 Have you been hoping to make pizza? Do you live and die by the recipe as written? I have some troubling news. It may make you recede to a corner, assume the fetal position and rock: pizza recipes are a moving target. Pizza recipes do not always work as you hope. You may get frustrated. You will make mistakes. You will cry—unless you are like me and you lack tear ducts and are genetically stoic. If you want to learn to make great pizza, a recipe is a good guide to help get you started. But it’s a guide only. Pizza is practice. Learning to make great pizza as a matter of routine means you have to be willing to make decisions—and mistakes. You also get to own those mistakes. That’s the bad news. The good news is, those mistakes are usually edible and enjoyable enough.
0 Comments
 Please forgive the inflammatory nature of the headline and its oblique connection to making great pizza at home. The pizza in question is closer than you know. Today, I was reading a pizza magazine called (oddly) Pizza Today. The article was about the evolution of traditional American pizza styles. It included some of the usual suspects, like Detroit pizza and Philly tomato pie. There are also some styles that you’ve never heard of—and which likely haven’t even been heard of by the people who eat them all the time. See also: Ohio Valley Pizza and New England Beach Pizza.  I pay attention to the pizza cooking questions over at the Troll Haven known as Quora. People occasionally ask about pizza, I answer, and maybe win a fan or sell a copy or two of Free The Pizza! But more important? I help prevent people from making pizza at home that's so bad they’ll quit before they’ve started. If you’ve never heard of Quora, well, it’s a social site where people ask questions and impatient know-it-alls answer them with scorn and derision. And then, there’s me. I hide my scorn and derision behind a smiling façade of self-serving servitude. (Oh, who am I kidding? I'm a total ham about this homemade pizza thing.) Last week, a six-year old question popped up in my feed, and I thought, What the heck? I’ll answer it anyway. Somebody will see it. Nope. Not just somebody. Since I answered it five days ago, 17,000 people have seen it. Over 130 have upvoted it, and a couple dozen have commented. New York Pizza Love: The bio-chemistry and immigrant history of an epic American success story11/29/2024  If you love New York pizza, and want to make a pizza you can love, it requires having more than just an oven. It helps to have chemistry and context. That’s why your Saturday Afternoon Pizza Post is a day early. It’s Black Friday, and there’s a lot of pizza oven lust going on out there. To alleviate the pain of pizza-oven big-sale FOMO, it seemed it might be useful and fun to share some of the context. I’ve always believed context helps us be better pizzamakers. Knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing is so much more satisfying than mere blind doing.  This past Thursday, we were having lunch in New Orleans. And you know what that means: Day drinking! We were in one of the town’s more famous dive bars. Inside, it’s small and dark and perpetually 9pm until you pay the tab and step out the door and go back into the sunlight which taunts you for your weekday misdeeds featuring alcohol involvement. Our bartender was an endless font of wisdom on everything, from stride piano (his professional specialty when he’s not tending bar), to the regional brewery scene, to sandwich preparation formats and techniques. I asked him if there’s any pizza in New Orleans that he likes. I asked because it's a very, very foodie town, but not really a pizza town. However, pizza is on the upswing.  What’s an anti-vampire pizza? Please allow me to answer your question with a question: Do you enjoy garlic? This is an easy-to-make pizza. (Recipe follows at the end of this post.) This pizza also sounds very minimalist--enough so that people will say, “That doesn’t sound very interesting." And that’s the beauty of it: nobody sees this pizza coming. When it arrives, they're awestruck at how crazy flavorful it is and their heads spin like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist on meth. (Is that so wrong? It's Halloween!)  Are you at all creative and experimental in the kitchen? If so, it doesn’t take long for you to start thinking about what interesting new pizzas you want to create. There’s a game to play here. I’m not sure you’ll want to play along. There is danger ahead. Have you ever considered a pizza with roast pork, or gravied ground beef, or shrimp, or fresh corn, or lobster or oysters? Do those possibilities make you wonder what the hell is wrong with me? Would you believe they’re not my ideas? (Well, not most of them.) Would understanding where these pizza ideas come from lead you to a “crazy-idea pizza” of your own that represents your own stomping grounds? You might be surprised.  What was it like the first time you made an actual pizza? We’re not talking a Thomas’s English Muffin pizza, or a Chef Boyardee pizza kit-in-a-box pizza. No Boboli-and-Ragu pizza. We’re talking a from-scratch, kneading-the-dough-yourself pizza baked in your home oven that came out and surprised you by tap dancing on your tongue. What did that pizza taste like? How did it make you feel? Did it change your world even a smidge?  What exactly is a COVID pizza? I think you’re looking at it in the photo above. As some people I know might say, “Dude, that cheese pizza is righteous!” OK, maybe so—until you see the whole thing. You’ll get to see it in just a moment.  There are people who will never be able to make a pizza. They won't even try. Some folks will try it once, and decide it’s not for them. And then there are people who seem to be able to produce a fresh, hot, savory, tangy, cheesy, mind-bending home-baked pizza whenever they want—to the point where the conversation goes something like this: “What do you want to eat? I can grill a chicken, make linguine in white clam sauce, or bake a sausage and mushroom pizza.” How do they do this?  “It was one of those moments where you say, ‘This is a perfect bite.’” That’s an actual quote from someone eating this pizza--one of my harshest critics, in fact. If you’re already making homemade pizza at any level, the pizza she’s talking about is easy to assemble, nobody sees it coming, and people love it. Welcome to the unexpected--The Land of Shrimp & Garlic Pizza. We’re going to talk about: 1) how to make it, 2) what goes on it, and 3) how to handle it so it amazes your friends and family and makes you a homemade pizza superhero.  Will your pizza go round in circles, and will your guests fly high like a bird up in the sky--all because your homemade pizza is finally round? Apologies to Billy Preston. But maybe that song is a good alternative to having this conversation. Here, see if this is better for you than making round pizza: https://youtu.be/U5-bJkoLWMY?si=2npbZpF_VbER_Ey6.  Scott always seems to be halfway to an enthusiastic grin. He's also pretty clear about his enthusiasm for this new gig. “When they asked me if I want to teach a class with Peter, there's a no-brainer. That's like a dream situation.” Peter, who also exhibits an enviable level of preternatural happiness, says, “I think there are people that just have a passion for it, and they have the means and the time to be able to do this, and there are folks who just want to gobble up knowledge and experience.” NEWSFLASH: Two of the nicest guys in the entire pizza ecosystem are getting together and teaching a 3-day course in pizza dough at the world-famous Pizza University, based in that garden spot of pizza, Beltsville, Maryland. And now you’re asking yourself the right question: In what bizarre world of homemade pizza would you be thinking, “Hey, I should travel to that greater Baltimore school for pizzeria operators and take that 3-day course about mixing together water, flour, salt and yeast?”  Getting ready to make that first pizza can be daunting. So can making the second, the third—heck, it’s pizza anxiety and it can be debilitating. I’ve known people who can’t start any new kitchen project with a process because they’re freaked out by the possibility of making mistakes. And pizza is one of those kitchen projects with a process that inspires with fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of making mistakes. Fear of handling dough. Fear of ending up with a freeform calzone. How can you mitigate the fear? To some degree, it’s merely about preparing well and then just making it so. Right now, there’s a loaf of rye bread cooling in my kitchen. You know how many times I’ve made rye bread?  I haven’t offered a simple kitchen tip in a while, so here it comes. Get ready for the ensuing mayhem. If you’ve spent any time around here, you’ve heard me say it: Scales are not necessary for making pizza. I’ve said as much to pizza pros, who instantly label me a scoffer and a misanthropist. So be it. Among American home cooks, there’s a clear and resonant hatred of the dreaded kitchen scale. I have a theory for why this is. It’s related to a less-than-stellar education system.  How daring are you, and are you ready for a crazy pizza challenge that sounds easier than it might really be? Would you like to try making a polarizing form of pizza using a barely tested dough? First, a short tale, and then some details. (And know those details are all reflected in the pizza in the photo above, which is an actual Free The Pizza Production developed using the methods in question.)  Last week, the conversation was pizza inspiration that knows no sane boundaries. And that’s fine. It’s so much better than the tyranny of “Pepperoni or nothing!” This week, part 2 of our conversation with Serhan Ayhan puts the spotlight on the truth about ovens and the things that matter more. (Flour, anybody?) And perhaps the most important thing you need for making pizza is free. In fact, it’s impossible to buy…  If you like making pizza, and you want to push the boundaries a little, it’s fun being inspired by other people’s pizzas.
For me, it’s usually the easy-to-find pizzas of high-profile pros like Dan Richer, Chris Bianco or Nancy Silverton. But there’s a pizza amateur who is may be the single most inspiring pizzamaker I’ve ever witnessed. Serhan Ayhan and I met in Atlantic City at the Pizza & Pasta Northeast (PPNE) trade show. Serhan was there not as a pizzeria pro (though he’s been one), but as an enthusiastic pizza amateur. By day, Serhan works in financial due diligence with a famous multinational investment bank. You may have seen him and his wife in the New York Times’ Real Estate section in a feature called “The Hunt.” The two stories there detail their hunt for a new home—including an oven big enough to accommodate his pizza peel. (We've all been there, right?)  Last week, I talked about hitting five of the top-rated pizza joints in Pizza City USA (AKA Portland, Oregon)—except… Pizzeria number 5 was a last-minute substitution based on a Google search for the closest pizza joint. I’d never heard of it, never saw it on any list—and it was the biggest surprise of my two-day pizza expedition. So, after years of regarding them with suspicion, I’m officially skeptical of the best pizza lists.  So I was talking with Peter Reinhart last week. He's the guy whose first pizza book 20 years ago got me making killer homemade pizza. And now, we sometimes talk about pizza because he's an incredibly nice guy and it’s one of his favorite things to do. I said to Peter, “If you were talking to a newbie pizza maker, somebody who maybe hasn't even touched dough yet, what would you say are the three most important tips you can provide before diving into this?” When he was done speaking, I told him that I’ve said something similar, though without nearly the same eloquence or authority. That’s why he’s a James Beard Award-winner and a professor at world-famous Johnson & Wales and I’m a semi-professional geek with a blog. So here now, I share Prof. Reinhart's insights with you and embellish them with some of my own geeky nonsense. |
AuthorBlaine Parker is the award-winning author of the bestselling, unusual and amusing how-to pizza book, Free The Pizza. Also known as The Pizza Geek and "Hey, Pizza Man!", Blaine is fanatical about the idea that true, pro-quality pizza can be made at home. His home. Your home. Anyone's home. After 20 years of honing his craft and making pizza in standard consumer ovens across the nation, he's sharing what he's learned with home cooks like you. Are you ready to pizza? Archives
March 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed