anything can touch Stanislaus Super Dolce. When I finally give up all pretense of willpower, I will sit on the couch eating it out of the can with a cooking spoon. I estimate I’ll be there by mid-2009.

I bought Boar’s Head cheese. Three-fourths of a pound of whole milk, low-moisture mozzarella, and a quarter-pound of aged provolone. Just for fun. Your best bet in a grocery store is the cheese they sell at the deli counter. The other stuff tends to have too much water, or it’s full of cellulose powder, or it just tastes bad. But as I have said, I made a very good pizza with Sargento bagged cheese.

I’m making a fat-free crust, simply because I prefer the texture.

Crap, I’m out of olive oil. I may have to hit the store. I like a little oil in my sauce.

Hope your fifth of July is going well.

AB Comes Through

Agent Bedhead, keeper of the sacred words “Pete Doherty,” has once again demonstrated her kindness and generosity by putting up a free ad for me. Thanks, AB. I would fix you a steak and a peach cobbler. If you werent in Oklahoma.

I hope she has given up that insane vegetarian nonsense. What would Jessica Simpson eat?

In other news, my tasty new old Smith & Wesson 27-2 in blue with the 5″ barrel has arrived in Miami. Hopefully I’ll be able to connect with my dealer this week, before Range Day.

Short and Sweet

I kept trying to think of a good domain name for a site for the cookbook. It has to be short and easy to remember, and it has to be descriptive. Codebluecooking.com isn’t that great.

After Googling to see what has already been taken, I am thinking I’ll just make it ManlyGrub.com.

Thoughts?

Ethiopian Ambrosia

Dan from Madison lost his mind and decided to try a recipe from Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook. And it wasn’t something everyone seems to like, such as brownies or blueberry cheesecake. He chose doro wat, which is Ethiopian chicken stew.

Ethiopians cook very spicy food, and they dump it on giant sour pancakes and use them to pick it up and eat it. You really have to try it. I corrupted it by putting sour cream on the side, but you can be more orthodox. Dan ate his doro wat with rice, and nobody arrested him.

Dan took it easy on the peppers, and he couldn’t get fenugreek. I think buyin fenugreek over the web is worth the aggravation. It has a unique flavor. But as Dan will tell you, doro wat is fine with or without it. It looks like he did an excellent job.

Here’s the first part of his two-part doro wat photoessay.

Positive Review

I am getting excited emails from a reader who is trying my doro wat (Ethiopian chicken stew) recipe. He didn’t bother making injera or rotis, and he was not able to get fenugreek, but you can always cheat and eat it over rice, so that’s what he’s doing.

Rather than bloviate about how great I am, I will wait for him to post a review. So far it sounds favorable.

I think I had to go to Penzey’s to get fenugreek, and the seeds are so hard, I used a coffee grinder to grind them. I have one grinder I only use for spices. Fenugreek is pretty neat, but oddly, it’s not essential.

He’s using chicken thighs with the bones still in them, and I think that’s a good choice.

HOI Approved

I had to cook some thick pork chops the other day, and I didn’t know what to do. I decided to rely on a recipe from my book.

If you have the book, you’ve noticed the stuffed pig recipe. It has two parts. First, a recipe for stuffed pork chops. Then a recipe for an entire pig. I cannot recommend these recipes highly enough. You won’t believe them until you try them.

I didn’t stuff the pork chops I cooked recently. Instead, I took one idea from the recipe and used it. I have sage growing in the yard, so I grabbed a handful. I poured about a cup of apricot nectar and a cup of Marsala (Florio’s sweet) in a pan. I shredded the sage into it and added salt and pepper, I added two tablespoons of butter, and I reduced the liquid until it was thick. I had already salted the chops and set them aside to absorb the salt. I brushed the liquid on the chops and baked them at 350 until they hit 170 degrees on the inside.

They were excellent. You should try it. I think they would be much better if you soaked them in the nectar and Marsala for a day before reducing it. And if you want to be a complete perfectionist, brine them in a baking soda solution for a day before that.

They’re better with stuffing, but this version has the benefit of not killing you as quickly.

If you use the recipe in the book, make sure you use a thermometer instead of relying on time. Jam it in the middle of the stuffing. When the stuffing is cooked, the pork is definitely safe.

I think peach nectar would be good, too.

Wonderful Feedback

I am receiving more priceless celebrity endorsements for Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook.

Okay, they’re not from celebrities. But they’re still pretty good.

Good afternoon, sir! I’ve been a longtime reader of your blog and have bought all three books. It’s really nice to see someone with good values (I’m very impressed by your religion posts) and connections to my part of the world get ahead in life. (I’m an Eastern KY __________ from __ County.) I really have enjoyed all of them, but the cookbook is a masterpiece. I read three chapters, then promptly drove three counties over to buy a griddle. 🙂 Made the steak and potato recipe last night… I thought I’d died and went to heaven. Keep up the amazing work!

Wow, I’m glad someone tried the griddle idea. There are no bad recipes in the book, but some stand out, and my steaks are so good, I no longer have any interest at all in steakhouses. I have been criticized for frying steak, which is what happens on a griddle, but what you get is a beautifully charred piece of meat, more than worthy of an expensive restaurant. My steaks are better than Ruth’s Chris et alia, so who cares if they’re fried?

Sometimes I think it would be fun to make beef gravy on the griddle. It would be sickeningly good. The griddle adds a lot of flavor.

Shipping it today. Very nice job. We making the pizza tonight. You didn’t mention the redneck lamb box thro…

I’ll post a review… althro I didn’t see the comment about the librarian and the leather belt soaked in cinnamon oil from the first one. I loved Adam, Satan and Petunia thro. A better story than the Lilith one.

I can’t say it enough. The pizza recipe justifies buying the book. I have to warn you, though, Mike is right. Once you have the power to make real pizza at home, you’ll make it over and over and over. He said it took him five years to stop. That is not a joke. If you’re fat, it may be a real problem.

Thanks again, all.

Whoops

I think I forgot to mention this. Kevin over at Technogypsy put up a link to my book, Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook.

Thanks, dude!

More

Also a gracious link from Bill Quick, at Daily Pundit. Thanks, Bill!

More

Claire dared to tamper with my peach cobbler recipe! If she improved it, I’ll sue!

She thinks there may be a misprint, RE vanilla extract. Unfortunately, I can’t remember.

More

Here’s one from…Captain Cryptic?

More

Damned if Helo hasn’t chimed in.

More

Did I already mention Kim’s review? Can’t remember, so I’ll put up a link.

More

ACK! Here comes Heather!

Not once, but twice!

More

Steve Gigl, who has threatened to cook every recipe and blog it. God help him.

Inside Joke for People Who Bought Book

I am getting more emails about Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook. I can’t get it through my head that people take this book seriously as a cookbook, because I wrote it to make readers laugh, but the recipes do work, and people seem to like them. This guy actually took the time to make the hash brown casserole! This one takes WORK.

I don’t name people who email me when I mention what they say, unless I’m sure they want to be named or won’t care. Here it is:

I cooked up the hashbrown casserole tonight. It was awesome. I needed to cook the bacon to get the grease, and I believe throwing bacon out is a felony (well, it should be), so I crumbled it up and sprinkled it between the layers of hashbrowns. You, sir, are a genius.

It warms my heart to read things like that. I hope people are cooking this stuff all over the US. But not too often. I need them alive so they can buy my next book.

More

I just got another one. I guess it will sound silly, considering the type of writing I do, but I can identify with this one on a special level.

I just got your book Monday and read it when I got home. The chapter written in Christopher Walken’s voice creeped me out, but then just looking at him creeps me out. I read the entire thing before bed. To say I loved it is damning it with faint praise. I loved the recipe for biscuits and I can’t wait to try them but I do have an addition. My mom used to make biscuits with ‘cracklin’s’. Cracklin’s were the left over little bits from rendering lard. She would get fat from the butcher (for some reason it was ground or she ground it, I don’t remember) and render the lard then take the little bits out and cook them a little more to brown up. She would make the biscuits and I don’t remember if she mixed the cracklin’s in or put them on top, but whichever way she did it she would take the biscuits and put them in bacon grease and turn them over so there was bacon grease top and bottom, then bake. When I was about eight or nine she started making Bisquik biscuits and never again did I have an honest-to-goodness biscuit with cracklin’s. Your book has inspired me to attempt to make them myself. Now to track down some place to buy hog fat.

As I have often said, one reason I started improving my cooking skills in the Nineties is that my mother had died, and I didn’t get to see my grandmother in Kentucky very often, and there were foods I missed. A lot of the things I put in the book are things I used to eat at their tables. Cornbread. Biscuits and gravy. Bean soup with ham hocks. I put chicken and dumplings in the original book.

In a less important way, I also missed decent pizza, which used to be all over North Miami when I was a kid, so I learned how to make better pizza than I had back then.

If you’re in the situation I was in, do yourself a favor, pick a few dishes you miss, and figure out how to make them. You’ll get it right eventually. I can tell you from experience, it’s like having an heirloom nobody can take away from you. And if you have kids, you can share it and pass it on to them, and they’ll know a little bit about what your life was like when you were growing up.

More Free Food for Yours Truly

Got some nice emails about Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook. Here’s part of one:

I thought I was gonna die reading your Angela Ashes passage. Seriously. Certainly not appropriate for a Sunday, but then, I’m iconoclastic like that lately.

And then the Christopher Walken and Tom Cruise, and, and, and.

Please write more. I know that I will be hooting and hollering and thinking and amassing recipes, if there’s another cook book, while I read your books. I can’t think of many authors who accomplish that result. The “big name” humorists aren’t literally funny, nor are they consistent, that I can see anymore.

I can’t ask for a nicer response than that. Although this comes close:

Just got your new book a few days ago and made champagne chicken tonight. Man, I can’t believe how good it is. It’s like sex on a plate. I’m probably too lazy to make anything else in the book, but I had to make something. It’s an obligation. I didn’t want the book to end up like another investment that ends up never used, like a Bowflex.

Someone got the writing, and someone else gets the food. Maybe I didn’t waste my time!

Fausta and her family invited me to dinner AGAIN tonight. And I was the worst guest imaginable. We started talking about bloggers and blogging, and we got carried away, I kept talking and talking, and eventually they had to tase me to make me leave.

It was sort of like reading this blog, only there was no way to close the browser window.

I really enjoyed myself, even if I bored everyone else to death.

Again, the comparison to this blog is unavoidable.

Thanks for the emails.