Pizza p. 191

Earlier this week, I was watching the movie Charlie St. Cloud while drinking heavily, an activity that anyone who has seen the movie knows is a pre-requisite. As ludicrous as the film was, there was this one scene that cracked me up:

Zac Efron is playing catch with his dead brother, and tells him he's going to cook dinner for this girl he met. The brother says, "You should make her pizza." Zac says no. Then the brother says, "Why not? Pizza is delicious."

Pizza IS delicious. But something about the way the kid delivered the line made me laugh. I think it's because in this day and age, the word "delicious" is actually kind of archaic. Meaning, you're a lot more likely to hear someone say, "pizza is really good!" or "pizza is amazing!" or some other nondescript adjective. When someone says that something is "delicious," it's serious business. (Similarly, the only funny line in the stinker Observe and Report is when Aziz Ansari says, "Why would I [blow up the Chick-Fil-A]? Chick-Fil-A is fucking delicious!")

So yeah, Zac Efron's dead brother is totally right. Pizza is delicious. That's why I've had a hankering for pizza all day.

Luckily, it's pretty hard to screw up pizza, as long as you have two things: good dough and good sauce. You could probably make an edible pizza with a slab of Boboli and some canned pizza sauce, but it would probably taste like cardboard. Plus if you make your own pizza from scratch, you can lie to yourself and pretend it's healthy.

I had a strong craving for a good, hearty, pretentious pizza, so I knew exactly what I wanted for toppings-- prosciutto, figs, goat cheese, and arugula. So naturally, I headed to Trader Joe's, the one stop shop for all my liberal, NPR-pledging, middle-class, non-essential food needs. Not too surprisingly, they had everything I wanted. (They did not have yeast, although they did have about ten different kinds of organic sugar extracts.)

Good pizza dough is luckily, pretty easy to make. I say it's "easy" to make, because I literally just throw all the ingredients into my bread maker. It's probably also fairly easy to make if you have a stand-mixer with a dough hook. If you're going to make dough by hand, it's a lot more involved, although pizza dough uses mercifully few ingredients (pg. 607).

The most important ingredient (aside from the flour) is the yeast. There's a dozen ways to leaven dough and manipulate its texture, but pizza dough relies on our good friend yeast, which releases carbon dioxide into the dough once the culture is active. You can buy yeast in handy tearable packages, but I usually just buy a big jar of Fleischmann's dry yeast, which I stow in the pantry and scoop when I need it. After having taught microbiology lab for a few quarters, I can safely say with much disgust that yeast loves to grow. Once it's in the right conditions, it'll happily propagate, until you're begging it to stop.

Yeast is happiest just below body temperature (95F, or for you Canadians, 35C), so once there, it'll multiply away, eating up the sugars in your flour and belching out the carbon dioxide that makes your dough rise. But, if you're like me and you like to start with dry yeast, you need to reactivate the cultures by warming them up in water (~105-110F). You can either use warm tap water, or zap some water in the microwave for about 30 seconds, or you can be lazy like me... and just throw everything in the bread maker and hit START. My life drastically improved the second I bought my bread maker.

Mostly what's nice about having a bread maker is that you don't have to manually knead the bread and keep an eye on it while it's rising. The upside of doing it by hand is you can really control how chewy you want your crust. The more you knead, the tighter and better organized the gluten network in your dough so you'll get a nice chewy texture to go with your toppings.

But onto the sauce. It's really not that difficult to make a good, flavorful sauce, but it makes all the difference in the world. Here's the secret: celery, carrots, and onions. If it's good enough for a stew, it's good enough for a sauce. If it smells amazing enough to eat straight from the pot, you can damn right bet it's good enough for a pizza.

There's a recipe on page 562, simply titled, "Italian Tomato Sauce," but like I said, you can start it the same way you'd start a stew. Dice up some celery, carrots, onions, and parsley, and get them nice and soft with a drizzle of olive oil on medium heat. Then just ask yourself this, "What do I want my tomato sauce to taste like?" Want some basil? Throw it in. Want some thyme? Throw it in. Want some garlic? Throw it in. If you want it, just throw it in. Then all you need to do is add the tomatos. The Joy of Cooking recommends 1 3/4 pounds of fresh tomatoes (this recipe makes enough sauce for two pizzas), or the substitute for us city livin' folks-- a 28-oz can of whole tomatoes. Let the tomatoes simmer, mash 'em up with a spoon, and you are solid. Season to taste.


So now there you have it. You have a delicious pizza dough, and you have a delicious pizza sauce. Now you can add whatever you want on top. Tip: if you're going to put something like arugula on top, save it until after you pull the pie out of the oven. Otherwise you'll be stuck with some nasty pile of wilted crap that no one will want to eat.

Believe it or not, there's still a lot more I want to discuss regarding pizza, namely the preparation of the dough prior to baking, but this post is getting seriously long in the tooth. Luckily, I made enough dough and sauce for two servings, so the next time I make pizza, I'll chatter a bit about the magic of olive oil, and how it prevents your dough from turning into a big soggy mess.