The Free The Pizza Summer Tour 2022 has been bringing pizza to the people around the Eastern seaboard. We’re presently in Cape Cod, where a friend we’ll call JD requested one of my signature pizzas: shrimp and garlic. I’ve known JD for well over a decade. I know some things about him. And I know that he hasn’t asked for some other toppings on that pizza that he would enjoy. For instance: he loves overtly spicy food that can tear the head off of mere mortals, causing pizza sauce to gush from the open neck hole. With that intel, it felt like time to introduce JD to Pizza De Los Camarones Al Diablo: Pizza Of The Devil Shrimp. (Yes, it’s a Spanish name. It sounds more dangerous than its Italian counterpart, and is also more friendly to the American tongue.)
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The reason I'm sharing my answer to a question on Quora is because it's going crazy there, and maybe you need to see it. The question was, "Why does homemade pizza never taste the same as pizza from a restaurant? Am I missing some secret ingredient or method?" I read the answers people had given this person, and I was appalled. It was a parade of negativity and ignorance. Only a couple of voices offered something worthy, and those answers were incomplete. So, I wrote the following...
You can make homemade pizza that tastes fantastic. My homemade pizza tastes better than a lot of pizza restaurants. (That’s one of the reasons why, after 20 years of doing it, I’ve written a book about how to do it.) It also seems most of the answers to this question are from people who apparently never make pizza at home, and know only why they can’t make pizza at home. Even a chef told you it’s not possible. If it’s not possible, explain this photo: Attention: Here Now, The 3 Secret Tips For Making Homemade Pizza Instead Of Accidental Calzone...6/30/2022 Ah, the accidental calzone. All pizzamakers eventually make that mess. Something happens upon launching a pizza that requires just folding over the dough and baking it like its hand-pie cousin. But interestingly, it seems to not normally be a newbie mistake. I was making pizza for quite a while before the accidental calzone happened in my kitchen. And after more than 20 years of doing this, I made one again as recently as a year ago.
But that’s not why you’re here. You’re here because you either desire to make pizza, or you’re already making pizza at home and want to make them even more amazing than they already are. “Oh, I know this is the right way to do it. But I don’t have time for that.” Yes, that is an actual quote. It wasn’t said about pizza, but it might as well have been. Pizza is so simple, yet for some people that seems impossible. They want to make pizza defy the rules of time, space and biology. It’s OK to not want to make pizza. But it’s not OK to have a desire to do it while maintaining a hatred for giving nature the time required to do the job well. Do the job badly, and why would you ever want to do it again. Have you ever made something in the kitchen and thought, “That’s disappointing. Let’s do it again tomorrow!” Can I guarantee she'll make an authentic pizza? Two things, I reply. One, thank you for saying “authentic” and not “perfect.” We seek perfection knowing it I unattainable. Authenticity is far easier. Two, I can’t guarantee anything. This is on you. And the first thing you can do to make it work is to not try too hard.
Is this all of a sudden sounding like Zen BS? But wait, there’s more. By far, the best pizzas I make are when I’m not making them. They’re just happening. And yes, this might sound like a pizza peel covered in cheesy Zen koan. But it’s true. The first time I made an “authentic pizza,” it was a little bit nerve wracking. I’d tried pizza before and failed. But this time, I’d been reading what I needed to read, I’d done the prep, I had the tools, so the only thing left was for the pizza to happen. It might not have been as good as what I’m making 20 years later. But it was convincing and round-ish. It looked good and it tasted great. It gave me a reason to continue. These days I know I can make a pizza. Where I get on edge is when I’m throwing a pizza party. Making half a dozen pies for eight people is always a a little daunting. You’re on a stage. People are watching. They have expectations. But the first thing I do is give up. I don’t try so hard. I just think about how I’m going to be making a unch of great pizzas. I’ve been at this long enough that there’s no point in sweating it. In the parlance of some other subculture that puts voice to such beliefs, I give it up to God. My hands do the work. I don’t worry about it because worry doesn’t help. Follow the steps. Use the tools. Visualize the result. That third part might be the most useful. Instead of trying so hard to make the pizza, visualize the pizza you’ve made before you make it. What it looks like, smells like, feels like. The color. The caramelization. The texture of the crust. The crunch. But don’t think too hard on that, either. You already know what all that should be. Just let it happen. There’s a critical voice in your head that will try to second guess everything you’re doing. You’ll be doing it right. Don’t listen to the critical voice that tries telling you you’re doing it wrong. Second guessing is pizza death. There is one place where I still get hung up: Dough. It’s interesting that my dough has gotten better since removing machinery from the making. People act like their stand mixers are the second coming of Christ on a Cuisinart. They can’t possibly knead their dough by hand. Get over yourself. Knead your dough by hand. The man who runs one of the nation’s most famous pizza restaurants makes enough dough by hand every day to serve as many as 250 pizzas a night. By that measure, you and I are mere gnats. Our couple of pizzas don’t even appear as blips on the pizza radar. We can muster the temerity to make dough by hand. And we’ll make better dough because of it. There’s no mixer standing between us and the most important part of the pizza process. To be more blunt: use a mixer, and you’re going to overknead the dough. Your pizza is going to be tough. Don’t do it. The dough problem I continue to face is measurement. It never works out. Measuring by volume is fraught with inaccuracy. But so is measuring by weight. No matter how I do it, I’m always called upon to make adjustments. My pizza dough ingredient measurement is never twice the same. This matters because the devil is in the dough. And if you face the same challenge, don’t stress it. Just be patient and make adjustments. Make sure you get to a supple, slightly tacky dough ball, and all will be good. To recap: I can guarantee nothing because your mindset is in play here. Don’t work too hard at it. Just follow the steps. Visualize the end result. Pizza is as much about your mind as anything. And when making pizza, developing pizza mind is invaluable. Want to take your first step to authentic pizza? FREE THE PIZZA! has been the #1 new release in Pizza Making on Amazon! Click here to learn more... If you've never made pizza before, buying a pizza oven is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.5/16/2022 The first question you need to ask yourself before buying a pizza oven is this: Do I know how to make pizza? If the answer is no, you don’t know how to make pizza, the best thing I can recommend is to step away from the ovens and step towards your kitchen. It's less expensive than buying an oven. And the pizza you make will be far better than most pizzerias you've been to--and definitely better than any delivery pizza that's been steaming inside a cardboard box for 30 minutes or more.
It’s not sexy, but you’ve already got a pizza oven sitting right there in your kitchen. When you bring the right tools to your home oven, you can make some killer pizza. The trick is this: you need to know what you’re doing. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, and you start messing with little, annoying, hard-to-use pizza ovens, you could learn to hate making pizza and never want to do it again. The joy of pizza is lovely. Burning lots of starter pizzas is not. It's possible that you’ve been enchanted by the new breed of outdoor pizza ovens. They’re made by companies like Ooni and Rocbox. These ovens can range anywhere from about 300 bucks to over $1,000. They’re usually fired with wood pellets or gas. And they have legions of rabid fans. Want to know the dirty secret about these ovens? They will not make pizza for you. Just as a $900 camera does not know how take the pictures for you, a $900 oven does not know how to make pizza for you. That’s your job. And the oven doesn’t make it easier to bake a pizza. In fact, if used to the fullest extent of its thermodynamic insanity, it can make baking a pizza one of the most challenging things you’ve ever done. See also: black and charred crusty things. There's nothing wrong with buying a pizza oven--but it helps if you do it AFTER you've made pizza one of your favorite bad habits. Habits are second nature. They can be practiced almost subconsciously. And you can get there with pizza. Knowing how to make dough without thinking about it, and going into The Zone, slinging half a dozen pies for a night of pizza with friends, is far more impressive than spending money on an oven that you can't use. Nobody wants to hear it but developing the habit of making pizza is cheaper and easier than buying an oven. Don't buy a pizza oven. Yet. Buy the simple tools for your home oven. Read the right books. Practice the pizza. A dedicated oven can follow. And if you'd like to be on the mailing list for when the Free The Pizza book is released, click here. Free the pizza! Because that’s what making pizza does to you. It gets you engaged, excited and perhaps boring to those around you who don’t share the thrill (but are nonetheless happy to shove your slices into their food holes).
To be specific, we were sitting at the table, awaiting our glorious fish dinners. The subject arose of my forthcoming book, Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With the Oven You Already Have. (Someone else mentioned it. I try to not talk about it.) Another guy at the table was intrigued. It didn’t take much discussion of pizza for him to start waxing poetic about kneading dough by hand to attain “the zen” of pizza. His words, not mine, but only because I try to resist making this seem in any way religious. (Though, the small “z” zen here is more an adjective related intuition, meditation and perceiving the true nature of things, and less about subscribing to a Buddhist religion. But I digress.) If you take joy in pizza, and you find a simple thrill in making a pizza that is perfect (knowing, of course, that perfection is unattainable), you begin to take joy in things like kneading by hand. And you talk about it. And you share it as a revelation. I can’t tell you how often people throw their dough into a stand mixer and let it grind away for far too long. They end up with a hard, chewy pizza that is unsatisfying and might even put them off trying again. Pursuing the simple things. Kneading by hand. Shredding your own cheese. Shaping your dough with care. Even watching a pizza bake. All of these things are simple good fun, and they all contribute the satisfaction that results from making a pizza that rivals anything you’ve ever had in a restaurant. Most pizzas in this country are made on an assembly line. Very few are made in your own kitchen with love. Free the pizza! If you want to be notified when the Free The Pizza book becomes available, click here. Making pizza? Fermentation is your friend in freeing the pizza. Quick pizza dough is your enemy.4/26/2022 Huge dough balls fast! No waiting! Make pizza for dinner in 30 minutes or less! Here’s how! Why pick up the phone when you can slap together some flour and water and get busy?!
There are so many “use it now!” pizza dough recipes creeping around the internet. Some of them are even from authoritative sources. But if you want a great pizza, a pizza that makes you say, “Wow, I’m glad I didn’t trust this meal to my local Papa’s Domino Hut,” you will be disappointed by Use It Now pizza dough. Here’s why… It’s impossible to make a great pizza dough in a matter of minutes. Good pizza dough is about the place where two fantastic F-words collide: it's Food banging into Fermentation. But what is fermentation? You certainly know the word. Fermentation is a metabolic process. And what the F does THAT mean? Let’s unpack it just a little to better understand how it leads to freeing the pizza. Trust me, you’re going to hate this. It gets so Biology 101, but it’ll be worth it. Metabolism is what we non-science types vaguely understand as some crazy clock inside us. We know it slows down as we get older, so we get fatter than ever by eating too much pizza. The word metabolism comes from the Greek word “metabolē,” meaning “change.” And that's not like, “Oh, I don’t have change to tip the pizza delivery guy.” We’re talking life change. But wait. It gets better. Metabolism is (ready?) an enzyme-catalyzed reaction that lets living things grow. (Science!) In a metabolic process, three important things happen: 1) taking the potential energy in food and converting it into fuel for running a cellular process; 2) converting food into building blocks for other compounds; and 3) eliminating metabolic waste. And with food, fermentation is the metabolic process that produces what experts call “a desirable chemical change.” That’s unlike the other, less desirable, temporary, smoke-induced chemical change we all know about that inspires one to order an 18-inch delivery pizza or jam one’s head into a party-size bag of tortilla chips—or to eat an entire one-pound chocolate bar, which we mention because the process of making chocolate requires fermenting cocoa beans. Do you like sauerkraut? Yep: fermented. Even the pizza-pertinent word "cheese" has etymology related to fermentation. If we were talking about making wine, the desirable chemical change is the creation of alcohol. Single-called microorganisms called yeast (the royalty of the fungus kingdom!) eat the sugars present in the fruit juice, then eliminate the metabolic waste in the form of alcohol. They’re having a party so we can, too. Whee! For pizza dough, the metabolic process is similar. We toss those royal yeast into flour and water, and they get busy. They’re all in there, eating the sugars and producing carbon dioxide and alcohol. In fact, if you ever overdo the yeast in a batch of dough, you can smell the alcohol just coming off that dough. It’s crazy. And the dough isn’t going to be very good, either. (Been there. Done that.) The carbon dioxide produced by the yeast also makes the dough rise. Those yeast also help develop the gluten. And the gluten is why we can stretch a little ball of dough into a big, flat, elastic disc and call it pizza. Here’s the thing: you cannot rush the process of fermentation. Yes, you can throw in fistfuls or yeast and the dough will puff up in short order. But it doesn’t taste good. When you’re talking about wheat flour, the proteins, starches and fats in it don’t have a lot of flavor. But add a little yeast and, over time, it breaks them all down. It helps them develop fabulous flavors that are the reason amazing pizza tastes amazing. You can even tell whether a dough has been fermented just by looking at the crust. The resulting pizza crust looks smooth and lacks texture. It looks like many, many fast-food pizzas you see out there from chains whose strengths are being consistent, convenient and quick. The downside is that fermentation requires patience—but the upside is worth it. This is how you serve people a pizza that makes them say, “This is the best pizza I’ve ever had!” So don’t rush it. You’ll be glad you didn’t. And when you start making a habit of having dough balls and sauce in the freezer, you can have fresh pizza almost as easily as making a phone call—except it’s a fraction of the price and it makes you so very happy. Want to know more about how to Free The Pizza and get some FREE intel? Click here. You've made your dough, you've waited three days, you're excited to share some pizza--and you can't make it happen? There's no little blue pill for this. And for the pizza newbie, stretching dough is filled with angst under the best of circumstances. And there's a lot going on with pizzamaking. Lots of moving parts. They're simple. But it's a lot to keep track of if pizza is not yet a habit.
If you can't stretch it, chances are good that you've made a simple mistake. In freeing the pizza, you haven't freed the dough from the fridge soon enough. It doesn't sound like such a big deal. But if you don't bring the dough to kitchen room temp at least an hour before you're ready to use it, there's a good chance you're going to encounter resistance. The dough is just too cold to be usable Here's a simple way to make sure you've got your timing right. Are you turning on the oven? Take out the dough. Between the time it takes your oven to reach temperature and the hour you need to preheat your baking surface, you've got about 90 minutes before you're making pizza. Just make sure that when you turn on that oven, the dough is on the kitchen counter. This is a simple mistake. I've made it myself. And there is no good way to rectify it other than waiting patiently. (No, putting the dough in the microwave for 30 seconds is not a solution. Do not ask me how I know this.) Cold dough is un-stretchable dough. Cold dough will break your heart. I'm going to be providing aid in this department with a free document for all my pizza peeps. It's going to be sort of a pizza pre-flight checklist. I've been doing this long enough to realize that even the most seasoned pizzamaker can make rookie mistakes out of simple oversight. (Do not ask me how I know this, either.) If you'd like your copy of the checklist when it comes available, just join the pizza list. Click here to be taken to the signup form at FreeThePIzza.com. And if you've already joined the list, you'll be notified soon. Free The Pizza! Kissing Off 21st Century Breakneck Madness For Love, Joy And The Poetry Of Freeing The Pizza...3/31/2022 Need a pizza right away? Pick up the phone. You’re not going to suddenly whip up a pizza (well, not a good one) by slapping together a bunch of raw ingredients in your kitchen in 30 minutes or less. And that’s fine. The reason and the reward are all part of the same, glorious goal of freeing the pizza.
Pizza is a process that requires allowing biology to do its thing. Great pizza dough is the product of tiny fungi getting busy and turning a lump of flour, water and salt into a canvas for comestibles that tantalize your tongue and warm the cockles of your heart (if you even know what cockles are or whether you have any heart left--sometimes I wonder about myself). That kind of yeast-driven magic doesn’t happen at the snap of the fingers. But it can be close at hand if you prepare properly. For instance, it’s not unusual to open my freezer and find half a dozen dough balls of various sizes. There are bags of frozen sauce. In the fridge’s cheese drawer, there are several blocks of mozzarella and a couple of wedges of Parmesan and Romano. In the cold cuts bin are at least a couple of cured meats. Almost always, one of them is Spanish chorizo, my go-to pepperoni alternative. If I want to make a pizza tonight, it can happen with about four hours notice. It takes time to thaw that dough. (Don’t use the microwave. I’ve tried it. Save yourself.) But making good dough from scratch can’t be done in an hour. And embracing that part of the magic fermentation process called pizza is what it takes to do the deed. People will try to tell you otherwise. They are not freeing the pizza. They’re enslaving themselves to the blind greed of the time-crunch culture. Pizza is a transformation of mundane ingredients into a joyous eating experience. As such, it will not allow us to rush things. It forces us to slow down. It’s part of the system and part of the poetry that is pizza. Think “poetry” is overstating the case? Consider this: poetry is the crystallization of a moment. It is words brought to bear on being evocative. A perfectly poetic moment is a slice of time or life caught in a stage of clarity that sparks the imagination. Come on, you know why the caged bird sings. And the reason is probably bigger than just pizza or anything else happening in our kitchens. A bite of brilliant pizza is also a crystalline moment. When you take that first fabulous taste and savor the sequence of flavors that make your tongue do a tango, enlivening your soul just a little more, well—that is arguably a poetic moment. If it’s the right pizza, of course. And this is not a rant against fast-delivery pizza. It has its place and its devotees. But if we’re going to be making pizza, if we’re going to the trouble of building this bridge between our food and other people, it’s worth taking the time to engineer it properly. And doing that requires patience. Whether it’s the days required to ferment a batch of dough, or the hours required to thaw one of the resulting dough balls, it’s worth the wait. The world is in a rush for us to do everything else. Why not take the time do justice to pizza and poetry? Want the free dough recipe from the forthcoming Free The PIzza book? Just click here. Free the pizza! |
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
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