Don’t Forget the Oil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing with guns is simple, I guess.