I Need Cheap Olive Oil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting stuff. The puzzle has no unique solution.