Don’t Let This Happen to You

I used to recommend a Christian teacher named Perry Stone. He got all sorts of revelation from God, and he taught about the deep truths of the Bible. He connected things in various books. He explained the meanings of symbols. It was something to see.

He didn’t ask for money, and he made it clear he never intended to. He counted on God to bring donations in. He gave materials to people who couldn’t pay, such as prisoners. He called his ministry Voice of Evangelism instead of putting his name on it.

Over time, he started to become somewhat crazy. He was angry a lot, and sometimes he relayed stories that were not true. He hadn’t checked them. He supplied information that wasn’t reliable.

He started to seem very proud of himself. He seemed to think he was always right. He wouldn’t admit it when he was wrong.

Eventually, he started asking for money. God didn’t give him what he wanted, so he appealed to people to help him build a big campus. He started calling his business Perry Stone Ministries.

I used to support his work, but it seemed to me that he was going astray, so I stopped. It was particularly ominous to see him appearing with Steve Munsey, a crooked megachurch grifter who is known for helping preachers get people to give them money. Rick Wilkerson Sr., the failed pastor of my old church in Miami, idolized Munsey and let him ruin his church. He thought Munsey was a genius because he had a Starbucks in his church.

I used to post comments on Stone’s Youtube videos, warning him to get away from Munsey.

In 2020, women associated with Stone accused him of gross sexual behavior, including things like showing them how sexually aroused he was. One said God had told him his wife Pam would be dead soon and that he needed to be with another woman. He took time off from preaching, but he went back very quickly.

He began attacking the victims and messengers. A lady stood up in church and called him a “nasty perv,” and he threatened to have her arrested and sue her, neither of which were credible options. He said those things because he panicked. His pride had been breached publicly, while he was on camera, in the pulpit, and after years of being surrounded by yes-men, he could not handle it.

He claimed he had a divinely-inspired dream about “ugly fish,” which represented women interfering with his ministry. He said he expected bad things, such as death, to happen to them.

In short, he went off his nut.

Recently, highly disturbing audio emerged. He had a meeting with two men who were close to him. One was a ministry leader, and the other was a cop who handled security for him. They tried to talk sense to him and calm him down. He cursed and said he was going to kill himself. I’ll provide quotations.

I’m going to go commit suicide up in the mountains and end this thing.

Listen to me, before God, I’m going to go take pills in the mountains … because I can’t put up with this. I am a very sincere person but I have almost no friends, man. And I have almost no friends because of s— like this.

I can’t shake a woman’s hand, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!” Pat them on the back, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!”

I will take my life before I let the ministry go down. I swear to God I’ll take my life!

No, no, no, no. This is going to get bigger. If he’s got letters, it means they’re talking. The ministry is ruined. I’m going to shut down and sell the building. I need to. I need to shut OCI down and sell the building and forget everything I’m doing. And if Pam Stone knows this, Pam Stone will leave me. Oh, she’ll find out. She’ll find out. And by accusations I’ll be destroyed, so what do I have to live for?

This is not your ordinary TV preacher scandal response. Stone reacted like a scared little girl, and he was caught up in selfishness, threatening to spite the world by depriving it of his exalted self. We haven’t heard any audio indicating remorse or a rational response. I doubt there is any.

The voice is undeniably Stone’s. You can go hear him on Youtube, and the story appeared in a reputable paper.

I looked at Stone’s Youtube channel last night. Videos are still popping up, many without Stone. Comments have been turned off. This is one of the signs of a ministry’s death. Crooked preachers like Kenneth Copeland, Paula White, and John Gray don’t let people comment on their videos. Cockroaches run from the light, as conservative Twitter users know.

I know what happened to Stone. Lust wasn’t his big problem. Pride was. He became so full of himself, he could not accept any kind of correction, and he craved wealth and admiration. After he became incorrigible, lust was able to get in and control him, and then after he sinned, pride made him lie.

God told me this: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.”

I know why pride defeated Stone. He didn’t pray in tongues enough. He told people they should do it, but his own prayer life was scant. He bragged about the long hours he spent studying the Bible and other books. You can’t put in long hours every day and have a prayer life that works. It’s not possible.

He used to praise old mountain people who prayed in tongues “excessively,” and to him, “excessively” meant 20 minutes. That’s not excessive. That’s just a beginning. If you only pray in tongues 20 minutes a day, you aren’t winning at life. You are being deceived and defeated.

Stone thought a 20-minute session was a big deal, so he must have been putting in much less time than that.

One of the signs that you’re not praying in tongues enough is that you become deceived. Stone is clearly deceived. He isn’t being corrected by God, and he appears to be somewhat insane.

He needs to go home, quit preaching, get his prayer life going, and let God fix his life. He needs to repent publicly, for real, not like he did the first time, and apologize to the people he wronged. He needs to have demons cast out of him.

It’s a shame to see him taken down like this. He has become so deranged, he is willing to consider killing himself–going to hell–in order to avoid more embarrassment. His pride is worth more to him than avoiding eternal torture by an enemy who will have special punishments waiting for him.

Because he is crazy now, people will assume he was always crazy. They will be less inclined to look at the sound, valuable work he did years ago. Nice work on the part of Satan. He has retroactively defused bombs that were wrecking parts of his kingdom. Fewer people will benefit from Stone’s earlier teaching, so more people will be more vulnerable to attack. If he gets to torture Stone in hell, it will be the cherry on top of the sundae. What a trophy.

Stone didn’t teach people how to protect themselves, so many of his followers are sticking up for him. They’re not praying in tongues enough. They’re not seeking correction. As the Bible says, a bad tree bears bad fruit.

I was praying about this last night. I told God it was discouraging, because if a man with Stone’s background can fall, what could happen to me?

I have been proud and extremely resistant to correction from other people. I have been hostile to people who were right when they argued with me. I keep trying to improve, but what I say about myself is true.

God has given me grace to pray in tongues. That is what will save me. I am doing what Perry Stone does not do, so I should avoid the snares he fell into.

I hope he doesn’t kill himself. He should have enough money to have a soft retirement, so he should be able to stay home and stay out of trouble. The problem with disgraced preachers, though, is that pride usually drives them back into the limelight. Alberto Lee Santiago, the pedophile who ran my last church, went to prison because he insisted on preaching after he was caught, and I don’t think he is any crazier than Perry Stone.

In other news, the gardening project is going well.

The tomatoes we repotted the other day are all alive. Mike was sure it was good to put tomatoes in a 50/50 mixture of peat and dry cow manure from the pasture, but I insisted on checking the web, and I settled on a mix of peat, potting soil, composted manure, and perlite, along with epsom salt and lime. We repotted 10 plants, and we did 9 my way. Mike insisted on doing one his way. As of today, 9 are doing well, and Mike’s plant is somewhat yellow and is losing…is “branches” the word? He is full of remorse. I think the 9 healthy plants will thrive pretty well and produce tomatoes. They are looking stronger by the day.

I am planning to try Ruth Stout no-till gardening, which could also be called “no-character gardening,” because it requires little work. A lady named Ruth Stout decided to try throwing seeds on the ground and covering them with old hay, with no other preparation, and she found she got better harvests than people who worked hard tilling, enriching, and weeding the soil.

You can see why this appeals to me. First, I am somewhat lazy, second, I want big harvests, and third, my soil is like beach sand. Growing things in the ground would be very hard.

I found out Yukon Gold and LaSoda potatoes grow well here, and I also learned you can grow beans and tomatoes the Ruth Stout way. I have seed potatoes and sweet potato slips coming. I have pole beans on hand. I may get more tomato plants.

I think potatoes and beans are important, because they have calories. You can’t live on cabbage and cucumbers.

Getting a lot of hay seemed like an obstacle. It’s expensive. Then I remembered the round hay bales in my woods. My tenant farmer puts them there for his cattle. I can’t take the edible hay, but the cattle have left a gigantic amount of old poopy hay strewn around, and it’s free. I got myself a manure fork today, and I loaded up the utility cart. It took about 10 minutes, so getting enough for a bed should be fast work. As of today, I own a manure fork, so I’m armed with the correct tool.

Better news yet: you can plant vegetables in oak leaves. I only have a few thousand tons of those. They’re acidic, which is a problem. If only I had a source of something to cut the acidity. Like the gigantic pile of ashes under my burn pile.

I think I’ll put down a layer of hay and then pile leaves over it. The leaves will trap moisture for sure. Or maybe I should put the leaves down first, because they will definitely kill all the grass and weeds under the bed. They have killed enough of my grass to make me confident.

We have not built a structure to protect plants yet. The potatoes won’t need protection, because squirrels are too stupid to dig potatoes. My understanding is that they will eventually discover pole beans. Tomatoes will definitely be attacked. I was thinking of building a greenhouse-like thing, but the more I think, the more I believe I just need a frame covered with chicken wire. It’s not cold enough here for a real greenhouse.

The war on squirrels goes better and better. I have learned that trapping nuisance squirrels is legal here, and I have also discovered conibear traps. These are little snap traps you can bait with marshmallows and peanut butter. You tie them to trees, and squirrels climb up and grab the bait. They’re extremely humane (mainly to me, I admit). They crush a squirrel’s neck instantly. I plan to try them. I got squirrel-thinning permission in writing from the state, so there is no reason to hold back. During the past week, I have executed so many squirrels, I have lost count. There are three in the yard now, waiting for their rides. From hawks.

In past years, I spent a lot of time sitting in the woods in a blind I bought, failing to shoot or even see squirrels. I wish I had known what I know now: the best blind is my house. I shoot most of them from the front door and bedroom.

Being a Southerner is so great.

Tomorrow, I plan to pick a spot for my bed, amass a large amount of leaves using the blower, and put them in place. Then I plan to cover them with poopy hay. Then I have to wait for my seed potatoes and sweet potato slips.

I need to learn this stuff before Biden starves us all. I don’t want to be unable to find carbohydrates because I sat on my rear end and trusted the government. I would be a lot better off had I started two years ago.

I don’t know what Biden-trusting people will do in cities. Eat each other, I guess. What if they start driving to the country to steal food? Good recipe for the wave of killings predicted in the Revelation. When times are good, shooting people who steal crops and livestock seems barbaric. When your chickens and vegetables affect what your family weighs in the spring, or how many members make it through the winter, all that changes.

For the first time in my life, I understand why my great aunt Berthy shot at a man who tried to steal her chickens. I get it. As a Christian, I don’t see myself doing that, but other people would.

I learned I can eat wood ears. They call them “chicken of the woods.” I will never run out of those here. I wonder how many calories there are in a serving. Coons and possums are edible, too. You can even eat a coyote or bobcat if you need to.

The recent improvement in my squirrel tactics could serve me well in the future, if I’m not able to thin them out and they remain in good supply. Two people could fill their meat needs with a weekly tally of 8 squirrels. When things get bad, no one will care much about whether they’re in season, and since they will be nuisance animals when they’re close to my house, killing them would be legal anyway.

If all this sounds crazy to you, ask yourself how crazy a 5-dollar carton of eggs would have sounded last year.

Hopefully the rapture will lift me out of here before I start putting moles in my soup.

Sicilian Pizza Recipe

I rarely check the email address associated with this blog, so I get behind on correspondence. I have to go to a different location and turn on a computer I don’t use much. Sorry about that.

A reader asked me for my current pizza recipe, and I don’t think I sent it, so I am trying to make up for it now.

This is for a Sicilian made in a 9″x13″ aluminum quarter sheet pan. I season my pans with olive oil, baking it on at 500° or so until it’s a nice, slick film. A lot of people love steel and iron, but the truth is that aluminum gives a better crust, and it’s light and easy to work with.

I used to use 1-1/3 times as much dough, for a taller crust. My friend Mike is staying with me, and he has blood sugar issues, so I decided to try a thinner crust. It’s still excellent. If you want a taller crust, do the multiplication.

Whatever you decide to do, you want about 2/3 as much water as flour, by weight. Don’t measure the flour and water by volume, because you will get inconsistent results. Be precise about this. A small variation can ruin your pizza. Don’t be an idiot and say you have to do everything by feel.

The big exception here is the sauce. You want 4 ounces by volume. It can be hard trying to figure out exactly what 4 ounces of sauce weigh, but the volume figure is what you’re shooting for.

SICILIAN PIZZA WITH 3/4-HEIGHT CRUST

300 g high-gluten flour, like All Trumps or GFS Primo Gusto
200 g water
1 tsp. salt
1.5 tsp. sugar
1/8 tsp. instant yeast – This will take hours to rise, so multiply by 4 if you’re in a hurry.
1/2 tsp. pepper
1.5 tsp. gluten if using bread flour – You may want to add a little more water.

Mix everything but the water in a big food processor with a chopper blade. Add the water and process for up to a minute. Dry flour will fly up and stick to the sides of the bowl in the first few seconds. I like to stop the processor and scrape it back into the dough with a silicone spatula. Then I continue.

Pour olive oil into your sheet pan. When it spreads out, it should be a circle at least 5″ in diameter. Put a little oil on your hands. Take the dough out and turn it inside out a few times, stretching it to make it tighter so it gives a good oven spring. Flatten it out into sort of a crude rectangle about an inch thick. Put it in the pan, roll it in the oil, and cover the pan with plastic.

After at least 20 minutes, Try stretching it to fit the pan. If it won’t cooperate, do what you can and return after 20 more minutes. Once it’s stretched, put dents all over the top of the dough with your fingers. Then turn it over and fit it to the pan. The dents will form nice ripples and so on in the finished crust.

SAUCE INGREDIENTS

4 oz. volume or ~135 g weight Stanislaus Saporito sauce
4 oz. water

If you want a sauce that tastes more ripe, substitute around 1-1/2 oz. of the fruit juice of your choice for part of the water.

1 tsp. sugar
1 tbsp. oil
1-1/2 tsp. vinegar
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. oregano

CHEESE

6 slices Publix brand provolone
Enough Boar’s Head mozzarella (whole milk, low moisture) to make up 12 oz.

I used to use Gordon Food Service provolone, but it seems kind of rubbery these days. Boar’s Head deli mozzarella works well, but it’s expensive, so try to find something else. You can also substitute other things, such as cheddar or munster. Swiss can be very nice.

Cut the mozzarella in cubes if you want to make things easy. Otherwise, thin slices will work. I tell the grocery people to make me 1/2″ slices so I can turn them into cubes easily.

Apply the sauce to the crust. If you want, you can parbake it first, but it doesn’t really improve it. Apply the provolone. Spread the mozzarella over it. Sprinkle the pie with oregano. Add toppings.

I like to put a few slivers of cheese on the outer edge of the crust so they melt and burn against the pan. You have to have a well-seasoned pan, though, or the cheese will stick.

Bake at 500° or more (my oven does 550°) on the lowest rack, until you get what you want. These days, I have been burning pizzas pretty good, at up to 17 minutes. I use a pizza steel now. I put it on the lowest rack and let it get good and hot. Then I put the pizza pan on it.

Take the pie out of the pan and put it on a wire rack if you are obsessed with crunchiness. If not, you can put it on a pizza tray.

You will probably have to play around to see how to handle your particular oven.

You can use just about any flour you want. They all work, but they give results that are good in different ways.

I suggest you make yourself a pizza peel like the one I made. You can find photos on this blog. You just cut it out of a pizza pan, bend it, and sand off the rough bits. You need something as wide as the quarter sheet is long in order to get all the way under the crust, break any sticky spots loose, and support the pizza.

The sauce comes in huge cans, so you should break every can into portions and freeze them in airtight bags. I divide my cans into 4 portions. When I want pizza, I take the frozen sauce out and slice off as much as I want, using a scale to measure it. Then I melt it in the microwave and add my other ingredients.

That’s about it. The results are extraordinary. Maybe you can improve on them.

Living High on Pork Avenue

Today I had a traditional meal I had not had in a while. Cornbread and vegetables. I fixed green beans and collards, and I served them with a sliced Vidalia and a sliced tomato. Very, very nice.

Yesterday, Mike made BBQ chicken, and I made greens. Because the chicken came out of the smoker faster than I anticipated, the greens had been cooking less than three hours when dinner was served. For this reason, they were practically raw by Southern standards, and the flavor was substandard. They were probably better than the collards in 99% of America’s restaurants, but then restaurants make them badly.

I had hoped to make the greens with neckbones, but my local grocery was out of neckbones and hocks. I grabbed some fatback, but when I got home, I decided not to use it because it wasn’t smoked. I used half a pound of fried bacon instead, along with most of the grease. I also added a garlic clove, salt, MSG, butter, pepper, and a few squirts of hot sauce. In retrospect, I think half a can of chicken broth might have been nice.

Mike put vinegar in his greens, and he raved about them. I kept telling him they were garbage compared to the real thing, but he didn’t seem to think that was possible.

After we ate, I boiled the greens for maybe 90 more minutes, and they finally gave up. They wilted completely and gave up all their flavor. Instead of salad in hot water, I had sweet, wilted, wrinkly greens swimming in an acidic, aromatic reduction you could sell by itself in a high-end restaurant. Call it soup.

Yesterday, when I realized I wouldn’t be able to use the fatback in the greens, I put it in the smoker with the chicken. When it came out, it was gorgeous. It had a golden glaze on it. It was tender. It smelled like heaven. Today I used it in my beans.

Pole beans are the best green beans. They have lots of flavor, and they take a long time to fall apart when you boil them. You can boil them with pork for hours without ruining the texture. I did not have pole beans, so I put my regular beans in water with salt, garlic, pepper, sugar, butter, and MSG. I sliced the fatback into the pot.

After a couple of hours, the beans were getting soft, but there was still too much liquor in the pot, so I removed the beans and boiled the snot out of the liquor and pork. I reduced the liquid by a factor of maybe three. Then I put everything back together. The blandness was gone. The flavor was even better than the flavor of the greens.

I made cornbread using my standard recipe, which is 2 cups Martha White, 1-1/3 cups full-fat buttermilk, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup bacon grease, 1 tbsp. sugar, and 1 tsp. salt. I had to replace about two tablespoons of grease with butter because I was running low. I baked at 450° in a #6 skillet. The cornbread came out with a dark brown bottom and lots of crunch. It was beautiful.

I will explain how I eat this stuff. I slice the onion and quarter the slices. I slice the tomato. I butter the cornbread. Then I go at it, and most of the time, I try to get a piece of Vidalia on my fork with whatever else I’m eating. I dip the cornbread in the liquid from the greens and beans.

If that sounds weird, you may be one of the millions of people who don’t like vegetables much, or maybe you’ve never had greens or beans cooked correctly with pork.

Mike is a real challenge. I made hoe cakes, which are small fried cornbread pancakes, the other day. They were supposed to go with chili. Mike grabbed a squeeze bottle of cheap jelly and blasted some hoe cakes with it. I nearly died.

Today he said he thought the undercooked greens had been great, and he said he didn’t understand dipping cornbread in the juice from greens and beans. He can’t even understand why a person would put Oberholtzer’s Kentucky sorghum syrup on cornbread instead of store brand grape jelly made from dye and corn syrup.

He has a date in another city today, and he didn’t manage his time well. I sat down and ate like a king, and he had to get in the car to drive across the state. He was not happy when he saw the food.

In these apocalyptic times of Bidenian inflation, supply chain problems, and disease, it’s good to remember that the price of a dish and its sophistication are totally unrelated to how good it tastes or how good it is for you. One day people who can do wonders with collards, corn meal, and salt pork will be living much better than urbanites and suburbanites who think they can’t eat anything Gordon Ramsay doesn’t eat.

Near-Divine Food for a Divine Occasion

My friend Mike arrived yesterday. He is moving to the Ocala area, and he just sold his house in New England. He left on Wednesday, and he arrived on Saturday. It was a horrible trip. Car problems. Bad hotels. No one to share the driving. He should have arrived Friday, but his Mercedes had to make most of the trip in limp mode, and he stopped in North Carolina overnight for an unsuccessful repair.

The night after the failed repair job, he went to a hotel in South Carolina and found it too filthy to stay in. Someone had even left him a little gift in the porcelain receptacle, if you get my drift. He drove to another hotel, and a shabby pickup kept following him as he tried to park. Obviously, it was some white-trash dirtbag hoping to loot his trailer. He called the cops, the trailer left, and a beat-up Pontiac showed up to continue the game.

He checked out and gave up on hotels. He ended up stopping periodically to sleep in his car’s front seat.

Of course, demons were resisting his move to Christian Northern Florida. But they failed to achieve victory. They are, after all, losers and the children of losers. Losing is what they do.

We had to move maybe a thousand pounds of stuff into my house today, and there is still a lot left on his trailer. He had 20 pounds of yellow grits with him, because he didn’t want to throw out everything from his kitchen. They got out and went all over his lawnmower. He had similar problems with sugar and a big bottle of Mexican vanilla extract. And a bottle of liqueur someone gave to his late father.

The good news: we’re working on Passover dinner. Let’s go ahead and call it Passover, even if Christians celebrate on the wrong day. Jesus is our Passover lamb, and he was killed on Passover. No chocolate rabbit ever died for anyone’s sins.

Local stores put rib roasts on sale, and I picked one up Tuesday. I covered it with salt, butter, and garlic, and stuck it in my spare fridge under kitchen towels. I wanted to roast it in my new oven, but Mike got all excited about the Showtime rotisserie, so that’s where it is.

I told him I’d handle the baked potatoes and Caesar salad if he cooked the roast. I cut a baguette in pieces and roasted them. Then I tossed them in olive oil in which I had fried garlic. Very nice. I dried the romaine as well as I could and cut it in suitable pieces. I finally found a very good dressing recipe. You can look it up over at Serious Eats. I used to use an Epicurious recipe, but it was disgusting. I kept forgetting it was bad, and I ended up using it more than once. I also used a Bon Appetit recipe. Forget both of those. It’s Serious Eats Caesar from now on. I had to use more lemon and Worcestershire than the recipe called for, but the dressing is perfect.

Now I just have to fix the potatoes and horseradish sauce. I now rely on Mike’s potato method. He covers his potatoes with oil and salt, nukes them, and toasts them in a toaster oven. They’re better than potatoes cooked in a regular oven from start to finish. Really easy.

Yesterday, we ate leftover pizza, and Mike made garlic knots. I also had some homemade ice cream from my fancy Italian machine. Vanilla with Grape Nuts. Sounds terrible, but it’s delicious.

In an hour or so, we should be eating. The only disappointment is that Rhodah can’t be here with me.

Hope everyone else is having a wonderful Passover or Resurrection Day.

You Can Keep It

I am still wondering about my future in blogging. I feel like I’m not doing much good when I blog about important things. On the other hand, blogging about trivial things is still a good way to pass the time on the rare occasions when I get bored.

Today I did something very unimportant. I made Sicilian pizza again. This time, I put cheese on half of the rim of the pizza so it would melt and burn against the pan. It was very nice. I may cheese the entire rim of the next pie.

I tried Bridgford thick pepperoni. I usually use Hormel pepperoni, which is thinner. I don’t have easy access to high-end pepperoni here.

The Bridgford was good, but it seemed to taste too much like salt and not enough like pepperoni.

This pizza got beaten up a lot while I was handling it. I removed it from the pan and set it on my steel to see if it would improve the crust, and I made a mess. It didn’t improve it, so I won’t have to do that again.

I dropped a slice of pepperoni and some cheese on the hot steel. No problem. I scooped it up and dropped it back on the pie. It made it better. The fact that the pizza was manhandled didn’t hurt it at all as a dish.

Someone suggested I buy a whole Bridgford pepperoni, wrap it, and leave it in the produce drawer of my fridge for a few weeks. Supposedly, aging improves it.

I have realized pizza can’t get significantly better than what I make now. That’s how good it is. I have started experimenting with variations just for the sake of variety. I’m making 3/4 height pies. I may make a 1/4 height pie. I would just reduce my original dough recipe by 75%.

My pies are darker than they used to be. I kept seeing videos of charred pies on the web, and they got to me. Now I’m starting to like them.

So where is the best pizza in America? Youtube personalities seem to think it’s in New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University. I have not been to New Haven. When I was in college, people said it was a dangerous ghetto.

New Haven drew a lot of Italian immigrants. Supposedly, a New Haven company recruited them in Italy and helped them move. They went straight from the docks to the company’s plant. Eventually, some of them decided cooking was better than industrial work. This is the legend, anyway. They started making big, thin, well-done pies similar to New York pizza.

In New Haven, people are forced to call pizza “apizza,” which is Neapolitan slang for “la pizza.” They pronounce it “ahbeets.” I can certainly understand why the local Italians would pronounce it that way, but everyone else should be permitted to pronounce it correctly.

There are three big-name places in New Haven: Sally’s Apizza, Modern Apizza, and Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napolitana. People argue about which is the best. They originally used coal-fired ovens, but Modern uses precious oil. Must stink to be them under Joe Biden. They bake their pies at somewhere around 1000°, whereas New York pizzerias run about half that hot.

People swoon over their pizza, and they wait in line. Pizza “experts” rave about these places.

I have been curious about “apizza,” but I knew I would never go to New Haven. I wondered if I could learn to make New Haven pies.

My friend Mike is driving to Florida right now. He sold his house up north, and he will be staying with me for a while. I have been calling him to help him kill time on the road. Today I called and told him he should have stopped in New Haven on the way.

He said he had been to Frank Pepe’s Massachusetts location about 5 times. I was surprised. I asked him how the pizza was. He said it was very good, but not amazing. He said his pizza and mine are better.

If Frank Pepe’s is merely very good, then apizza is a hollow legend. Mike knows a good pizza when he eats, or bakes, one.

I went to a pizza forum and told everyone what Mike had said, and people there seemed to agree. Their lack of awe is evident in the scarcity of forum posts asking for help making New Haven pizza. If it were really that good, people would be trying to replicate it. They work hard to make Chicago pizza, New York pizza, Detroit pizza, and Neapolitan pizza, but New Haven doesn’t get significant attention.

This experience reminds me of something I already knew: people who can’t make pizza have lower standards than people who can.

Mike and I once toured Miami, trying slices at various places that were highly regarded, and none of them could sit beside our own pies. I think it would have been different had we been unable to make pizza. We would have been dependent on professionals, and they would have seemed like miracle workers to us. Having made extremely good pizzas for a long time, we were not easily impressed during our tour.

I don’t plan to try to make apizza. Mike says my pizza is better, and I know he’s right, because his opinion can be trusted. I don’t need to go to New Haven and find out what I’m missing.

The more pizza I make, the more confidence I have in my ability. Today on a forum, I stood up to a guy who sells steel pizza pans. These pans are all over New York City. They’re used to bake Sicilian. They’re heavy and expensive.

He was pushing his pans, as well as a small plastic spatula for scraping pizzas out of them. Other people were suggesting ridiculous ideas like paint scrapers.

I put up a post saying I didn’t understand why people used steel pans. I said I used seasoned aluminum quarter sheets. I have tried steel, and it doesn’t brown pizza well. It also rusts, and small steel pans are square, which is stupid, because it reduces the number of edge pieces you get. No one wants an inner slice.

I also posted a photo of a tool I made to get pizzas out of pans. I’ll post photos here. I made one of these over a decade ago when I was stupidly making pizzas for the inept and corrupt people at Trinity Church in Miami. I make the mistake of leaving it in the church kitchen when I left, and I’m sure it has never been used since. Their pizza operation ceased permanently the minute I left, even though I had taught people how to make it.

The tool was cut from a tray for 14″ round pies. I cut it on the table saw, and then I ground the corners off, sanded the edges, and bent it using a Moxon wood vise.

Unlike a tiny spatula, this thing will lift an entire 9.5″ by 13″ pizza without bending or tearing it. It’s fantastic. I own one of the only two in the world.

It’s amazing that experienced pizza people would suggest terrible tools like scrapers and spatulas. It’s amazing no one could figure out a better way. Meanwhile, a hobbyist who makes pizzas in a home oven made the perfect tool for $5.75.

The guy who sells pans came back and said something about how I needed to try steel pans, so I posted a photo of the ones I have, sitting in a cupboard behind some cake pans I never use. I let him know they appeared to be exactly what he sold: American Metal Spinning pans with wire in the rims.

I said they appeared on the web for $28 each, which was ridiculous, since aluminum quarter sheets sell for around 5 dollars on restaurant supply sites. Aluminum is a lot more expensive than steel. I put up a photo of one of my Sicilian crusts.

I know what I’m doing. Sometimes you have to admit you know what you’re doing. My Sicilian is as good as anyone’s pizza, or AHBEETS, anywhere. The pan guy should have kept quiet, but of course, he’s trying to make a living. You can’t blame him for trying, even though his product is pretty much worthless.

A law school friend of mine moved to Hollywood and became a Fox executive. She told me people there kept saying this: “No one in this town knows what they’re doing.” They meant they were all winging it, pretending to be sure of themselves. The same thing is true in most fields. It’s true in the pizza game.

I make great Sicilian. I made a fantastic tool for moving it around. I chose the best pans.

Deal with it!

“Breakfast” means “America”

This post will repeat things I wrote in an earlier post, but that’s okay, because I want it to stand on its own.

I just had my first decent breakfast in weeks. I had my last good breakfast in Ireland, during my recent trip. Every breakfast since then was lame. Until today. I just visited McDonald’s.

I don’t know why people don’t man up and admit McDonald’s makes some of the best breakfast food on the planet. It must be snob anxiety. They’re afraid of what other people will think. I remember seeing Candice Bergen brag that she had never had a McDonald’s hamburger. She sounded like a fool to me. Sure, she said the right thing to avoid raising the anemic eyebrows of her elitist vegan peers, but she sounded like a snob who was more interested in currying favor than in enjoying good food. For all she knew, McDonald’s burgers were wonderful, but she was afraid to try them because the unwashed intracoastal masses ate them.

I know Mcdonald’s burgers are NOT wonderful, but then I’ve eaten them. I gave them a shot. I didn’t sneer at them in proud ignorance.

Today I had a sausage and egg McMuffin, a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, and hash browns. I mixed Hunt’s All-Natural ketchup with a little Frank’s Red Hot, and I dipped liberally. I’m still basking in the afterglow.

You may wonder what I had in Ireland that constituted my last good breakfast. Simple. I went to the McDonald’s on Dublin’s O’Connell Street.

I think the first breakfast Rhodah and I shared in Dublin came from Keogh’s, a cafe in the Temple Bar area. They sold us two scones; cranberry and raisin. We paid over three Euros each. The scones were cold and dry. The butter was cold and hard. Rhodah’s scone had no raisins in it. We sent it back. The waiter returned our serve, unaltered. They had a big pile of scones with raisins in them, but they insisted a raisinless raisin scone was normal.

Not long after that, we went to Bread 41, a hipster bakery that sells the kind of food people describe as “artisanal,” which means it looks good. Bread 41 had a lot of great Internet reviews, and people on a forum recommended it.

Here is the problem with food: most people have the palates of goats. If you put three people at a table, you serve them horse manure on cold bagels, and you pay two of them to say the bagels are great, the third will almost certainly agree. The third person is not likely to know the difference between horse manure and good food, and even if he does, he’ll probably want to fit in with the other two. For these reasons, it’s not really possible to get good advice from people you don’t know. When it comes to the Internet, the problem is compounded by fake reviews. All over the world, people are making good money recommending things they haven’t tried.

We were told Bread 41 was so good, we needed a reservation. We were told people lined up around the block. We walked in anyway, during peak breakfast hours, and there were about three people in front of us. That should have told me something.

I ordered pain au chocolat (“chocolate croissant”), a croissant, and hot chocolate. Rhodah ordered something called a morning bun, along with a roll that had been sliced in half and filled with some kind of cream. She also ordered coffee.

The food looked marvelous. The croissants (I will call both of them that) had all sorts of flaky layers in them. The items Rhodah ordered were very appetizing. Then we tried to eat our purchases.

The croissant tasted like burnt egg wash and not much more. A true croissant is made with milk, sugar, and salt. It should be very flavorful. It should not be dry. It should not be harsh. My croissant had very little flavor, except for tasting burned.

I have managed to enjoy a lot of bad croissants. Burger King croissants are not impressive, but they taste like bread and butter, so they’re pleasant to eat. Publix croissants have a nice buttery taste. Walmart croissants are no worse than a good slice of bagged white bread. In Egypt, at a hotel buffet, I had croissants which pretty clearly arrived at the kitchen in a bag, but they weren’t offensive. Bread 41’s croissants, I could not finish. I mean, I could have, but I didn’t want to. They were that bad.

The chocolate one was just like the other one, but it had chocolate filling installed WAYYYY down in one end. This made it look very stylish, but it was a stupid move, because you would have to eat most of the croissant before tasting chocolate.

Rhodah’s morning bun was fine. It was sort of a glorified pecan twirl kind of a thing. Spiced dough rammed into a mold and baked. Imagine a really good cinnamon roll, and then imagine it dryer and with less flavor. She shared it with me, and it was the only thing we finished.

The cream roll was horrendous. Rhodah complained about the flavor. I tried it, and it had a bitter taste. There was a spice in it that belonged in something like sausage or Indian food. Ruined the whole thing.

Her coffee was lukewarm and not very tasty. My hot chocolate was fraudulent in that it was not hot at all. It was tepid, and it tasted as though it had been made with spoiled milk and water. It wasn’t very sweet, either.

I think the Irish dislike hot beverages. This wasn’t the only time we were served lukewarm coffee or cocoa.

I was afraid the chocolate was spoiled, so I barely touched it. I didn’t want to spend my vacation throwing up.

This is how post-Food Network foodie hipster food is. It’s supposed to look perfect, and you’re supposed to rave about it even if it tastes bad, which it often does.

I wrote an honest Internet review, and someone from Bread 41 had a conniption and responded with a total lack of professionalism. This says a lot about the restaurant. A professional never berates a diner. They say they’re sorry the diner didn’t like the experience. They say they will try to do better. Or they ignore the complaint altogether, sure that it’s a fluke. When you go after a dissatisfied patron, you show that you can’t improve because constructive criticism infuriates you.

I’ll go through the employee’s claims.

He said the bitter roll was a Swedish semla. I’m sure you’re all very familiar with these, since all Americans eat them several times a week. He said it contained cardamom, as specified in the traditional recipe. He seemed irate that I did not expect this.

Couple of things. Like 98% of the world’s population, I had never heard of semlas. If you’re going to sell people bitter cream rolls for breakfast, you should offer some kind of warning before handing them over, unless your business is in Sweden. On top of that, I tend to doubt the amount of cardamom was correct, because the roll was disgusting. It tasted medicated. Based on the chef’s inability to recognize a good croissant, which people in nearly every country on Earth can do, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he has no idea how much cardamom to put in a semla.

You don’t have to tell people what croissants are like before you sell them, because everyone knows what a croissant is. If you’re going to sell, say, an obscure Congolese pastry made with a tablespoon of mace, you should let customers know what they’re in for.

My wild guess is that he overdid the cardamom. The web says a proper semla is “lightly flavored” with it.

He also made it clear he thought I had no idea what croissants should be like, because I was American. He said American croissants were full of various unpleasant things, such as emulsifiers.

That was really dumb. America has the best food on Earth, because America is rich and able to pay for it. We have drawn all sorts of skilled immigrants over the centuries, and many of them are from France, the home of croissants. I know Ireland is the world’s French pastry mecca, so forgive me, but I think our French cooks, and the people who have learned from them, have figured out how to make croissants here.

When I say we have the best food on Earth, which is true, I don’t mean the majority of our restaurants sell great food. I mean our best restaurants, bakeries, butchers, and grocers are as good as anyone’s. Now that the microbrew revolution has blossomed, we also make the world’s best beer; no contest, even from the Belgians.

Obviously, our croissants are not all full of chemicals. I’m sure some are, but clearly, this country is full of bakers who would never use such things. And the unpopular truth is that sometimes, chemicals make good food a lot better. Try adding sodium citrate to mac and cheese.

He said I should continue eating at places like Burger King and Walmart, since their food was more on a par with my tastes. He was actually right, because a lot of the food from these places, unlike his food, isn’t so off-putting I don’t want to finish it. A good Whopper is better than a burnt croissant.

Go to Youtube and search for croissants made in Paris. You’ll see they’re not burnt. They’re not even dark.

I can’t believe an Irish person would dare make fun of another country’s food. Irish food has such a bad reputation, the government mounted a nationwide campaign to fix it, and it hasn’t been a great success. They don’t even do uniformly good work with fish and chips, which is a signature dish of the British Isles. Imagine going to Tennessee and finding that most barbecue restaurants were no good. Same idea. It could never happen. It’s nice that the Irish have made an effort, but I ate there for about 12 days, and I was usually disappointed, even in the Guinness, which they served incorrectly.

We never had a bad Thai or Italian meal in Ireland, but the Irish themselves nearly always let us down.

Two hungry people showed up at Bread 41, hoping to fuel themselves for a long day of walking, they were hungry enough to eat substandard food if necessary, and they left most of their items unfinished. The customers were not the problem. Case closed.

I really wanted to get some calories into me because I knew we would use them up, but it wasn’t worth it to me to finish my food, nor was it worth it to Rhodah. When we left, we joked about needing to find a place to have breakfast.

After this, we had breakfast at two B&B’s. One was in Dingle, and the other was in Inis Mor. In both places, I made the error of ordering the full Irish breakfast.

They gave me one egg, which is ridiculous, dry Irish bacon, fried mushrooms, white pudding (funky-tasting sausage), link sausage, and canned beans which were about like pork and beans. I also had toast. I passed on the black pudding, which is a giant scab of seasoned congealed blood.

I don’t know why people rave about English and Irish breakfasts, because they’re not very good. They’re kind of okay. That’s about it. Who pours beans out of can and microwaves them for breakfast? Who eats one egg? The link sausage was like finely ground mystery meat; it tasted cheap.

My advice is this: don’t try to like the full English or Irish breakfast. You may think you’re supposed to like it, because people who don’t know good food claim it’s good, but it’s not good at all.

I also had eggs Benedict; an AMERICAN dish. I couldn’t tell exactly what the object that was supposed to be an English muffin was, but it was dry, small, and hard. The egg was also small, which is weird, because Americans supposedly use smaller eggs than the British, who are right next door to the Irish. All the Irish eggs I saw were tiny.

In America, eggs Benedict is wonderful. You get two big eggs with lots of Hollandaise sauce. You get a big English muffin with butter. You get Canadian bacon, which is much better than Irish bacon, a drier, less tasty version of the same thing.

Eggs Benedict came out of Delmonico’s restaurant in New York, where it was named after a customer named Benedict. If it had tasted like Irish eggs Benedict, no one would know what it is today, because no one would have considered saving the recipe or naming it.

Here’s something else that’s bad about Irish breakfasts: they don’t provide cream for coffee. They use milk, which is completely useless. The fat in cream kills bitterness and improves the texture of coffee. How can people in other nations have failed to catch on?

I could have had French toast, but I opted not to. Why? Because I knew there was no way they would have real syrup. Maple syrup is a NORTH AMERICAN condiment. It would amaze me to learn it was sold anywhere in Europe. Ordinary pancake syrup is a chemical counterfeit better known as diluted corn syrup. I don’t understand why any serious establishment would serve pancakes, waffles, or French toast without offering real syrup.

In Dublin, we found a McDonald’s, and Rhodah loved it. The McMuffins were very good. The hash browns were a bit undercooked, but they were still better than Irish food.

The food I had this morning was great, and McDonald’s deserves some credit. They make beautiful biscuits; if you don’t believe me, order them a la carte, take them home, and put your own gravy on them. Their muffins can’t be criticized. They’re standard English muffins, smeared with real butter. Their sausage is just as good, or better than, anything you can get at your local grocery store. They fry their circular eggs in-house. Granted, the folded eggs are warmed up at their restaurants, but eggs take reheating very well. Waffle House cooks eggs to order, but McDonald’s makes a much better breakfast.

If you don’t respect the hash browns, try making them yourself. I have. You will fail. It’s very difficult to make a McDonald’s-style hash brown that isn’t soggy or brown inside. They do a beautiful job.

The coffee at McDonald’s is also excellent, WHEN they keep it fresh. They tend to let the decaf sit, and then it starts to smell like cat pee. I really mean cat pee. Not trying to be funny.

I am extremely blunt and honest when I write Internet reviews. Business owners seem to think the purpose of reviews is to flatter them and lure people to their establishments. It’s not. It’s to give people solid information so they can patronize good businesses and avoid bad ones. If a proprietor does a bad job, I’ll say so, and I don’t care at all how he feels or whether it costs him money. I’m not on his side. I’m on the side of other consumer. If he doesn’t like complaints, he should change his ways.

If the Bread 41 guy is upset, tough. Reviews are matters of business. We’re not buddies. If he thinks people who do business with him are supposed to go on the web and lick his ear, he needs to grow up.

The best breakfasts I’ve had in Europe were continental, i.e. a couple of baked items and coffee or chocolate. On the continent, you get excellent pastries and rolls, and the coffee and chocolate are just as good. When it comes to real breakfast, meaning a meal, I don’t know of any country that can touch America. If you have a Cracker Barrel and a McDonald’s near you, you are in pretty thin air, and there are many American restaurants that put these businesses to shame. Try a real Jewish deli that serves good bagels and smoked fish. Try a fancy hotel with a big brunch spread. I make country ham, scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy, and fried apples that would bring most people to their knees. Americans do breakfast right. No getting around it.

Thin Pizza is for Apostates

Lunch was okay today, and by “okay,” I mean the closest thing to heaven I expect to experience in this life.

I have been making thin pizza after thin pizza, wondering why the pies didn’t make my eyes roll back in my head the way my Sicilians do. I finally realized this: thin pizza is inherently not as good as Sicilian. It’s not possible to make a thin pizza that compares to my Sicilian, so I have been wasting my time chasing a culinary unicorn. I’m wondering if I should ever make thin pizza again.

Today I decided to make a full-size Sicilian, meaning a quarter sheet. The measurements are about 9″ by 13″. It may not sound like a big pan, but a Sicilian made in it will feed three reasonable people or me and one of my friends.

I haven’t messed with my Sicilian recipe much, because it was incredible the first time I made it back in 2009. I have made little changes, but it’s nearly the same pie it was then. Today I decided to get brave and innovate.

I have been experimenting with twice-melted cheese. When you reheat pizza, the texture of the cheese is usually better than it was the first time around. With that in mind, I wondered why I shouldn’t melt my cheese, cool it, put it on the pizza, and bake it a second time.

I used twice-melted cheese today. I made a mixture of Boar’s Head mozzarella, Publix sliced provolone, and Cracker Barrel extra-sharp white cheddar. I used a quarter sheet as a mold and shaped a piece of nonstick foil around the bottom of it. This gave me a foil tray slightly larger than the bottom of a quarter sheet. I mixed my cheeses, put them in it, and heated them until they bubbled. With great care, I was able to get the foil out of the oven and chill the cheese without any accidents. At room temperature, it formed a sort of cheese placemat.

I used slightly more dough than I usually do, and I chose to parbake it. Ordinarily, I don’t do this. I put my stretched dough in a very oily pan and baked it at 500° for 9 minutes. I was surprised how long it took to start to look cooked.

I had 6 precious cans of Stanislaus Saporito sauce. I had been reluctant to use them, because the nearest source is 90 minutes away. I had been working with Cento tomatoes and Glen Muir paste to come up with an acceptable, readily available substitute, but today, I had to have Stanislaus.

I thought about the economics. I hesitated to use Stanislaus because the cans contain around a gallon, and the cost about $7 each. When I use Cento and Muir Glen, I spend over $5, and the amount of sauce I get is a small fraction of what a can of Stanislaus produces. I realized I was tormenting myself over nothing. Stanislaus is actually cheaper, even if you throw a lot out.

I broke the can into four nearly equal parts, took a little out for today’s pie, and froze the rest in bags. I should have good-quality sauce for a month or two, and even if it deteriorates, it will still be a lot better than Cento and Muir Glen.

I put 8 ounces of sauce on the parbaked crust, which is a third more than usual. I applied my sheet of cheese. I had a little bulk Italian sausage, so I put that on the pie, too.

When I baked the pie, it took forever to cook. I had added dough, I had interrupted the baking by parbaking, and I believe the twice-melted cheese took longer to brown than cold cheese. When I put it on the pie, it was already covered in fat, and fat slows browning.

I was hoping the cheese would crawl over the edges of the crust and burn against the pan, and that did happen, but not to the degree I had hoped.

After I pulled the pie out and cooled it a little, it popped right out of the pan. The crust was nicely browned. The cheese was limp, cooperative, and gooey. The sauce was a home run, plain and simple. I felt stupid for using store ingredients.

The crust could have been crunchier and lighter. The top could have been a little more brown. There could have been more browned cheese around the rim. The pizza was hard to handle, so it got a little beaten up. In spite of all that, this pizza was exquisite.

I don’t know if I’ll keep fooling with cheese sheets. I don’t think they improve things. Not sure yet. I will try to let the next crust blow up more so it will be airier; I was in a hurry today. I will increase the heat to get better crunch. Of course, I will use more sausage. Other than that, there is not much to say. I can’t get a pizza like this anywhere except in my kitchen. When I die, America’s best street-style Sicilian (to my knowledge) will die with me.

I’ve been watching pizzaiolos on Youtube, and some of them make Sicilian. Some call it “grandma pizza,” which makes it sound gross and inferior. I don’t think much of the way they make it. They make very thin crusts. What’s the point? If you like thin crusts, make a thin round pizza right on the stone. The joy of pan pizza is in the crust. It should be thick enough to give you the sense that you’re eating homemade bread.

I think my pizza is better than theirs. I’ve had Sicilian in Miami and New York, made by actual Italians. I’ve had excellent Sicilian in Hollywood, Florida, at a place called Vannucchi Brothers. I know what good Sicilian is. When I watch someone make a Sicilian on Youtube, I have a pretty good idea what the taste and texture will be like. I think they do it wrong.

Urban mythology says all pizza made in New York is perfect. That’s completely untrue. There are bad pizzerias in New York, and even the good pizzerias generally aren’t making astounding pies. New York pizzaiolos are stuck with ancient traditions that may or may not work, and which may be rooted more in economy or laziness than a desire to make excellent food. It shouldn’t shock anyone when I say I can make better pizza.

In Pennsylvania, there is an elderly lady named Norma Knepp. She took over a pizza concession at a farmer’s market a few years back. She had never made pizza before. She got some advice and worked up a recipe, and she ended up winning a big competition in New York City. If New York Italians knew everything, that would never have happened. They are beatable.

Along with the pizza, I had a Coke. I chilled the can in the freezer along with a very heavy glass. When I poured the Coke into the glass, ice crystals floated to the top. That’s how you serve a Coke. I want a special cooling device made with a Peltier cooler to keep my glass of Coke at freezing temperatures while I eat.

I still have enough pizza for a day or two of fine eating. I may fry the slices in a pan before or after heating them in the toaster oven, to make the crust crunchier.

I have pizza figured out. You don’t make thin pizza unless you have a special craving or a finicky guest. You make Sicilian, like a man. You use real tomatoes from a serious company. Thin pizza and store tomatoes are foods of a lower order.

I don’t think my thin pizza can get much better, because no matter what I do, it will always be thin pizza. The pizza of the undiscerning.

No Oil Crisis Here

When it comes to pizza dough, it looks like a small amount of oil goes a long way.

Day before yesterday, I made a 12″ pie with 225 grams of flour and no oil except for some applied to the outside. I found the crust leathery, which is what I wanted, but not quite as crunchy as I desired.

Having obtained the leathery crust I was shooting for, I started to feel I didn’t want it after all. I decided to try to make it slightly less tough, with more crunch.

The pizza before last was made with a teaspoon of cheap olive oil, and I thought it wasn’t tough enough. Pizza with no oil was too tough. I decided to try half a teaspoon.

I fermented the dough overnight in a fridge, and today I baked at 550° on a quarter-inch steel. I baked it slightly longer than usual. You can see the result below.

I think this is what I’ll stick with for a while. It was a perfect pizzeria-quality pie, except of course better. All of the ingredients are sold at my local Publix, so I don’t have to worry about local availability.

I used about 4 ounces of Boar’s Head sliced mozzarella and 2 ounces of Cracker Barrel extra sharp white cheddar. I cut the cheese in small pieces, tossed it to mix it up, and applied it.

The cheese was good. I found I wasn’t thinking about it while I ate the pizza, and that means I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I believe the cheddar loosened the mozzarella up and added some zing.

I also used big chunks of Publix bulk Italian sausage, which is now my default pizza sausage. Much less aggravation that sausage in a casing, and it cooks beautifully.

Next time, I’ll cook the pie for 8 minutes instead of 9. This one was wonderful, but it didn’t need to be quite so well done.

Now that I have a grip on dough management, I can make dough up to three days in advance. That will give me flexibility. I may make a ball now for day after tomorrow.

I’m thinking about making mozzarella. I read about making it at home, and it seems like a good way to get it the way I want it and save half of the cost. I learned that you need unhomogenized milk to make it, and that’s expensive, but you can make your own unhomogenized milk by adding heavy cream to skim milk. If I can make low-moisture mozzarella at home, I should be able to get a better product without shelling out 10 dollars per pound.

I have read that you can make mozzarella from queso blanco. Evidently, queso blanco is what you get if you start making mozzarella and stop before you’re done. If this is true, I could make nice cheese without all the work of starting with milk.

Once I can make cheese, I think I’ll be stuck. There won’t be anything left to figure out. Maybe at some point I’ll develop an interest in high-temperature pizza. That would supply fodder for new projects.

After writing all this, I had a revelation. I figured out why my thin pizza hasn’t been as good as my Sicilian.

Back in 2009, a recipe for astounding Sicilian pizza simply fell into my head, and since then, I have been making the best Sicilian I know of. I have never had a restaurant pie as good. I have improved my recipe a little, but even the first version was beyond compare.

Once I had Sicilian under control, it was natural to try to conquer thin pizza. I already knew how to make a pretty good thin pie, but it didn’t bring me the same level of ecstasy as my Sicilian. Over the years, I have made a lot of progress, and for a long time, I’ve been making thin pies better than restaurants do. I was still never quite sure I had the perfect recipe.

A few minutes ago, I had a revelation. I now know why I do better with Sicilian than thin pizza.

Sicilian pizza and other forms of pan pizza are objectively superior to all types of thin pizza.

Why didn’t I see this sooner?

Sicilian combines a crunchy, fried, buttery crust with a thick layer of delicious fresh bread. If you want, you can spread cheese all the way to the sides and get magnificent baked cheese all the way around your crust. There is no way to make a thin pie give you all that potential for joy. A thin pie has a small rim, a fat rim, or no rim, and it can be puffy and soft or crunchy. It’s not fried. You can’t make it buttery. The crust under the sauce and cheese isn’t crunchy and aromatic like Sicilian crust. It’s like burned leather. It has almost no bread flavor, because it’s so thin.

Sicilian pizza is Godzilla. Thin pizza is Japan. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter how well you make your thin pizza. It’s still not going to be as good as Sicilian. Even Pizza Hut pan pizza, which is made with fake cheese and spray-on butter, is better than a really good thin pie.

I have been striving for a goal I had already reached.

I think now I have pizza peace. I’m sure I’ll keep messing with thin pizza variations, but I’ll give up the idea that it will ever make me as happy as Sicilian.

I had the feeling I should get a propane oven that reached high temperatures, but that’s stupid. The best New York pizzerias cook at around the same temperature I do. A hotter oven would not make things any better.

I already make the best garlic rolls possible, so I have nothing to strive for in that area. When it comes to pizza and rolls, I believe I can be content with small changes from now on.

Let’s just hope I don’t go Neapolitan. I don’t want to open that can of elmintiasi.

Papa Who?

Today I gave my shopmade pizza steel a try.

Yesterday I made a pie on a makeshift steel, and it was a big improvement over a stone. I thought the pie was imperfect, though, because it was done more on the bottom than the top, and I didn’t think the rim was crunchy enough.

I decided to make another pie. I didn’t use any oil, except for an extremely thin film on the pan where I left the dough to rise. I reduced my sugar from 2.5 teaspoons to 1.5 teaspoons. This is for 225 grams of King Arthur Bread Flour.

I was afraid the dough would rip when I tossed it. Oil prevents that, probably by preventing the dough’s surface from drying during tossing. In the old days, I had some problems. When I took the dough out today, it worked fine. I believe the night in the fridge helped the dough become stretchier, so even though it probably dried out a little while I was working it, there were no holes

I baked today at 550° using convection. I moved the steel higher in the oven than yesterday.

After 9 minutes, I had a very nice pie. Pictures follow.

The crust was leathery, which is something I was shooting for, but the rim didn’t crunch quite as well as I wanted. The underside of the pie was beautiful. It had plenty of charring, but not enough to make the pie taste burnt.

For cheese, I used 1/1/1/ provolone/mozzarella/cheddar. It was very nice. I may reduce the cheddar next time.

When I was at the store yesterday, I bought cheese and bulk Italian sausage. Today when I got ready to make the pie, these things were nowhere in sight. I decided to check the car. When I opened the door, I smelled the odor of dead pig. The sausage had expired during the night. I had left all three items out there.

Before I assembled the new pie, I bought new stuff. I used the room temperature cheese from yesterday, though. I didn’t think sitting in the car would hurt it.

I put a number of globs of sausage on one half of the pizza. I was afraid I was using too much, but it turned out I should have used a lot more. I used raw sausage. I used to think pizza sausage had to be cooked in advance, but that’s wrong.

The steel is a big blessing. It produces better pies than a stone, and I have the satisfaction of knowing I made it myself.

Some people recommend half-inch-thick steels, but that seems to be overkill. Mine is 1/4″ thick, and it cooks the bottom of a pizza like nobody’s business. I think a thick steel would burn it.

Now I need a pizza stand to raise my pies off the dinner table. Not that I sit at the table. Come on. I’m a man, after all. I’ll start doing that when my wife moves in and not before.

My next pie will contain a tiny amount of oil. I wanted a leathery crust just like the ones I used to eat at Pizza Town in Manhattan, and now that I’ve made one, I think I went a little too far. Maybe a very small amount of oil will make the crust slightly less chewy without making it mushy like Papa John’s.

New Pizza Steel Almost Ready

This is a big day. I just made myself a pizza steel.

I realize it’s not likely anyone wants to read about it, but then I don’t blog for hits.

For years, I’ve used a stone I bought at Bed Bath & Beyond. I’m pretty sure that’s where I got it, anyway. It has been so long, I forgot.

It was much better than a pan, and it did a fantastic job of making the bottom of a Sicilian pizza crunchy, but I always felt my thin New York pies were A- pies, not A+ pies. Sicilian is easier to make than thin pizza. If you can stuff dough into an oily pan, and you can find good ingredients you should be able to make a good Sicilian. New York pies have to bake faster, and you have to have a good balance of heat on the bottom and top.

I was also using way too much yeast, and that hurt the flavor.

People on a pizza forum told me steels were all the rage. I was surprised, because I had tried a round Lodge cast iron pan, and I had given it away because the results were so bad.

When I looked at steels on the web, I saw they were selling for $120, which seemed ridiculous, given the price of steel plate. Eventually, I saw them selling for as little as $59, but that’s still a lot, and they weren’t the steels people recommended. Also, the steels I saw were small. Fourteen by fourteen or so.

Yesterday, I swung by the metal place, and I got me a 16″ square of 1/4″ hot-rolled. I got lucky and received a piece with nearly no rust. It hasn’t rained much here lately. Cost: $27.46.

Today I used a big Metabo angle grinder and a Walter cutting wheel to knock the corners off the steel. After that, I deburred it and knocked the rust off with a smaller grinder and a Walter flap wheel. Then I used the 2×72 grinder to round the corners. I deburred the corners with the smaller grinder, and I was ready to go.

I took it in the house, washed it in the kitchen sink, applied coconut oil, and stuck it in the oven, which is now running at 500°. My favorite seasoning fat is bacon grease, but I thought it would be fun to try coconut oil, since it’s essentially tree lard. Vegetable oil and peanut oil give off blue smoke and stink. Burning bacon grease just smells like food.

It looks beautiful. I can’t wait to try it.

Yesterday’s pie was great, but it was more done on the bottom than the top, and it was softer than I wanted. The crust was also sweeter than I liked. On advice from forum people, I am doing my next pie differently. I’m baking it higher in the oven, and I’m cutting the sugar by 40%. Moving the pie higher should help the top cook faster, and cutting the sugar should make it crunchier and let me cook it longer. Sugar speeds up crust browning.

I’m also making the pie with zero oil, except for an extremely thin film I put on the pan I’m using for proofing the dough. I like the flavor and consistency of oil-free dough. I have been using one teaspoon of olive oil in 180 grams of flour, which is not much. I use it because oil prevents the dough from drying out fast while you toss it, and this makes tearing less likely. My forum advisors claim I can do without the oil if the dough is fermented properly, so I’m doing a day-long fermentation in hopes of getting a tear-resistant dough. I can toss a dough that’s prone to tearing, but it’s always possible I’ll get one or more small holes that require repairs.

I’m going to try something like 4/2/2 provolone/mozzarella/white cheddar. I want cheese that’s a little more sour and less rubbery than 50/50 provolone and mozzarella.

I’m definitely picking nits. My pizzas are very good as they are.

I grabbed some bulk Italian sausage at Publix today. Tomorrow, I hope to soar.

Steel Life

Today I finally tried my new oven, along with a pizza steel. I had been using baking stones for years, but people on a pizza forum said steel was much better for New York pizza, so I decided to try it.

Naturally, I barely had to move in order to get a steel going. I had a big sheet of 1/4″ plate on hand already. It had a small amount of rust, so I put it in the kitchen sink and used a Fein Multimaster to knock it off. Then I coated it with lard and baked it to season it.

I still get to do things like that until the wife moves in.

My old oven only went to 500°, which is at the low end for New York pizza. It also had a failing display, and I couldn’t use the self-cleaning cycle because it would blow its thermal breaker. The new oven does 550°, it’s bigger inside, and it will clean itself with either steam or high heat. The steel I used today is a plate I intended for use as an outdoor griddle, and it’s almost 18″ square. It would never fit in the old oven, but it just barely fit the new one, so I used it.

I picked up a slightly smaller piece of steel this afternoon, so I’ll still be able to make the griddle.

Why do people use pizza steels instead of stones? Simple. They transmit heat faster. Would you rather touch a 550° stone accidentally, or would you prefer to touch a steel? Exactly. The steel would burn you faster, making it harder to pull your hand back in time. The same principle applies to pizza. The steel will brown the crust faster at the same temperature.

I stuck my dough in the fridge last night. I don’t have any faith in long fermentations at low temperatures, because my refrigerators are too cold to allow yeast to do much. I do have faith in a long rest’s ability to improve dough’s texture. Today I took the dough out of the fridge a few hours before I intended to bake, and it blew up well.

I had been concerned about unsatisfactory oven spring, and I also wanted to make a pie with no oil inside the dough. Pizza dough is just plain better without oil in it. End of story. I didn’t put any oil inside today’s ball, but I did oil the outside before refrigerating it.

A completely oil-free dough will work great, but it will tend to tear during tossing. This is why I oiled the outside. I hoped it would prevent tearing.

When I got the dough out of the bowl, it had some nice big bubbles starting. I consider pizza a failure without big bubbles in the crust. When I worked at Domino’s, they made us break the bubbles. That’s Domino’s for you.

The dough tossed very easily. I had to be careful not to open it too much. I was making a 12″ pie with 400 grams of dough. It could easily have opened up to 16″ if I hadn’t been careful.

I left a fairly large rim, thinking I would need a lot of dough for a big rim.

The pie blew up beautifully. The rim was so big, I may reduce it next time. It’s almost like a doughnut with a pizza inside it.

The crust was nicely browned on the bottom. The upper part was browned, but it could have used a little more heat to crisp it up.

Here are some shots to show the details.

I measure my ingredients very carefully, so I am sure this pie was made with the same things as the previous one. Strangely, this one tasted sweeter. It also cooked much faster. I find myself wondering if these things are somehow related.

I have been advised that sugar makes dough softer, so maybe I need to cut back. I guess I can do that the day after tomorrow and see what happens.

Pizza steels are obviously great. That, I am sure of. The Sicilians I finished on stones were wonderful, but they could just as easily be finished on steels, and the thin pizzas didn’t cook as well as the one I made today.

The store-bought steel that was recommended to me costs $120, which is ridiculous. At that price, they are begging potential customers to make their own. I paid under $28 today for a 16″ square. I’m going to grind the corners off, which anyone can do, and then I’ll season it and be done with it.

I already made nice New York pies in an ordinary oven, but it looks like the steel makes them better, and it will also reheat faster than a stone, so you can make several pies at one gathering without a lot of down time.

In short:

Steel: recommended.

Buying a steel someone else made: not recommended.

Now what do I do with my stone?

Famous Chefs Focus on the Wrong Kind of Dough

Today, I am making pizza. I can’t seem to stop doing it. I made myself an excellent thin pie which was just about perfect, so I had a recipe I should have clung to. Naturally, I decided I had to go on and make a less-thin pie with a different crust recipe. While I have been fooling with it, I have gone looking for helpful advice.

It’s surprising how hard it is to get solid information about food. You would think it would be simple to find great advice in this, the Internet’s fourth useful decade. Not so. People who have no idea what they’re doing post recipes and include the word “best” in the descriptions, and many of them seem to have credentials, so it’s easy to get sucked in.

It’s a little like America’s Got Talent. A small percentage of Americans can actually sing, but there are many, many more who clearly can’t yet insist on auditioning. People who ought to know perfectly well they can’t sing show up in droves, and the judges have to waste their time listening to them.

How you can get to be an adult and not realize you can’t sing is beyond me. Surely many of the bad performers that have made the judges suffer had already been informed.

People post bad recipes, and they also give bad general advice about cooking, and many of the worst offenders have big followings.

Long ago, I quit watching the Food Network. I had tried recipes and gotten poor results, and it was not my fault. I found out that famous TV chefs had published a lot of useless, time-wasting material. I had a realization: it wasn’t just that they couldn’t cook. They had jobs that required them to produce an endless stream of good recipes, and there was just no way for mere mortals to fill the demand, so they published a lot of things that weren’t tested properly. They hired ghost cooks to send them things, and many of those cooks weren’t very good.

The goal of a famous chef isn’t to produce good food or teach other people to cook well. It’s to maintain a huge income stream. You can’t do that without providing way more content than a real human being can create responsibly.

I have learned I can’t trust famous chefs, and I have also learned that a cooking school degree is meaningless. America is full of trained chefs who serve terrible food. Cooking well requires a little ability and a lot of humility. You have to know good food when you taste it, and cooking school can’t teach that to everyone. You also have to keep testing yourself. You have to taste the food you make. You have to ask for advice. You can’t just say, “I went to Cordon Bleu, so I know this dish is going to come out right.” I knew two Cordon Blue chefs who couldn’t cook as well as I could, and among the total population, I’m probably a 90th-percentile cook. After several years of college, a chef should be a 99th-percentile cook.

A professional chef once made me a dessert as a gift, and I had to throw it out. It smelled like a wet dog, and this person apparently couldn’t tell, in spite of making a good living in kitchens. I didn’t tell this person how bad the dessert was. I was afraid it would be devastating.

Here’s what I always say: think about all the bad food you’ve had at expensive restaurants, and then consider the fact that most of it was made by trained chefs.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about a person named Kenji. Based on what I read, I thought he might be a useful resource. He is famous for his methodical, fact-based approach to food, and people cite him as though they were citing God himself. They don’t even use his last name. He publishes recipes at a site called Serious Eats.

He grew up eating pizza from a place I liked: Pizza Town, near Columbia University. He also ate at V&T’s, an Italian joint near Columbia. I probably had hundreds of slices of Pizza Town pizza during my New York years, and I grew to like it. Pizza is that way. You will start to like whatever you eat regularly.

In reality, Pizza Town was not that great. Their thin pizza crust was pretty hard, and I believe they used Stanislaus sauce (paste plus basil) straight from the can, with a little water added to reconstitute it. I developed a taste for it anyway, and I had it in mind when I started making pizza, but there are better places. V&T’s was actually very good, although Kenji says it made “good-bad” pizza, whatever that means. V&T’s pizza’s big flaw was that it was very wet, so it had to be eaten with a fork.

V&T’s was significantly better than Pizza Town, so it’s odd that Kenji preferred Pizza Town.

Today I decided I would check Kenji out, and that’s how I learned the facts mentioned above. He has a recipe for New York pizza. He has a separate recipe for the sauce. I thought it would be smart to look at his sauce recipe. He ought to know what he’s doing, right?

Here is the main ingredient for his sauce: “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes.”

Poof. There go my Kenji hopes.

Pizza is extremely ingredient-sensitive. You can completely screw up a tested recipe by using the wrong flour, tomatoes, or cheese. You can buy the right type of ingredient but the wrong brand, and things will go sideways. There are all sorts of whole peeled tomatoes out there. Some are very good. Most–most–are so bad, it is not possible to make an acceptable pizza with them.

You can be a mediocre cook and not know the importance of using the right tomatoes in pizza sauce, but you can’t be a towering food genius and not know.

It is not possible for a person who understands pizza sauce, and who wants others to do well, to recommend “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes” without specifying brands. The tomatoes are the most important thing to get right. Good tomatoes are so helpful, many good pizzerias use sauce that is nothing more than tomatoes and water. You can get away with that if your tomatoes are right. If they’re wrong, nothing you add to them will save your pie.

He also says, “Canned tomatoes invariably have some citric acid added to them in order to increase their acidity.” That’s not true. Everyone who makes pizza knows this. Many pizza makers hate citric acid, so they insist on acid-free sauce. I’m used to citric acid, so I don’t care, but many people insist on brands like Escalon, which preserve tomatoes without it.

You can’t say all canned tomatoes have citric acid in them if you know anything about pizza sauce. Every pizza enthusiast knows better.

He also specifies “bread flour” for the dough, leaving it at that. First of all, that’s the wrong flour. It’s a second choice, for people who can’t get high-gluten flour. I use bread flour (King Arthur) and add gluten. I can’t get high-gluten flour around here. When I used to use high-gluten flour, I found that different brands gave different results, and I settled on Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto. I tried all the big names and ended up with a store brand.

He uses only mozzarella in his recipe, which is questionable at best, and he doesn’t recommend a brand. That’s a serious problem. There are cheeses that fit his specs that don’t work well. Right now, I have a block of Walmart low-moisture whole-milk mozzarella, which meets his specs, and it makes bad pizza. It’s extremely important to try different cheeses and pick the best ones.

My guess: his pizza is excellent, because he has a brand of tomatoes he likes, not to mention a brand of flour and a brand of cheese. But he’s useless to me as a source for a pizza recipe, because he isn’t specific. Fortunately, I already know which ingredients to buy.

His ingredient input is unhelpful, but he may be helpful with other things, like methods. He holds himself out as a sort of scientific chef who tests things instead of accepting dogma. He made several batches of pizza dough by different methods, and he came up with an interesting result: a food processor made better dough than a mixer.

That interests me, because I’ve been using food processors to make dough since around 2009. People have told me it didn’t work, but I was doing it, so I knew it did. It’s strange how people will insist things don’t work when great numbers of other people are already doing them.

His food processor gave pizza crusts bigger air holes. He said this:

Only the food processor-produced dough created a crust that was perfect in both texture and flavor. Tender, chewy, and crisp all at once, with that coveted slick layer at the sauce-crust interface and a thin layer of melted cheese just hinting at brown, it was the archetypical New York pie, and it had just come out of my own oven!

That’s reassuring. To many people, kneading dough with a chopping blade in a food processor is unthinkable, but they’re wrong. I was also reassured to see that his dough recipe was pretty much like mine, except he likes a lot of oil.

He may not be a real pizza expert, but he probably knows what a New York crust is supposed to taste like.

He has a German-style joint in San Mateo, California, which is basically San Francisco. His restaurant is called Wursthall, and I looked it up. Overall, it gets unexciting reviews on Yelp. So-so food, according to many. Some reviewers who don’t give good ratings mention him as the factor that drew them to try the place, and then they talk about the disappointing fare.

Here’s a disturbing review:

Wow, this place is really expensive. It is like being at a giants game. Two beers, a salad and chicken sandwich for $70!!!
And slow beer delivery to boot.
Won’t be returning anytime soon.

That price appears to be no exaggeration. The menu says a sandwich platter runs $16, and most beers cost $8 per pint, with some costing a lot more.

The restaurant specializes in sausages like bratwurst, served as sandwiches. Call it what you want: it’s a hot dog. It may be the best hot dog on Earth, made with unusual ingredients, but it’s still just a hot dog. It can’t be worth $16. I don’t care if the cost of making it was $50. If you’re spending a lot on gourmet ingredients, make something other than a hot dog. That’s my advice.

I would never go to a sit-down restaurant with tablecloths in order to get a hot dog platter. I could see spending $15 on a really good bratwurst on a fantastic bun, plus sides and a good beer, but…no, actually I couldn’t.

I’m not sure there is any German-style meal that’s worth more than $20. Maybe if you threw in strudel. German food is generally pretty gross. Sausages in a pile of beans, with melted cheese on top. Potato salad that tastes like pickled potatoes. Pickled this. Pickled that. There is a reason why young chefs train in Paris, London, and New York instead of Berlin.

Does German haute cuisine even exist? I don’t think so.

I think nothing of giving a steakhouse $75 for dinner, because steak costs money, and a really great steak is as good as any food on the planet. I don’t mind paying $20 or more for an excellent pizza, because pizza is wonderful, and one pizza will feed at least two people. I don’t mind paying $25 for excellent Southern food. It’s well worth it. A sausage on a bun is different. It can’t be all that good, no matter how you make it. Wienerschnitzel, which is actually Austrian, can’t be all that good. German dumplings can’t be all that good. Pig snouts and feet can’t be that good. Their desserts are wonderful, but then they have to be, to make up for everything else.

If Kenji’s knowledge is unsurpassed, why does he have 777 Yelp reviews and only a 4-star rating? He also gets 4 stars from Tripadvisor users. He gets a lot of bad reviews. Overall, he’s doing okay, and he gets plenty of stellar reviews, but if he’s the once-in-a-generation food genius people make him out to be, he should be stunning people with his food, consistently, and that is not happening. And he’s making the same things over and over, so he should have everything perfected by now. His food should be as good as it could possibly be.

Based on what I know of the steak, I don’t buy the sizzle. I don’t think this man is a reliable resource. I guess that explains why I’ve never been impressed by Serious Eats.

I am reminded of Bruce Lee. He weighed about 135 pounds, and he squatted 95 pounds, which is not an impressive weight for a strong woman, but people think he was the greatest fighter who ever lived and that he had superhuman strength. He never fought anyone in a ring with a camera going and judges present. No competitions. He ran from scrutiny. People seriously think he could have flattened the best heavyweight UFC fighters, which is ridiculous. He didn’t have the training to handle the little ones, let alone the big ones. Their way of fighting didn’t exist when he was alive. If you don’t prove yourself, your reputation is just words.

Maybe Kenji does superhuman work when he’s not making New York pizza or running a German restaurant, but what I know so far is discouraging.

I don’t like James Beard, either, and there is a prestigious award named after him. I had three or four of his cookbooks, and the recipes just were not good. I believe I threw them out.

I also think poorly of Mario Batali’s skills. I went to two of his restaurants, and both served me bad food.

I have seen Alton Brown ruin steak, and he also recommended Shun knives, which are fragile and expensive, not to mention poorly balanced. He touted them enthusiastically, until he stopped and started touting completely different knives. My guess is that the wind of money blows him around like a windsock. America’s Test Kitchen, which actually tests things, recommends cheap Forschner knives, and so do I.

Bobby Flay published a prime rib recipe that, for very obvious reasons–the wrong oven temperature–produces a hard lump of unappealing meat. Prime rib is easier to get right than a cheeseburger. All controversy concerning prime rib methods should have ended by about 1900.

Now that I think about it, Myron Mixon, the TV barbecue king, opened a restaurant in Miami, and it was very bad. I tried it. I make much better barbecue at home. Barbecue is simple, but he couldn’t do it. His restaurant went out of business. He claimed his partners ruined everything. That’s hard to believe. I could write two paragraphs and show you how to make perfect dry-rubbed ribs. Anyone can do it. Even with bad partners, Mixon should have been able to teach his staff how to make ribs. Mix seasonings according to boss’s recipe, put on ribs, smoke ribs. That’s all there is to it.

Today’s experience confirms what I already believe: as helpful as outside advice is, there is no substitute for personal experience in the kitchen. Few experts can be trusted, and some of the most respected are the least reliable. Most people who buy cookbooks can’t cook, so even if millions of people recommend a celebrity cookbook, it means nearly nothing.

Reading about Kenji also makes me regret posting recipes that were not as great as I thought they were. That has happened. I have sometimes misled people and contributed to the clutter of unneeded recipes. I have made both the America’s Got Talent error and the Food Network error.

On the other hand, I have come up with a number of truly magnificent recipes, so there’s that.

I have never had a cheesecake that compares to mine, or a Sicilian pizza that comes close. I have never had beer or steak that compares to mine. I made sourdough garlic rolls that seemed to come from heaven itself. I could never eat a standard Thanksgiving turkey after eating my boneless turkey stuffed with cornbread dressing. I’m crazy about the Alfredo-ish sauce I came up with recently. I have a pretty decent list of victories.

Maybe the recipes that weren’t that great can be forgiven in view of my successes. I am, after all, an amateur.

I don’t think the pizza I’m working on right now will be a victory. It looks like the dough will not be elastic enough to give me big bubbles. I hope I’m wrong, but at least I’ll know, and I’ll have meticulous records to incorporate the new knowledge.

Kenji claims New York pizzerias commonly cook at around 500°, so that’s good news. He should be right about that, given the fact that he grew up in New York. I have a better source, though. A guy on a pizza forum says 500° will work fine, and he is a paid consultant who has helped New York pizzerias. That puts him higher on the authority scale. Unlike Kenji and Bruce Lee, he has produced results on the battlefield. Professionals in the nation’s top market are willing to pay for his help.

In a side note, Kenji’s restaurant is near San Francisco, and he got attention for saying people in Trump hats would not be served there. Here is the text:

It hasn’t happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served. Same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.”

He said it hadn’t happened, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that there aren’t many Trump supporters in San Francisco, and the second is attitudes like Kenji’s. Conservatives know they aren’t safe in San Francisco, so they are reluctant to out themselves. They don’t want food full of boogers. They don’t want to be attacked physically. Leftists talk a lot about safe spaces, with reference to trivial things like hearing words that upset them, but they have a history of creating actual unsafe spaces in which conservatives are threatened with actual harm or battered.

His remark, itself, was a declaration of something at least approaching hate. Ironic. He couldn’t see the beam in his own eye.

Delusion is getting very bad in the US. A friend of mine has a far-left adult son who is literally deranged. Yesterday, my friend brought up the Ukraine invasion, and his son told him he didn’t want to hear about it because it was just an unimportant conflict between white people. That’s startling. It’s a lot like Whoopi Goldberg’s crazy remark about the Holocaust being unrelated to race. The Germans were white, and so were the Jews, so the Jews don’t get to be real victims like, I suppose, Jussie Smollett.

It’s not a problem when children and other civilians are hurt and killed, or when soldiers suffer the same fates, as long as they’re white. That’s my friend’s son’s position. And he’s white.

The son’s mother used to be conservative and probably still is, but she has started listening to leftist 1984-style “thought leaders” and parroting their absurdist, racist hate speech to her son. My friend is considering letting his son know his mother used to be conservative, and he is also considering telling him she is probably only pretending to be a leftist in order to avoid upsetting him and being rejected. My friend hasn’t done these things. He is not sure they will help.

The mother has never been quite right. She has claimed to have a psychological disorder, officially diagnosed, which makes her extremely uncomfortable whenever she doesn’t get her way. I don’t think that’s a real disorder. Not unless it’s demonic. To me, it sounds like she’s just spoiled, controlling, and misandrist. Which can also be demonic, now that I think about it.

How can you abandon your right to think and let some hateful, willfully ignorant idiot on Youtube do it for you? How can you trust another person that much, especially when that person’s idiocy is extremely obvious? It’s unusual to trust Jesus himself that much, and he’s always right. God has said he sends supernatural delusion to rebellious people, and we see it all around us now.

The other day I heard a Holy Spirit-filled conservative say maybe we should just quit obeying the law because Biden was incompetent. That’s also delusion. It proves being baptized with the Spirit isn’t enough. You have to pray in tongues and ask for correction every day.

In 2 Thessalonians 3:2, Paul calls the Antichrist “the man of lawlessness.” Satan is really pushing lawlessness now. There are truly stupid and dangerous laws we shouldn’t feel compelled to observe, but these days, people are encouraging disobedience that isn’t really justified. Thanks to the toxic philosopher Henry David Thoreau, leftists think breaking laws is highly virtuous, and in recent years, they have been breaking good laws like never before. Conservatives have become jealous, so they are also becoming lawless. It’s not good. Even if disobeying the law brings short-term benefits, it contributes to a culture of lawlessness. If you like that kind of thing, take a look at Somalia. That’s where we are headed.

My guess is that things will become so chaotic, the world will be ripe for the Antichrist to step in and restore order. Isn’t that pretty similar to the Saul Alinsky plan? It should be, since Alinsky took dictation from Satan himself.

Human interaction is rapidly being reduced to, “I got you,” and, “I got you back.”

Last night I dreamed I was at my dad’s home back in Miami. I was looking after him. I heard motor noises outside, and I realized trespassers were in the yard. I went into the garage and yelled through the doors, telling them to take off. I started opening the doors, hoping they would flee. They did not.

When I walked outside, they were working on the driveway. I became enraged. I thought they were driveway gypsies. Maybe you don’t know what those are.

Gypsies, or Romani, as they prefer to be called, have a long history of cheating people on driveway work. We are supposed to treat gypsies as though they were wonderful people who are oppressed unfairly, but the truth is that their culture permits and encourages stealing and swindling, so I can’t really go along with the white privilege guilt trip and manipulation.

Here is a gypsy legend most people don’t know of: many gypsies claim the nails for the crucifixion were provided by a gypsy blacksmith. In addition to the three we know about, there was a fourth nail intended to go through Jesus’ heart. The blacksmith refused to provide it, meaning he stole it, and as a reward, God exempted them from the 7th commandment. This means they are allowed to steal.

Not a great pillar for a culture to stand on.

It’s a horrible, sick, stupid, gypsy-destroying rationalization, and it would make no sense if it were true, because Jesus’ heart was pierced by a Roman spear after he died. Stealing a nail wouldn’t have helped him. A nail through the heart while he was still living, on the other hand, would actually have been merciful.

My mother was crazy about gypsies. I have dim memories of her taking me to see them when I was very young, in Tampa. I haven’t thought about that in years. They must have had a community there. She liked having her palm read, which is, of course, idolatry.

Anyway, gypsies (and other people) are known for showing up at the homes of elderly Floridians and offering to do driveway work cheap. They’ll say they have materials left over from other jobs, so they quote low prices. The problem is that the material is basically paint, so it comes off quickly.

In the dream, I thought gypsies were after my dad. For some reason, I reacted like a rabid dog. I have run actual driveway gypsies off, and I was polite. In this dream, I was a different person.

I started calling them filthy names involving excrement and sex acts performed on other men. I really laid into them. One of them approached me, and I slapped him so hard, he should have been on the ground. He came up behind me, and I pulled his glasses off his head with my teeth and threw them on the pavement.

I saw that they had cut a big hole in the driveway. One was carrying a piece of lumber I thought he had stolen from us.

I kept excoriating them, and the guy with the glasses and another man who was like a foreman kept asking me to let them explain. I was not having it. I made them leave. They fixed the hole they had dug. I was not afraid of them at all.

One of them came over to me and asked me why World Relief, a huge Christian charity, had been mailing me. He apparently wondered why a person like me would be hearing from a charity. He was a young black man, and he was very polite and respectful. None of them treated me the way I treated them.

I had a tablet, and we started looking at it. We were looking at sites dealing with World Relief. I was not angry at him. My tablet had a protective plastic film on the screen. I wondered why I had never removed it.

Anyway, they left, and when I woke up, I tried to find out what the dream was about. Were they demons, trying to break through God’s hedge of protection and harm me? Were they angels, sent to help me because I had done alms in the past? Why was I so angry?

I started to feel very bad about all the times I had mistreated people who were helping me. I had been nasty to educators, for example, over trivial things. It’s amazing that I could have been stupid enough to give people a hard time when they were trying to help me get an Ivy League degree. I had been nasty to other people who had tried to give me helpful advice. I had rejected other people’s input because I was proud and wanted to get by on my own ideas so I could have the glory.

When I was a kid, my parents did a poor job. They didn’t teach me much of anything in the way of wisdom or good habits, and perhaps as a result, I learned to think for myself. In doing so, I lost respect for other people’s advice. I was very smart, so I was used to being the brightest person in the room, and I started feeling I was always right.

Maybe the dream was about the way I had rejected helpful correction and ended up suffering unnecessary defeats. I reinvented the wheel many times, often incorrectly, instead of building on other people’s good ideas.

I also felt bad about the many times I had jumped into or started angry arguments, treating people who were merely wrong as though they were trying to do me harm.

Maybe the dream was about these things, or maybe the men were demons.

The other day, I dreamed a kid and a young man were trying to harm me, and I beat them brutally, crushing the young man’s face. In that case, there was no doubting their hostility, and I have no doubt they represented evil spirits. This time, I don’t know.

I hate demons with a hate I can’t describe, so maybe they did represent demons. If I could, I would do things to them that would make Josef Mengele throw up. I can understand why God plans to burn evil spirits forever. In my dreams, I break their bones and mutilate them. It’s not possible for me to feel that way about a human being.

Even if the gypsies represented demons, I still believe it was very good for me to confront my faults last night, so it’s a win. We are in the apocalypse, so a spirit of murder and hatred has been released on the world, and I need to avoid opening the door to it.

I can’t really see myself pleasing God by calling demons names involving gay oral sex. I would think that if I were fighting demons in a dream, in obedience to God, I would be somewhat more dignified.

Last night I thought about all the things he has shown me lately. He keeps telling me to change so I will not be like the rest of humanity. While I was in bed thinking about this, I put my face in my hands and told him I was going to end up surrounded by people I couldn’t even communicate with. I would be so different, and other people would be so deaf, I wouldn’t be able to explain much to them. Even if I didn’t become particularly good, I would understand things I couldn’t make other people understand.

I wasn’t complaining about his demands. I just felt I needed to tell him.

In my mind, I had an image of a long train full of people, hurtling toward a cliff. I could watch, but I couldn’t stop it.

I started asking God how people were supposed to learn. Who was supposed to teach us? Instantly, I realized I already knew the answer: the Holy Spirit. Churches are like grocery stores where half the food is poisoned, and we can’t rely on them. We have to hear from the Holy Spirit himself, one on one, as John taught. That means prayer in tongues, and not just a couple of minutes per day.

We can’t find reliable pizza information easily, and it’s hard to get good information about God. From human beings, I mean. Yet we still push people to turn pastors and priests into little gods who can’t be questioned.

I hope God restores the Holy Spirit as a teacher before the world ends. If not, I think the apocalypse will continue to progress without interruption.

Pump up Your Pizza

I have been fiddling around with thin pizza, and I have figured out some things.

I love my recipe for thin pizza, but I am fairly sure it would be better if my oven were a little hotter. I got stuck with an old 500° oven. In addition to the temperature issue, it also blows a thermal fuse whenever I try to use the self-clean cycle. I can’t clean it unless I do it manually. That will not happen. I’m not sure why ovens have to be cleaned, however. They seem to work fine whether you clean them or not. Is cleaning just a vanity thing, or will my oven eventually explode?

The oven also has a display that has grown so dim, I have to use reading glasses to read it.

My oven in Miami went to 550°. I have been looking around for something new that will do that. I learned that many brands only go up to 500° in bake mode, which is ridiculous, given that pizza making is more popular than ever. You can bake a good New York pizza at 500°, but hotter is better.

I discovered that Frigidaire, the manufacturer of my last oven, still makes hot ovens. I started trying to find one that will work for me.

Of course, ovens have changed a lot since the last time I bought one. They have a lot of silly “smart” features I don’t want. Why on Earth would I want to talk to my oven from across town? It’s bad enough getting distress calls from the vacuum cleaner. Smart features just add expense and more risk of failure. I guarantee you, your smart 2022 smart oven has parts that won’t be available in 2027.

Ovens with phone apps are patently stupid, like refrigerators that send you movies of their contents, but ovens have other new features that could be great.

I have learned about oven spring. This term refers to the way bread blows up when you put it in the oven. I thought I could get peak oven spring with any old oven, but that’s wrong. To get good oven spring, you need steam in your oven when baking starts. Steam keeps the outside of your bread elastic so the bread can puff up. You can force your old oven to do steam by putting things like skillets full of water-soaked rocks in it, but it’s a pain, and it’s not optimal. They now make ovens that do steam baking, imitating the ovens real bakers use.

Today I baked a pizza, and when I put it in the oven, I threw about a quarter-cup of water in the oven below it. This helped the dough blow up beautifully, but you can’t keep throwing water in an oven that isn’t made for it. I found a Frigidaire that has a steam-bake setting. Will it work? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try.

New ovens also have better convection and air-fry capabilities, and it’s not hard to find one that has a probe to measure the internal temperature of meats. You can also find ovens that somehow skip the preheat business, and you can get ovens that proof bread.

I found a Frigidaire that does all this stuff. Man, is it expensive. I know I’m cheap, but $2300 for a single oven seems like a lot to me. It could be worse. Other ovens break the $4000 mark.

I’ll post a photo of today’s pizza. You can see how big the air holes in the crust are. Very nice. Unfortunately, the cheese I used is disgusting. I decided to try Boar’s Head provolone, and for some reason, the only provolone they make is the low-sodium kind. I decided to try it, thinking maybe all provolone was low-sodium cheese. The pizza just didn’t taste right. Also, I fermented the pizza too fast because I was in a hurry, and that didn’t help the taste.

I learned something else about oven spring. If you rest your dough before turning it into a ball or loaf, it will spring better.

I make phenomenal Sicilian pizza. I make the dough in a food processor, I make a puck out of it, I put it in a very oily pan, and I let it rest for around 20 minutes. After the time is up, the dough, which was initially more like hard, lumpy batter, is smooth and stretchy. At this point, I stretch it to fit the inside of the pan and let it rise again. It’s always magnificent.

I had read that thin pizza (and baguettes) needed to be stretchy and tight before final proofing, and today, I thought about those Sicilian pies and that stretchy dough.

This afternoon, I tried resting dough for thin pizza. Using the food processor, I blended everything but the oil and waited 10 minutes, for sound reasons which escape me at the moment. Then I processed the oil in and waited 20 more minutes. Then I kneaded the dough in my hands a few times to move the outside in and the inside out, and I formed it into a ball. The ball had a nice, tight surface, and when I put it in the toaster oven to proof, it stood up nicely instead of flattening out the way my dough balls used to.

Combined with the steam, the resting helped the dough puff up in the oven.

Obviously, you have to ask which change made the most difference: the steam or the resting. Answer: the resting. I think. I made two pizzas today, and I didn’t add water to the oven the first time until the pizza had already been baking for several minutes, so I don’t think the steam did much. Both pizzas were made with rested dough, and both blew up well. The second one was better, but the improvement between it and the first one was smaller than the improvement between the first one and the ones I used to make.

I’m trying to convince myself to buy the Frigidaire, and I plan to rest my dough from now on. And I’m not buying any more Boar’s Head provolone.

Under Biden, we now have an oven shortage, so I feel like I need to get an oven right away, before things get worse. The Frigidaire is on sale for about 10% off, which is remarkable given the supply chain problems.

Rhodah and I have been praying for Biden, and today we prayed for the leaders of Russia and Ukraine and their people. We didn’t just offer bland, “Oh, please prevent war,” prayers. We prayed for God to correct people and help them to become Spirit-led. I think it’s dumb to pray for things to go well for people without praying for God to correct and repair them.

We also prayed for special protection for God’s children in these countries. God’s children; not everyone. Most people are not God’s children, and many people can’t be helped because of their rebellion. Many have come under curses they will just have to put up with until they repent.

I have not been keeping up with the news, but I can’t help hearing some things, so I know about Russia and Ukraine. Would Putin have attacked with a functioning chief executive in office? I don’t know, but I don’t see how Putin could pass up the chance to run wild with Biden in charge. America is much weaker now that Trump is gone, and of course, this matters to our enemies. They will pull things they would never have tried with Trump or even Obama.

Obama didn’t put America first, and our enemies often played him for a fool, but he was also warlike and egotistical, so he didn’t always roll over.

If I were Putin, Xi, or Kim Jong Un, I would be thrilled to be up against Biden. They must have been ecstatic when Trump lost.

My friend Mike has a pal who hates Trump. Before Biden won, this person said he would rather see America destroyed than see Trump reelected. A lot of people felt this way, and now they’re eating their words. Very sad. I would rather see Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, or even Whoopi Goldberg elected rather than see my country destroyed.

Whether we could elect any of these people without destroying America is another question.

I don’t know how serious the Ukraine situation is for America. I have no idea whether there is or is not a danger of a world war. I do know the apocalypse has started, however, so I suppose anything is possible.

I have been putting dry food in containers in case I need it, and I’ve considered getting an upright freezer for meat. I found out I needed to make sure I didn’t get a frostproof model.

In the past, freezers kept food in good shape for a very long time. They were not frostproof, and they didn’t have warm cycles. Frostproof freezers actually warm up every so often. It ruins food.

If you put ice cream in a frostproof freezer and leave it unopened, it will degrade. The ice crystals will melt and refreeze over and over, and the refrozen crystals will be a lot bigger than the original ones. This ruins ice cream’s texture. The same thing happens in other foods.

Apparently, you have to avoid frostproof freezers or eat your frozen food pretty quickly, which defeats the purpose of a freezer. I don’t look forward to defrosting a freezer once a year, but it sounds better than eating freezer burn.

Maybe I’ll get a freezer. Might as well have decent food while everything disintegrates.

Popeil Appeal

I guess I have a lot of nerve, because I have decided to second-guess the great Ron Popeil.

As some readers know, I recently picked up a Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven, unused, on Ebay. I felt I needed it. My dad had one, and it was great. My friend Mike has two of them. You would think nothing with the Popeil name on it could possibly be worth buying, what with all the attention his spray-on hair got, but it isn’t true. The original Showtime was a reasonably well-built product made in South Korea, and it did what he said it would do. It made great food.

It’s very weird that the Showtime has no present-day competitors. George Foreman sold rotisseries, but they vanished from the market. You can get vertical rotisseries, but they’re stupid. The fat runs off the food. No self-basting.

I’m going to guess the food Nazis are behind the vertical rotisserie problem. Who else would drive a policy that dumb? Competent cooking is literally impossible without fat, and fat is good for you, but people are still convinced it’s evil. What kind of fool would spend hundreds of dollars on a machine designed to cleanse food of the very thing that makes it delicious and juicy?

So far, I have cooked four things in the oven: a chicken, a rib roast, and two pork roasts. I learned a couple of things.

1. You have to be careful about applying too much salt, because the rotation of the spits makes it hard for things to run off the food. More of the salt will stay where you put it.

2. Some dishes would probably be better if the oven had a lower heat setting.

The pork roasts I fixed were magnificent. The rib roast I made was fine, but it was too salty. The chicken was done, but not done enough to be tender, and the skin was getting dark when I took it out of the oven.

The Showtime has three settings, but none of them have anything to do with heat. You get one heat setting, and you’re expected to accept it. The spit assembly can be placed in two different positions, one of which is farther from the heat, but the difference in heat that reaches the food is small.

I looked into ways to vary the heat, and I found three solutions, only one of which have I seen applied.

1. Attach a simmerstat to the oven.

2. Buy an AC speed control for power tools and splice it into the heating element circuit.

3. Put a diode and a switch in the same circuit.

A simmerstat is a device found on stove burners. It turns a burner on and off repeatedly. The overall effect is to lower the heat output. Depending on the ratio of on time to off time, you can get plenty of control. Because the simmerstat shuts the juice off instead of shunting it through a resistor, it doesn’t give off a lot of heat. Resistors always use up energy and give off heat. A stove burner coil is a resistor.

I do not know how a speed control works, but since they don’t heat up and catch fire, I know they don’t use big resistors. Maybe they work like simmerstats.

A diode will only pass current in one direction. A heating element in a Showtime oven runs on AC, which means the current switches direction 60 times per second. If you stick a diode in the circuit, half of the time, the circuit will not pass current. That means you should get something like a quarter of the energy output. For DC, it would be a quarter for sure. Don’t ask me about AC, because AC is somewhat different, but half is in the ballpark.

A Youtube genius got himself a big diode and a switch, and he modified his oven. Now he can cook stuff slowly when he wants to.

I considered the alternatives, and I decided to get a diode. A simmerstat or speed control would involve a lot of work to make it part of the oven, and I don’t think I really need a wide range of heat settings. I think high, low, and off will get the job done. I ordered a diode, an SPDT switch, and some spade connectors, and when they get here, I plan to roast a chicken. When I’m done working on the oven, it will look no different than it does now, but for a toggle switch on the control box.

Once the heat issue is solved, my only complaint will be that the top of the little broiler-style drip pan that sits in the bottom of the oven is hard to keep clean.

The oven literature says the pan is nonstick, but to me, it looks like plated steel covered with some kind of ceramic. It sticks to everything. Whenever I use the oven, I cover the pan and grate with foil and poke holes in the top for the grease, but stuff still burns onto the top.

I don’t trust the pan to remain rust-free in the dishwasher, but maybe it will. The new ones do. I need to find out. The dishwasher should remove nearly all of the crud.

I made my second pork roast last night, and it was superb. I will post the recipe, which is extremely simple. Obviously, it will also work in a conventional oven.

INGREDIENTS

pork roast (shoulder)
12 oz. apricot or peach nectar
2 tsp. pressed garlic
1 tsp. sage
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. butter
1/2 cup sweet Marsala or Harvey’s Bristol Cream

Salt your pork roast and let it sit for a while to take the salt in. Boil the other ingredients together until you get a thick syrup that doesn’t run. Cover the roast with the syrup and roast it however you want. Make sure you burn the outside a little to make a nice crust. You’re looking for around 150° on the inside. I think low and slow is the way to go, followed by increased heat to brown the crust.

I gave a 4-pound roast something like 25 minutes per pound, and it was excellent. Very juicy.

It would probably be even better to double the sauce and reapply it halfway through. It’s easier to apply the sauce once the roast is attached to the spits.

I like to bone my roasts and tie them back up, tightly, with twine. You save maybe $1.50 per pound for 5 minutes’ work. To make tying easy, use a butcher’s knot. Look it up.

You can’t imagine how good this tastes.

Smell the pork package at the store to make sure there is no boar taint. If you get a smelly roast anyway, you can brine it with baking soda to kill the stink.

I look forward to my first low-temperature chicken. Should be wonderful.

EUREKA

Aside from the day I “met” my wife (online) or the day we married–no, wait–aside from the day I accepted salvation, the day I received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, AND the days I “met” and married my wife (bases covered now), today is the most triumphant day of my life. I stuck it to the greenies by modifying my old-fashioned eco-hostile washing machine to make the inlet valve easier to clean, and I made the best thin pizza I have ever had.

I got myself a Maytag Commercial washer from Lowe’s last year. It would have been better to get a sister model from another vendor, because the Lowe’s job has a shorter warranty, but I needed a washer fast, and Lowe’s was ready. I got the washer because my old clothes-fermenting Samsung washer was making new noises.

The people who used to own this house weren’t cheap, so they got very expensive laundry machines. Unfortunately, they bought them after Uncle Sam (more like Aunt Sam or maybe Uncle Rupaul) ruined washers with stupid environmentalist rules. Newer washers use too little water, and they never dry out, so they make clothing stink with mildew. There is no remedy for this. If you’ve ever stood next to someone and assumed he smelled like mildew because he was a filthy person, you were almost certainly wrong. Everyone who uses a greenie machine smells like mildew on warm days.

My Samsung started making noise, and I leapt for joy, because I was awaiting the day when I would have an excuse to junk it. I didn’t even consider having it repaired. I had already done my research. Speed Queen used to make good washers, but they stopped. Maytag was the best option.

The Maytag will do a load of clothes in 27 minutes instead of the 90 minutes the Samsung needed, and it only has minimal electronics, so I don’t have to worry about trying to buy a discontinued computer in the future. It uses tons of water, and it dries out between uses. It’s the best.

Problem: the inlet screens were not removable.

Washers typically have hot and cold water inlets in the back, and these inlets are almost always fitted with internal plastic screens you can pull out and clean. This keeps rocks out of your clothing. I can’t believe tiny rocks will damage clothes, and I doubt they hurt washers, since washing machine instructions never say, “Don’t put muddy clothes in machine.” The screens are there, however, so you have to live with them.

My water has a lot of rocks in it, so every few months, the washer starts making scary sounds. Then it quits. The first time this happened, I thought it was broken. No. It was just whining.

I saw that the inlet screens were full of crud, so I tried to pull one out. It would not budge. I couldn’t get it out with pliers. Turning it didn’t help. It wasn’t screwed in. It was a permanent fixture.

Things like this remind me that every engineering class has a bottom 5%.

To clean the screens, I had to pull the washer out into the room, remove the hoses, and use things like an old toothbrush. Unacceptable.

I didn’t want to butcher the original valve. Some day I may need warranty service, and I don’t want the lonely Maytag guy to look at my modified valve, tell me I’ve been a bad boy, and refuse to work on the machine. I decided it was worth it to buy a whole new valve assembly. I forget what it cost. Probably around $60.

I also bought some removable screens made for other washers. You can find them on Amazon. I got 4 for about $7.

I took the new valve and ripped the screens out of it. I shoved new ones in. They fit perfectly. I was ready. I stored the valve assembly in the laundry room and waited for the day when the washer started whining again. Today is that day.

In order to get the old valve out, I had to take the control panel off the machine. That was impossible, because it was held on with special Torx screws that require bits with cavities in the ends. Tamper-proof screws, because, as everyone knows, repairing your own belongings is TAMPERING. I gave up and called Maytag.

Are you high? Do you really think I don’t have a huge supply of tamper-proof bits? Did you seriously fall for that? I got the bits out, took the washer apart, slapped the new valve in there so it looked OEM, stored the old valve, and washed my clothes.

The next time the rocks build up, I can remove a hose, pull a screen out, rinse it in the sink, reverse the procedure, and go back to making pizza or whatever. If the washer develops any other problems during the warranty period, I’ll put the old valve back in before the repair guy arrives.

Is it wrong to play warranty tricks on Maytag? Sometimes. If I had a CNC shop, and I decided to make my own souped-up washer transmission, and it ruined the machine, it would be wrong to put the old transmission back in and pretend it had always been in there. Inlet screens are different. The screens I put in do the same job the old ones did, only better. It will be impossible for them to harm the machine. It would be unfair for Maytag to use inlet screens as an excuse to cheat me out of warranty work.

Corporations play that game sometimes. Some won’t touch a product that has been opened by a consumer. That’s just plain evil, so I don’t feel bound to cooperate.

I only have a three-year warranty, and I probably won’t get to use it, so I don’t think my subterfuge will ever come into play in a repair situation. I still think the money I spent on the new valve was well worth it. A non-warranty repair on a major part could cost a great deal. Also, inlet valves go bad often, and now I have a replacement valve ready to go.

As for pizza, today I had the best thin pizza ever, from any source, anywhere. I am done searching. I’m sure I will continue tinkering, but the recipe I used is recorded and stored, and unless a miracle happens and I manage to improve it, I will use it until I die.

The best thing about it is that it didn’t take a day or more to prepare. People claim you have to let dough ferment for over a day, preferably in a refrigerator. I did that a few days back, and today’s pizza, which rose over about 4 hours, was better. The texture and flavor were magnificent. It puffed up nicely. It had big bubbles, which I like. It browned beautifully. I literally start to drift into a dream state when I close my eyes and remember how it tasted.

I used the last recipe I posted here. I made the dough with cold water to slow down the rise, and I proofed it at 75° on my kitchen counter, on a pan, under a glass bowl to reduce evaporation. It took around 4 hours, not 24. I suppose it could be 2% better if Gordon Ramsay moved in and worked on it for a month, but I have never eaten its equal.

For cheese, I used about 3 ounces of Boar’s Head low-moisture, whole milk mozzarella from the Publix deli, sliced, combined with Sargento thin-sliced provolone. I put the provolone on top because it doesn’t burn easily. Anyone can find these cheeses or their equivalents. No Internet orders or road trips needed.

Walmart sells LMWM mozzarella in blocks for $3.68 per pound. I plan to try it. Boar’s Head costs $10 per pound, which is impossible to justify based on the manufacturer’s cost. If other companies can sell it for less than half that price, Boar’s Head has to be overpriced.

I plan to get a piece of steel for pizza. People say steel is better than a pizza stone. A good pizza steel only costs $139 on the web, so why not?

You believed that? You really thought I would pay that? I’m going to my metal dealer. I’ll bet I can get a 15″ square of 3/8″ plate for under $25.

I don’t know what kind of tool-illiterate leggings-wearing morphodite would pay $140 for a piece of steel plate, but he isn’t me.

It must seem silly for a grown man to get so excited about pizza, but I have been trying to get to this point for decades. I summited the Sicilian pizza mountain 12 years ago, but I was never completely certain my thin pizza was perfect until today. It was good. No restaurant I knew could touch it. But it wasn’t my dream New-York-style pie.

This must be how Edison felt when he stumbled on tungsten.

The only thing left for me to perfect is fried chicken. I have no other food Everests to conquer. There are innumerable things I don’t know how to cook, but then I don’t want to cook them. I know how to make everything I want.

Except chicken.

Pizza is unbelievably difficult. An ideal pizza you picture in your mind is an extremely elusive target. When you make recipe changes you are sure will work, they will often move you further away from your goal. It’s maddening. The really annoying thing about it is that once you get your recipe dialed in, making it over and over is simple. The execution is a joke. The search for the recipe is what crushes your soul.

I ate an entire 12″ pizza earlier, and I want to make another one right now, even though I’m not hungry. I want to relive my victory. I’m not going to do it, but I want to.

I bought two pounds of cheese today. I may have to chain myself to something.