Culinarion:
Pizza Maison
3 June 2015
Regular readers will understand that I am about to discuss making pizza, for why else would I bring it up? They might well wonder, though, why I am making pizza at all, in a city famous for “Original Ray’s” and for prompt deliveries. After all, pizza is a convenience food, something to fall back when you’re too tired or distracted to have much of an appetite for real food. And really good pizza is said to require either a commercial pizza oven or a rather fussy cluster of substitutes (stones that take forever to heat; sprays of water at the last minute). Plus, pizza crust is a “leavened flatbread,” as The Joy of Cooking puts it. You go to the trouble to make a yeast dough, and wait for it to rise once. That takes over an hour. Where is the convenience here?
I am not going to talk about making pizza dough in advance and freezing it. I haven’t got that far yet. Let’s just say that, even without the advance work, it’s no big deal. Making a yeast dough requires little more than forethought. And you can store what you don’t use in the refrigerator — although you must wrap it very tightly, or it will do what some leftover dough did over the weekend, and puncture the plastic wrap at a weak point, expanding into the open air, drying out, and becoming useless. Not altogether useless: I lost only about a third of the leftover dough. This turned out to be a good thing, because it forced me to roll out a thinner crust, which was no trouble at all.
Back to “why.”
For decades, I kid you not, we ordered our pizzas from Ottomanelli’s, a butcher shop with at least one pizza outpost in Yorkville. It took thirty years — thirty years! — for us to reach the point beyond which we could not think of ordering another. It happened overnight. What had been a perfectly satisfactory pizza suddenly became impossibly heavy and dull. So we tried another place, Two Boots, an assertively non-traditional outfit. Their sauce was just not for us. Even in its mild version, it was too spicy. I don’t mind a pizza that’s herby, but I don’t associate Italian food of any kind with “hot.” Quite the contrary.
We thought of asking around. We tried a few normal places. But normal pizza sauce has become terribly sugary. It is both dinner and dessert in one dish. Comfort food is one thing. Baby food is something else again.
There’s a place down in the East Village that makes terrific pizza — Li’l Frankie’s. I know, because Megan, my daughter, used to order it all the time when she lived on Avenue C. Then Megan moved to San Francisco. Her response to the fact that Li’l Frankie’s does not make deliveries to Outer Sunset was to take up making her own. I have watched her do this, without stress and with great results, every time that we’ve visited. Since Li’l Frankie’s doesn’t deliver to Yorkville, either, I thought I’d follow Megan’s lead.
Also, I have needed to enlarge the repertoire of short-order dishes that can be put together (with or without the kind of advance preparation that can be done hours ahead of time) at the last minute, when Kathleen finally does call from a taxi to say that she is on her way home, without my feeling that I’ve been on call for three hours. Even the simplest meal of meat-and-two-veg demands concentration and coordination if it’s to come out fresh. At a certain point in the evening (generally by eight-thirty), I want to have put the day’s concentration behind me. One-dish menus are the easiest solution.
So, that is why I’ve started making pizza.
It turns out that pizza is no less convenient to make than it is to eat.
This is not to say that it’s like making a sandwich. You can’t create a pizza in five minutes without any preparation at all. But if you’ve got dough that’s ready to use, and a reasonably-stocked larder, five minutes is indeed just about what it takes to put a pizza together.
You use a bit of forethought to determine when you’re going to want the pizza. This is usually dinnertime. so you work back from that. I said that I wasn’t going to talk about frozen dough (that you’ve made yourself), but I understand that it’s just a matter of pulling a ball of it out of the freezer in the morning and letting it defrost. Otherwise, you make it from scratch, starting an hour or so ahead of time.
Everything else is already on hand. So far, my pizzas have been just as simple as the ones we used to order: pepperoni and mushroom. You slice the pepperoni (about twenty slices) and you slice (two) mushrooms. You spread a half cup of tomato sauce, or maybe a little more, atop the rolled-out dough. (The sauce can be home-made, or it can come out of a tub from Fairway. Last night, I tried Fairway’s vodka sauce, and we liked it a lot.) Then you sprinkle grated mozzarella on the sauce. Then you arrange the pepperoni and the mushrooms. Then you bake the pizza in a 475º oven for twelve minutes. It comes out piping hot, of course, but it cools more quickly than you’d think. Pretty soon, the pizza is all gone.
I am dying to try bolognese sauce. I’m dying to try a lot of things. I’ve ordered Suzanne Lenzer’s Truly Madly Pizza. There’s a pastry board at Chefs Catalog that I’ve got my eye on.
Where did I get the idea that making pizza at home was a big deal?