The Files of Fail: When good ideas ferment badly, and recovering with antidotal anchovies (much to your horror).

Oh, it has been a bad week at Pizza Bayou. The R&D Team at the Free The Pizza Fermentation Fortress has been off their game.
 
Perhaps you can learn from my mistakes, though that seems an unlikely outcome.
 
More probable, you’re here for the opportunities in rubbernecking, pointing, and laughing at my expense.
 

As the saying goes at Free The Pizza, I do these things so you don’t have to.
 
This week has surpassed the standard spectacle of my pizza-mistakes paradigm into a vast failure of time invested and resources wasted.
 
If this havoc has a sunny side, it's that this supercritical event is the result of cascading successes culminating in an epic failure that rivals the 1945 Demon Core Incident at Los Alamos–except we have no plutonium, nobody died (yet), and the only bomb here is an 8-inch pizza nobody was hoping for.

 
What am I blathering about, you ask.
 
Next month, I’m partnering with an edgy New Orleans chef at a sneaky pizza event in his super-secret Tiki Food Lab hidden out in the bayou near NASA’s Stennis Space Center.
 
We’ll refer to this man by his code name, Chef Ernie.
 
One of Chef Ernie’s specialties at the Tiki Food Lab is fermentation greatness. Since I’ve been dabbling in lacto-fermentation myself, I thought it would be fun to try bringing additional fermented foods to the table along with my standard cold-fermented pizza dough.
 
 
If you’re new to all this and haven’t yet been issued clearance credentials, the top secret is that really good pizza doughs are made with less yeast and more time.
 
Giving microbes an opportunity to do their dance inside a mass of water, flour, salt and yeast creates an environment ripe for flavorful crust.
 
Good pizza dough relies on something called Alcoholic Fermentation. The yeast consume sugars, then release carbon dioxide and ethanol. Letting the yeast get busy in there for a couple of days results in a far better tasting pizza crust than an over-yeasted dough that's ready in an hour.
 
Lacto-Fermentation, on the other hand, is a simple food preservation method. Food is put into a solution of water and salt, and good bacteria turn the food’s natural sugars into lactic acid.
 
 
This is how you get real pickles or sauerkraut.
 
Other tangy tasting preserved foods can result as well. If you really want to bring the funk, you make kimchi this way.
 
That said, most commercial pickles, 'krauts and kimchi are not actually fermented. They’re quick-pickled in a vinegar brine and then pasteurized. Actual fermentation takes days to weeks, so it's not moving at the speed of industry. (With some notable exceptions that are slow-pickled and contain active cultures.)
 
Anyway, I’ve been making a lacto-fermented marinara sauce (tomatoes, onion, garlic, basil), which tastes great when tossed with freshly cooked hot pasta.
 
I don’t heat the fermented sauce, as that would eliminate some of the tasty byproducts of fermentation.
 
 
So instead of being piping hot, this pasta dish is more like a warm hug at the table.
 
The flavor has all the umami magic of a marinara with the added thrill of tangy bomblets and savory excitement.
 
In my zeal to unleash this newfound fermented fun onto my world o’ pizza, I figured that we could bake a kind of Pizza Bianca (read: a fermented pizza dough baked with nothing on it besides olive oil), then spread it with room-temp fermented marinara as per my pasta dish.
 
Then, bonus, we’d top that marinara-slathered crust with slices of fermented garlic.
 
 
SIDEBAR: Trust me on the excellence of this unexpected snack sensation.
 
In the fridge, I have about a pound and a half of fermented garlic cloves, and they are a killer snack.

The first time you pop one of these puny pickles into your kisser, you’ll realize you’ve wasted your life.
 
So anyway, this was the fermentation bomb I expected to unleash upon an unsuspecting audience out in Chef Ernie’s Mississippi science swamp super-secret kitchen hideout.

It was time to make a prototype. 
 
 
I went and baked an 8-inch test pizza.
 
I removed it from the oven.
 
(Mind you, the dough was a four-day cold fermented high-hydration product, which ends up like a crispy-crusted focaccia but much thinner.)
 
I spread the little pizza with fermented marinara (which takes about 14 days to ferment to perfection).
 
I strategically dotted it with translucent slices of fermented garlic. (The garlic is a product of a 42-day fermentation.)

In aggregate, that's 60 days of blissful fermentation at work. 
 
 
After drizzling with a good olive oil and garnishing with fresh oregano, this pizza was a site to behold.
 
And not a good one.
 
It looked anemic.

ABOVE: The finished pizza without any color enhancement. Let's face it: "One order of fingernails pizza, extra pale, coming up!" 
 

I thought, Don’t eat with your eyes. Use your word hole!
 
I cut a slice of pizza. I took a bite.
 
 
In the cartoon version of this event, I spit pizza onto the backsplash.
 
In real life, I kept chewing.
 
But it was a salt bomb of epic proportions.
 
Had this pizza been dropped from a plane onto enemy forces, they would have died of dehydration within days. (Yes, like pizza dough, this is a war plan that requires patience and could fail if rainfall is imminent.)
 
Honey came through the kitchen, saw the pizza, and took a bite.
 
“Oh. Yeah. No. I can’t eat that.”
 
She left the building.
 
 
In hindsight, I should have seen this salt monster chasing my ass.
 
Formulated with the best of intentions, it was a little pizza gone epically wrong.
 
It blew up in my face—but only metaphorically.
 
And there was still a pizza to be dispensed with, and I hate dispensing with anything even resembling good food.
 
 
Lately, I’ve been reading new things about Pizza Mastunicola.
 
If you’ve not heard of it, Mastunicola is considered the earliest form of pizza as we know it.
 
A description of this pizza dates back to the mid-1600s in a document from the AVPN archives in Naples.
 
As we all know, Naples and the AVPN (that’s the “True Neapolitan Pizza Association”) are champions at owning the idea of pizza.
 
But new regional intel has surfaced.
 
I've recently been digging into Pizza Bianca (literally, “white pizza”) and seen discussion of Pizza Mastunicola being a Roman Pizza Bianca topped with lard, anchovies and herbs.
 
Is this true, or is it Rome trying to get Naples’ goat?
 
I have no idea. But it gave me a direction.
 
 
I grabbed my chef’s knife.
 
Instead of plunging it into my chest, I used it to scrape the toppings off the Pizza Mistake-a-cola.
 
I dotted the now-untopped crust with bits of lard (yes, there is lard in my pantry—and not the fancy stuff).
 
I plopped a few Wild Planet white anchovies on top. (Also in my pantry is a metaphorical metric ton of anchovies. And yes, that link is an affiliate link to Amazon. If you care.)
 
Dropping the remaining pizza back into the pan (this was a Lazy Way pan pizza, and traditional Roman-style Pizza Bianca is also from a pan), I slid it back into the oven for a couple of minutes.
 
I pulled it out, flung a few fresh basil leaves, and took a bite.

ABOVE: Detail shot of the Pizza Bianca Mastunicola. The anchovies in question are broken pieces of Wild Planet brand wild white anchovies. They're a larger anchovy with a delicate flavor, and a texture more like tinned tuna than tinned anchovy. 
 
 
The 40 angels painted upon the ceiling of the Sistine chapel began to sing in my general direction.
 
What began as the little pizza that couldn’t was now can-do glorious.
 
Fatty herby salty umami magic.
 
I looked at the little glass bowl on the counter, which held a healthy glob of marinara, garlic and Romano.
 
I thanked it for its service.
 
Then I gave it a burial at sea via the garbage disposal.
 
 
I carried a slice of the replacement pizza to Honey at her desk where she’s busy banging out the next great American novel.
 
She took a bite. The conversation went like this:
 
“Heyyy!”
 
“Right?”
 
She want back about her business while munching Mastunicola.
 
I went to decontaminate the kitchen.
 
Oh, wait. There were no fissile materials involved. No radiation suit required. No meltdown. Just a bad result born of intentions that were good—if perhaps a bit too clever.
 
Pizza contamination by cleverness has no lingering effects. Just wipe it out of your mind.
 
 
The moral of the story…
 
If you’re overthinking it (and you can tell when you’re doing that, you really can) you’re probably on the wrong track.
 
That pizza is gonna bomb.
 
And the corollary moral: You can almost always rescue and redirect a mistaken pizza.
 
Remember, pizza is bread with something on it.
 
Bread is resilient and often survives a topping removal exercise.
 
 
Here’s your Take A Chance Recipe of the Week: Pizza Mastunicola.
 
Make a white pizza with whatever dough you have handy.
 
Stretch the dough or pan it, and brush it with olive oil.
 
Bake it until almost done.
 
Remove the pizza from the oven and dot it with lard. (No lard? Bacon fat will suffice.)
 
Plop down a few anchovies.
 
Return the pizza to the oven for a minute or two.
 
Once the anchovies have begun to melt into the crust, remove the pizza.
 
Add some fresh herbs. Sprinkle a touch of salt around the places not occupied by anchovy.
 
Consume and delight.
 
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