Blogging is hard guys. Believe it or not, I don’t always have brilliant insights or hilarious anecdotes to accompany my middling kitchen efforts. Sometimes there are no disasters, epiphanies, or cutesy-poo pet stories to liven up my endless pictures of flour and canned tomatoes. Sometimes I just cook something, and then eat it, and sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not, and there’s really nothing interesting to say about it. This is one of those unfortunate times.
I’m going to follow Jeffrey Steingarten’s recipe, given at the end of his essay “Perfection Pizza”, which is full of disasters, epiphanies, and all things I did not experience. If you can get your hands on either of his books, The Man Who Ate Everything or It Must Have Been Something I Ate, I highly recommend them – he’s one of my favorite food writers, and I will be quoting him constantly today to make up for my lack of interesting-ness. Most of his essay concerns attempts to get his oven to heat higher than 550, to better replicate authentic pizza ovens. See below:
“I folded together many layers of wet paper towels, put them in the freezer until they had frozen solid, draped them over the temperature sensor with the oven set to high, shovelled in an unbaked pizza, and stood back.
The results were brilliant, especially in concept. My oven, believing incorrectly that its temperature was near the freezing point, went full blast until thick waves of smoke billowed from every crack, vent and pore, filling the house with the palpable signs of scientific progress. Yes, the experiment had to be cut short, but it had lasted longer than the Wright brothers’ first flight. Inside the oven was a blackened disc of dough pocked with puddles of flaming cheese.
I had succeeded beyond all expectations.”
He also attempts to short-circuit his oven’s self-cleaning cycle and fires up something like 60 pounds of charcoal in a kettle grill and melts all his grilling accessories. I apologize to my readers for not gambling the health and well being of myself, husband, and pets by tinkering with electricity, conflagrations, or upsetting the local fire department. This might be a funnier post if I had, but a recent episode concerning the batteries in our smoke detectors (eight! We have eight! We are so safe!) upset my dog to the point where she huddled, shaking, in my lap while my husband jabbed at the ceiling with a broom handle. She is too large for lap-sitting.
Moving on. I’ve been cleaning my house all weekend. My in-laws are coming in for the Fourth of July weekend, and I’m on a continuing (9 years!) quest to pretend to them that I’m a functional adult, and not a garbage person. Truthfully, I am a garbage person, but when company’s a-comin’ I can put on a good show. As a result, I have an unprecedented amount of clean and clear counter space. It’s begging me to mess it up. I will oblige. I’ve been avoiding Neapolitan pizza for awhile because a) it doesn’t have any delicious meat on it and b) it’s such a simple dish that the beauty is in its purity – no fancy sauces, no creative toppings – just good bread, sauce and cheese. Let’s go!
Mr. S’s recipe makes four pizzas, which I have no need for, so I’m halving his dough. Here we have:
1 lb. flour (half bread flour and half unbleached all-purpose)
¾ tsp. active dry yeast
½ tblsp. salt
1 ½ cups cold water
The water is in a Mason jar because of Pinterest, that massive and all consuming time-suck. If I’ve learned nothing else, it taught me that you have to put shit into Mason jars or get the hell off the internet. Also my Oxo clear plastic measuring cups are getting a little grody-looking.
Mix dry ingredients together in a mixer bowl. Add the water and stir “vigorously” with a wooden spoon. I do. I like using a wooden spoon. The ingredients should “come together into a shaggy dough”. I think this looks shaggy:
Mix on low speed for one minute, then high speed for 3 to 4 minutes. Okay. Pour the dough onto a well-floured surface. “It will form an irregular blob.“ Why yes. Yes it does.
This is the wettest, stickiest dough I’ve ever tried to work with. There is no surface that could be well-floured enough to handle this dough. It sticks to everything. This is quite possibly ooblek. I add more flour. Then I add more flour again. Then I just keep the open jar of flour handy and keep dumping handfuls onto my blob. Eventually I’m able to fold it up in thirds and let it rest for ten minutes. Divide the dough into two equal pieces using a dough scraper. Mr. S says each will weigh about 14.5 ounces. One clocks in at 13.75 and the other at 14.75. I’m awesome at dividing dough. (The dough scraper is an invaluable tool for the baker, the pizza maker, and the lazy cleaner.)
Each piece gets shaped into as smooth a ball as I can manage, given that it grows ever stickier with each passing moment. One ball gets set onto a well-oiled plate, which I do not have at the ready, and the other goes into a clear plastic quart-sized container. Per Mr. S’s advice, I mark the side of the container to gauge dough risification. I mark it with a poorly drawn mustache because – Pinterest. This is actually a pretty great idea, which Mr. S calls “proprietary and surely patentable”. Let the dough rise until it’s roughly doubled (this takes about two hours), and look – his method works! Genius!
Then transfer to the refrigerator for a minimum of one and a maximum of twenty four hours. I let it go for six, because I want to eat it tonight, and Mr. Dishes gets cranky when dinner isn’t served until 11:00 a.m. the following day.
Part two will deal with the sauce and the actual baking/consumption of this pizza. This post is already too long (as per my usual), and I’m not getting any funnier or more interesting as I continue to write. I’m mostly just putting words on the screen because I’ve been procrastinating with this post hoping I would find something entertaining to say about it. Just a-tappin’ away at the keyboard hoping something humorous lands on the page.
It doesn’t. (sad face)
illdothedisheslater 