The one in which we manage to mash up Greek pizza, The Odyssey, pineapple, politics and religion, the algorithms and Peter Pan.

As Dorothy Parker used to say whenever her doorbell rang, “What fresh hell can this be?”
 
Of course, she never had pizza delivery.

The fresh hell here is a pile o' pizzas my friends never saw coming.

Adjusting expectations is important. It’s part of adapting and surviving for a life filled with better flavors.
 
Last night, I made pizza for friends who were expecting my usual--a kind of NeoNeapolitan style that might be referred to as New York 2.0. It's arguably a pretty traditional style of pizza.
 
What they got last night was not that. 

On the first pizza I served, you could sense the hesitation and confusion.
 
The first of the pizzas on the table did not look like my usual fare and were unfamiliar.
 
I explained in my best Alec Guinness that these pizzas were not the pizzas that they were looking for.

ABOVE: The style of pizza they were expecting--kind of a standard, New York looking thing.

ABOVE: The undercarriage of the pizza they thought they were going to get--smooth, crisp, some dots of char...


What they were getting was a new style of pizza from my new book, which is inspired by a regional style from New England. 
 
Instead of a pizza stretched in flour on the counter and baked on a steel, this pizza was formed and baked in a pan.
 
By the fourth pizza, the hesitation and confusion had evaporated. Thrills and excitement were filling the room.
 
Everyone had graduated to explaining their favorite part of the pizza, whether it was the abundant olive oil, the crunch of the crust, the guilty pleasure of the excessive toppings, or the simple joy of a pizza surprise that made them happy and wanting more.

ABOVE: The style of pizza they didn't expect--a thicker crust, heavier toppings, lots of crunch...

ABOVE: The undercarriage of the Lazy Way pizza that they were surprised by, with its crunchy bottom and olive-oil forward flavor.


One of these friends is originally from an exotic land called the North Shore of Boston.
 
I told her that this pie was based on a common regional style called New England Greek pizza.
 
She’d never heard of it. (Neither had her husband who is from Maine—and last week I was in Maine, driving past a pizza joint proudly proclaiming “Greek pizza and Greek Salads!”)
 
I asked her if she’d ever heard of Beach Pizza.
 
She said no.
 
I told her it’s a kind of “micro style” found on Boston's North Shore—where she’s from.
 
She said, “Nope. Never heard of that either. But I remember having pizza at this place called Cristy’s. It was square. Thin crust. Crispy. It was weird but it was pretty good and we ate it and we moved on.”
 
I said “Right, that’s beach pizza. But who cares what it’s called? Did you like it? Did it taste good? Would you eat it again? Does it even matter? Probably not. You came, you ate, you had fun and you left. You didn’t have a label for the pizza and so what?”
 
She said, “Yeah!”

And took another bite of pizza. 
 
 
We don’t know names for so many things.
 
We have things we’re used to, and things that don’t quite fit.
 
And most of the time we just deal with it and move on.
 
What it’s called matters only when you’re trying to either find it again, or else get a recipe to make it yourself.
 
I had one friend ask me if I’d ever eaten the pizza at a particular joint in our home town.
 
I’d never even heard of the place, but I knew exactly the part of town he was talking about—and the flavor profile he described.
 
It was an oregano-forward, olive oily pizza with a crunchy crust.
 
I told him it was probably a New England-style Greek pizza, a recipe I’d been playing around with.
 
He’d never heard of New England-style Greek pizza.
 
 
But he was excited by the potential of a Proustian moment—an adulthood flavor rush back to a time with a long lost Main Street pizzeria of his Southern Connecticut childhood.
 
What’s interesting is I’ve searched the pizzawebs for conversations about this style of pizza.
 
There’s a lot of contempt.
 
“The pizza is awful!”
 
“They shouldn’t even try making it!”
 
“They should just stick to what they do well, which is subs!”

(Ah, the joys of Reddit.)
 
I have no idea if this is a uniquely American trait to piss on things that deviate from the norms in one’s own small life. I just know that it’s widely celebrated on the web and it’s wearying.
 
And that’s just pizza, not politics. Or religion.
 
When did our culture abandon the taboo of discussing the twin nuclear weapons of social intercourse? It’s turned our world into a minefield of incivility (if I may mix my explosive metaphors).
 
 
Warning: Digression ahead—and I dare me to bring it back home. Let’s see what happens.
 
As you may know, the social media sport of the moment is about bashing Cristopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and its detractors.
 
We’ve been presented an ambitious, extravagant, record-breaking Hollywood film that’s thrilling moviegoers around the globe while igniting a firestorm of uniformed commentary by armchair classicists who anointed themselves experts just yesterday.
 
The new favorite whipping target is professor Emily Wilson, an Oxford- and Yale-educated scholar born of scholars. She has made whip-smart if occasionally unkind comments about Nolan’s screenplay. (Like he cares. He has a net worth of a quarter-billion dollars.)
 
Social media users who’ve read nothing but the cherry picked inflammatory sentence fragments of Ms. Wilson’s essays have profound if uninformed opinions on one of the most scholarly individuals of our time.

Such folks are capable of elevating their opinions about a centuries old epic poem to the same high level of their philosophical assessments of the other cultural crime known as pineapple upon pizza (which, often, they’ve never tasted because they already “know”).
 
 
Oh, the humanity!
 
It would be helpful if folks could focus their ire on something that matters—and be thoughtful about it.
 
For example, take The Algorithms.
 
The Algorithms are the invisible, epic poetry beasts of our time, the one-eyed creatures that lack depth of field and perspective and exist for no other reason than to feed us ire and venom along with a side of fries from whatever sponsor is paying the freight to inflame our passions.
 
 
I long ago cleansed my social feed from inflammatory political nonsense.
 
I’ve also largely squelched the pineapple-on-pizza hate and its ilk.
 
Mostly, my feed is now smart friends saying smart things and enjoying life, laced with periodic satire about the madness of our times. And pizza positivity, of course. 
 
I know people who can’t accomplish this.
 
They don’t understand the simple tools of their social feeds, much less that there are complex mathematical equations are crawling out from beneath the digits, enticing them into tilting at imaginary windmills that are so very clearly not giants yet get their dopamine all pumped in a rush over pointless gymnastics related to everything from the president to pineapple, ultimately accomplishing nothing beyond optimizing advertising cash flow for the wizard pulling the levers inside the curtained booth of Facebook et al.
 
Phew! I didn’t know I had such a complex sentence in me this morning.
 
And who knew there was a Venn diagram with a convincing overlap in the stew that includes politics, culture, pizza and pineapple?
 
 
Anyway, this all started with pizza and ends with pizza. Apologies to Bill Shakes for what’s about to follow…
 
What’s in a name? That which we call a slice
By any other word would taste as savory.
 
(By the way, speaking of Shakespeare, Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of The Odyssey included transposing it from ancient Greek dactylic hexameter into modern English iambic pentameter. Where are the torches and pitchforks for that criminal act of revisionist heresy? It’s on a level with vegan pepperoni!)
 

Anyway.
 
If I say to you “New England Greek-style pizza,” it probably means nothing—just as it meant nothing to my friend who’d never heard of it despite growing up in its native land and who was also ignorant to the existence of a seaside pizza style she’d tasted so close to her home town.
 
But she knows what’s important: that it all tastes good.
 
She doesn’t bother to define anything beyond compliance with what is known as Reinhart’s Flavor Rule, namely: "Flavor rules."
 
 
Adjusting expectations is vital to a healthy, happy existence.
 
As soon as my friends were confronted with a strange pizza from a strange land, they adjusted their expectations and adapted to what was in front of them. It was a brilliant evening. 

To borrow from my new best friend in research, Googly Eye, “Flexible adaptation lowers stress, builds personal resilience, improves professional relationships, and helps you respond constructively to unexpected changes instead of fighting reality.”
 
How many people do you witness fighting the reality of pineapple upon pizza? Haven’t we gotten beyond that yet? It’s a 60-year old trope that matters not at all. It’s not even funny until you find a way to float it in the reflecting pool. (Yeah, that’s a non-sequitur. But I enjoyed it.)
 
Similarly, declarations that Greek pizzerias in New England “should not be making pizza at all!” is so sad a position that it’s like being the lone guy, that one at the back of a theater full of excited children watching Peter Pan, and yelling, “He’s not flying! He’s on a wire!”

Way to grow up into a warrior for truth!
 
There’s also no Santa Claus nor Tooth Fairy, yet like Greek pizza and The Odyssey in IMAX, they still make people happy despite the dismissives, the killjoys, the crybabies and bellyachers.
 

If you’ve read this far, I admire your fortitude.

You are an epic human being with the staying power of Odysseus.

Allow me to bake you a Greek pizza.
 
Next week, another hare-brained recipe to make you happy! Dopamine will be involved. Maybe even more than you expect.
 
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The five-star rated The Lazy Way to Pizza e-book edition is now on sale at Amazon. As it says in the book description there:

The only special tool: A pan. The only special ingredient: Patience. (Just a pinch.) The only oven: the one already in your kitchen.

ABOVE: The book and the genuine Lloyd Pans that were onsite that night...

​Your friends and family won't believe you made this pizza yourself--especially after that incident with the burnt water topped with boiled toast. This is for real: one of the best tasting pizzas you've ever put into your mouth. The cheese, the tomato, the olive oil, the crunch--it's so good, you might never order delivery pizza again. You might even call this pizza "artisanal."

"This pizza made as instructed is one of the best pizzas l've had...an artisan-level experience while remaining one of the easiest pizzas to execute."
--Kevin Godbee, Chef and creator of Pizza Is My Life
(from the foreword to the book)

For more info, click here.