Round, Flat, Soaked in Cheese: Meditations on Pizza
Monday, May 28, 2007 at 09:17PM Do me a favor and say the word "pizza" to yourself five or six times. Use the standard American English pronunciation, "pEEt-sa." I'll let volume, diction, and emphasis occur as they seem most natural to you, but for maximum realism I would encourage you to imagine that you're saying the word "pizza" to yourself in lieu of hearing me say it. Here, I'll help; we'll all do it together. Ready?
Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza.
By now, you are, as my psychologist girlfriend would say, "primed." The neurological pathways governing "pizza" have been activated; in your mind's eye you should be seeing a slowly rotating disc of flat bread covered in your favorite toppings. I'll need you in this special mental place for the rest of the article. If you aren't there yet, please keep saying "pizza" to yourself until it stops making sense. If, by then, you aren't about ready to out-salivate a basset hound for sheer desire to eat a pizza, then this article is not for you.
(I shall lead by example: I have just finished eating almost my weight in fresh pizza. Writing even this much of an article about pizza is almost more than I can take without having another slice.)
I couldn't guess my age when I had my first slice of pizza. In the US it's ubiquitous, night-inescapable. I can't count the number of times during my 16 year tenure in the American educational system that I was fed free pizza as a form of compensation, entertainment, or treat. Pizza is the most communal food we American's have, and the only instance I can think of where it is polite to acquire a slice of dinner from the same whole pie as everyone else will dine from, with only your hands. You needn't even use silverware to consume it; dishes are likewise optional. As though it needed to be even more perfect, most of the finer pizza-dispensing establishments will carry the pizza from the oven directly to wherever it is you plan to eat the thing! A group of bipeds armed with little more than forty dollars (plus tax and tip) and a cell phone can have a full meal delivered without any requisite form of trapping, frippery, or social pressure.
What's more, pizza is essentially nourishing. Though the exact nutritional profile varies widely, pizza is most typically a disc of bread (read: carbohydrate) smeared with a fruit paste (more carbohydrates, trace amounts of oregano) and covered in molten cheese (as glorious a fat as man ever dreamed up). Toss in any one of your four favorite grease-enriched meats (sausage, pepperoni, bacon, ham) for protein and bell peppers or olives for color and voilà!, a meal for anybody who isn't on Atkins. (Vegetarians can skip the "meat" part.)
In more specific terms, pizza is a particular bread covered in a base (usually tomato sauce, somtimes not), some "toppings," and a mozzarella-like cheese (true mozzarella being nothing like the reduced-moisture part-skim cheese-product we tend to eat in this country). It can be vegetarian or not, vegan or not, even gluten-free or not, depending on the choices made while dressing the thing. Sometimes, however, this does not go so well.
Pizza has three great failings and the first is the lack of creativity evident in its toppings. Plain cheese, pepperoni, sausage and olive, mushroom: no matter what name they're given by a particularly marketing-concious parlor, the basic message is the same. Toppings are such a trope that one can reverse-define an object as pizza simply by covering it in "pizza toppings," thus the bagel pizza, English muffin pizza, pizza sandwich, pasta alla pizza, and (most horrifying of all) pizza soup and salad.
This might be okay if it weren't for pizza's second great failing: quality. Pizza can be a truly thrifty food; as is so often the case in this country, economy is capitalized over all other traits, pushing the envelope as hard as possible to maximize profits. The result, as far as pizza is concerned, is still edible. Miraculously, pizza can survive degradation better than most any other food I know (would you eat a $1.00 turkey sandwich? How about a competitively priced slice?). That said, pizza has a reputation for grease and a sort of leaden stomach-feel that isn't undeserved. Day-old pizza below a certain price-point is folly to ingest, being edible only when screaming hot. The cheese congeals into something unholy, toppings sit in little frozen lakes of grease, and the crust passes far beyond the pale, attaining a consistency akin to moist cardboard.
Crust, by the way, is the third great failing of pizza. Here in the United States of Nonchalant About Bread, pizza crust usually manifests and a nigh-flavorless discuss which would not, for any reason, ever be eaten without toppings. Pizza exists to hold up pepperoni, not to be accented by it -- a state partially responsible for the "pizza soup" debacle. What's more, in a sadistic turn of irony, the crust is the locus for almost all the creativity in the pizza industry. What do we get? The hydrocephalic spawn of a pizza and a calzone: pizza with crust full of cheese; pizza with second crust on top, itself covered in toppings; pizza full of pizza, topped with lasagna. The thought is almost too horrific to contemplate.
In my own experience, good crust is the pyramid of turtles for my pizza. (Remember: it's turtles all the way down.) Good crust is deceptively simple: bread, water, yeast, and salt, the four basic components of all bread, plus oil to make it supple. A good gluten must be built up to provide enough structure for the bread to rise and to create a pleasing chewiness; thus, I favor kneading by hand over food-processing. As anyone who has ever eaten pizza while traveling will know crusts vary wildly by region, so when baking at home it's important to decide what kind of crust one is trying to make. I prefer an Italianate crust with a thin-yet-chewy body and a well puffed golden torus to contain the toppings.
My criterion for good crust is simple: it must be so delicious that you would willingly eat it solo. To test this, simply form a lump of your dough-du-soir into a small wheel about half the diameter and several times the thickness of a pizza-purposed batch. Leave it entirely naked, or adorn it only simply (say, with rosemary, olive oil, and gourmet salt). Bake as normal (I like 15ish minutes at 515ish degrees); serve is as fast as you can without injuring your diners. You'll know you've found the right recipe when the bread vanishes in a near-orgiastic display of indulgence. For the record, my favorite crust is in the Gourmet Cookbook (edited by Ruth Reichl). Though difficult to knead due to high water content, it is exemplary in flavor, texture, and resilience to toppings.
With a good crust, toppings are forgiving. I encourage individuality and shameless joy in topping selection. Remember: you can have anything you want on your pizza, so long as you make sure it will all cook properly. Preparation is key; you can't just haphazardly dump ingredients on a disc of dough and hope for the best (unless you're really good.) That said, some guidelines:
1. Most vegetables roast beautifully on top of a pizza. Garlic mellows, onions turn golden and soft, and cherry tomatoes, split in half and drizzled with a little olive oil, become a source of near-euphoria. Cruciferous vegetables and greens should be softened before adorning a pizza unless "salad" is the desired topping-effect.
2. Some toppings, most notably potato, can be reliably placed raw on a pizza provided they've been sliced thinly (remember: a potato cooks as fast as you cut it). Also: any vegetable you want particularly roasty should be drizzled in oil, which hastens heat transfer (to promote cooking and crisping) while retarding blackening.
3. Consider your placement relative to the cheese. I pan-crisp my meats prior to placing them on a pizza if I'm going to put them beneath the blanket-o-cow/goat/sheep/buffalo. Aromatics like basil and rosemary are a different case; if placed atop the cheese, they frequently scorch and loose their more desirable properties.
4. Raw meats, unless sliced exceedingly thin, should be pre-cooked.
5. If it's fluid, it's pizza sauce. Hell, if it can be spread on relatively delicate dough, it's pizza sauce. Sauce exists on mainstream pizzas to stop you from tasting the crust and the cheese; on really good pizza, sauce is just another complimentary topping, adding to the gooey appeal of pizza as a food. Consider the following partial list of things I've sauced a pizza with: straight tomato paste, pasta sauces of numerous kinds, barbeque sauce, olive oil, molé, vegetables cooked in cream sauce, a drizzle of whiskey, thai peanut sauce, yet more cheese (oh yes I did!), and nothing at all (who says you have to sauce?), I find oily things and viscous fluids work best (the whiskey made the dough too soggy), but anything is game.
If you love yourself, buy good cheese and exercise more. Preface taken care of, I'll let you, my beloved reader, in on a secret: I choose my cheese last. For most of American pizza, cheese is assumed to be plentiful and mozzerella. I say: fight the paradigm. Get your crust going, choose toppings and a complimentary sauce, and then pick a cheese. Don't ignore it as an ingredient, though: the right cheese often makes or breaks a given combination. My roasted-tomato-garlic-kalamata pizza is nothing without the dollops of sweet Italian gorgonzola. Cheese is your friend for life, but not all cheeses respond equally to heat -- not nescessarily bad as long as it's planned for. Be cautious when combining cheeses (unless you like dragging a paper towel across each slice before eating, in which case, why aren't you ordering delivery pizza?!) -- some ideas, like sharp cheddar and bleu cheese, are rather like communism: fantastic until the grease fire gets going in your oven (remember, as with communist uprisings, do not splash a grease fire with wate: pour salt on whatever is actively flaming). When in doubt, test your combos on an english muffin tucked safely in a pan with tall sides. Stick it in the oven on broil, let things melt, see how you did.
Assembling your pizza is in your hands. So, some advice: As cool as it looks when the pros do it, tossing a pizza is impractical for most doughs (they'll either rip or refuse to stretch). If you can't stand to make it yourself, buy fresh dough from whoever will sell it to you -- I reccomend Great Harvest or Whole Foods. Pizza stones really are proof that somebody Up There loves us -- buy one, preheat it in the oven on the lowest rack for at least one hour before use, and never put anything on it that could possibly soak in (including oil and soap). I like to form my pizza on a baker's peel dusted liberally with cornmeal. After you've shaped the dough and added whatever sauce you're using, pick up the peel and shake it genly back and forth (on a horizonal plane) to loosen the dough before it becomes laden with joy (I mean, toppings). Once the pizza is assembled, you can slide it straight on to your waiting pizza stone with a smooth motion and watch it bake. (You'll also see the cornmeal toast, burn, and sometimes combust; this is O.K. All part of the show. Open a window.) Cut your pizza with a high-quality pizza cutter or the biggest French chef's knife you have on hand. Serve promptly, with beer and napkins.
Remember: the reward of the just is truly spectacular pizza. Love your pizza and it will love you.
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Reader Comments (13)
For the rest of you out there: Kate R is right, you should grill a pizza. I usually make my dough twice as thick as I would for oven cookin'. Resist the urge to oil it, it will only end in pain. I've also found that lower heats are preferable for grill pizza -- unless Cajun Style is your M. O. Slap your dough on the grill, flip it as it starts to crisp, and cover the other side in toppings. If you need to put in on a plate to get it properly adorned, fine, but dont get the raw side stuck to anything. I find that having your ingredients more cooked than for oven pizza is often advisable. Grill with the lid on. For Extra Double Plus Delicious, chuck a little hickory into the coals and lightly smoke your pizza.
Using these techniques one -can- create a calzone, but it is not easy and should definitely be done with indirect heat and a closed lid.
Thanks, Kate, for pointing that out to me!
I suppose mine is the Church of St. Made-Fresh-and-Tasty, and I am ready (and waiting!) to convert the dessert pizza you describe. It sounds... so good. I want one, and it's not even 8AM. My only stricture would be using pizza dough. (For me, the one truly immutable part of real pizza. I'm not saying bagel/English muffin/tortilla pizzas don't have their place, but are they truly pizza?)
As a final comment, we're up to two major omissions from this post. If a third one shows up I'll go ahead and edit the dang thing...
Also: mmmm.
If only I had any notion what "quarry tile" is, or where to get it.Sadly, Google yeilded little of use, "http://www.quarrytile.com" is almost as hard to use as it is ugly, and Wikipedia responds to "quarry tile" search querries with an entry on Boston City Hall. Dang.
Bether brings up an excellent point, however: flat ceramic discs of almost any description make excellent pizza stones. For that matter, stone makes a pretty good pizza stone too, if you can get it in a generally flat, oven-compatable shape. Perhaps you're cooler than I am and have a ready source of quarry tile; I reccomend you make use of your connections.
Apt post, sir, as I have just made my first four pizzas from scratch and hoo boy were they delicious.
Pizza stones are naturally porous. Any oil you introduce will sink in to the stone (FAR in to the stone), where it will react with nothing but the heat of the stone. The most likely side effect of an oiled pizza stone? Combustion. (Ask me how I know.) It turns the stone black and somewhat glass-y (neither quality at all desirable) and provides -no benefit at all-. To aid the crust in not sticking, dust the baker's peel with corn meal.
Pizza stones are also, typically, made of stone (duh). The whole point of the stone is to better channel heat in to the pizza crust. Ovens, y'see, are boxes of heat. Open the box and... the heat escapes. Pre-heating exists to bring the -walls, floor, and sides- of the oven up to temperature; all the hot air flies the coop when you open the door.
Thus: introducing a cold pizza stone, pre-equipped with pizza, into an oven does several highly undesirable things. 1: The stone has very high thermal inertia. You're basically insulating the crust itself from baking through the bottom -- all heat must make it in the top. 2: The oven will have to go kinda nuts trying to get itsel back up to temperature with a big, cold lump of stone sitting in it. 3: Put a cold enough stone in a hot enough oven and it can crack due to heat differential.
I encourage you to place the stone in the oven at the same time you begin preheating. Let the stone rest, in the over, at temperature, for one hour before baking. Use a bakers peel ($20 at my local QFC) to get the pizza in and out. Your crust will thank you for it.
FWIW, despite the preheating advice, I can say (as only a n00b would) that it worked fine the times I have put it in cold, including a delightfully crunchy crust.
Did you mean to insert one more or one fewer negative there, or did I misunderstand?