Pizza Wars Part 2

The Home Front

So you’ve decided to do it yourself, shun the corporate machine telling you that pizza-making is something best left to professionals, buck the commercial lull of laziness and get into doing things the old-fashioned, pre-logo way! Great! I have a bunch of products manufactured by gigantic conglomerates to recommend for your use.

Crust

Make your own. Yeast, bread flour (or whole wheat flour), dry milk, sugar, olive oil, salt. Put ‘em in a bowl in proportions you can find in any decent cookbook, mix ‘em up, knead it, let it rise, punch it, let it rise again, roll it out. Or pop it in your bread machine and let it do alladat. So simple! But, as you can probably tell, time-consuming. On occasions when you want pizza but don’t have time to make the crust, you may well want to investigate pre-made options.

The best of these is the Boboli pre-made crust product. There is a product running around called Mama Rosa’s or something like that; it comes two crusts to a package. It is more complicated to make than the Boboli (you’re supposed to brush olive oil onto it and pre-bake it slightly before putting anything on it, whereas the Boboli can be popped right in the oven) and not as good. It burns easily, but if you don’t burn it, it has no structural integrity whatsoever. It has an indistinct wisp of flavor and no texture to speak of. The Boboli has a nice chewy texture and a wheaty flavor with hints of garlic and cheese, none of which are particularly authentic-tasting but which are not bad for what they are.

Extremely slick people make their pizza dough ahead of time in their bread machines and set the timer to have the dough done when they need it, though. (Super-extremely slick people buy bread machines that don’t convince them that the timer has been set properly and then turn back to the regular cycle when you turn your back, which means I am not a super-extremely slick person due to a snafu yesterday. I hate Toastmaster.)

Sauce

Make your own. However, I am a bachelor, and the economies of scale involved in this are such that I don’t do it: it’s too much work to make an amount of sauce I can actually use before it goes bad, and I don’t really have the freezer storage space for the amount of sauce that would actually be worth the work. If you have a similar problem or just don’t feel like making sauce (which, admittedly, is another part of my calculus), you do have some good options.

Chief among these is Bertolli, which used to be Five Brothers. It has a nice bright tomato zing that can hold its own with the other flavors in a good pizza. The other one I use is Barilla, which has a richer, more subdued flavor: better for pasta than pizza, but still pretty good. Nothing else really works well. Classico is good for pasta, but too thin and too delicately flavored to do really well on pizza (except that four cheese one, which has its own problems). Prego and Ragu are nearly inedible.

Cheese

There was a time when I thought all supermarket mozzarella was basically the same: Sargento was a little better than Sorrento, and Sorrento was a little better than all the other ones, but the differences were not anything to get excited about. (An exception is Polly-O, which is watery, strange-flavored, unusable crap.) But that was before I discovered Frigo. Frigo melts perfectly, has a nice stretch to it and has a clean, clear mozzarella flavor. It costs more, but it’s worth every penny. If I were to have the cast of “Charlie’s Angels” over to my house for pizza, I would be buying a couple pounds of Frigo so as to have the best chance of dazzling them with my culinary abilities. That’s how strongly I feel about it. Frigo rules.

Fresh mozzarella doesn’t really work in regular pizza. It works great on a thin crust with sliced tomatoes and some basil leaves and some garlic, or in similar spare preparations. But use regular mozzarella for regular sauce-cheese-toppings pizza.

Even if you have a pound of Frigo, though, you are not going to get those Charlie’s Angels to go devlish with you without some other cheeses to accent the mozz. If you use Parmesan, go easy, as the salt has a tendency to stop the mozzarella from cohering properly. Same with Romano. Not that you don’t use them, but just like Guatemalan insanity peppers and chili, you don’t make them dominate the preparation. Fontina you can be more generous with; a pizza that’s about a fifth Fontina and four-fifths mozzarella is a nice-tasting pizza. Asiago works too.

Pepperoni

I’m only discussing pepperoni among the toppings because otherwise you have to do fresh, dammit. Buy some sausage and fry it up or chop the mushrooms and peppers yourself or whatever. You can do it while the oven is preheating. But the sticks of pepperoni available at local Italian delis, while flavorful, do not have the diameter necessary to make a nice-looking pepperoni slice for pizza, and in any case I don’t have a knife sharp enough to cut the sticks thin enough. C’est la vie.

Carrando is the product to choose here. It has a rich flavor (though not that much spice - you’ll have to hit the deli for that), costs less than its competitors, and now comes in the same kind of resealable package that they do. Armour is better than Hormel, but neither really brings much flavor to the table, so to speak.

Pizza Preparation

Buy a stone. I’ve seen these little pans with their aeration methods and their kooky attachments that promise to deliver crisp crust every time without the use of a big ole piece of ceramic. You know what? People who use those are suckers. Go to your local gourmet pizzeria. Does it use little fluttery rotating discs with air circulation and heat lamps and what have you? No. It uses stones. And if you have any stones, you’ll use one too.

Preheat the oven with the stone already in there. Saves you cracking your stone. Put the stone on the second-lowest rack of the oven.

Make your pizza on a peel. You can buy these, with handles, or you can make one out of a sheet of cardboard like my dad did. I love my dad, but I flinch every time I try to put a pizza on a stone with a sheet of cardboard. The ten bucks I spent on my cheap-ass peel was a great investment.

This is how you do everything:

• Roll out the crust.
• Put cornmeal on the peel, so the crust doesn’t stick to the peel when you try to transfer the pizza to the stone.
• Put the crust on the peel.
• Add sauce, cheese, spices, toppings. (You’ll find how much through experimentation. Start out with enough sauce to cover the crust and enough cheese that, when it is spread in a thin layer, only a little sauce peeks through Thicker crusts can handle more stuff than thinner crusts without going soggy.)
• Open your oven all the way. Put the far edge of the peel on the far edge of the stone. Jerk the peel towards so the pizza starts coming off. If you line up the edges, the pizza will come off right on top of the stone (assuming you gave a couple inches clearance between the edge of the pizza and the edge of the peel).
• Bake it ‘till it’s done, when the crust is a nice golden brown and the cheese has thoroughly melted.
• Do not try to eat it right when you take it out of the oven, because you will burn the top of your mouth on the sauce. Let it sit for 5-7 minutes. Cut it (buy a pizza cutter) and eat it.

There! Isn’t it satisfying to have control over your pizza-eating experience? And you can cater to your own tastes better than any restaurant ever could anyway. Of course, if your tastes have been entirely shaped by restaurants, you may be back to square one. But I hope this guide encourages you to experiment, to labor on your own behalf, to practice until you’re making the best pizza you possibly can. Try different toppings, different configurations, different combinations. Jettison tomato sauce entirely and see what you can do with barbecue. What would a Thai pizza be like? How about a Scandinavian? The possibilities are endless.

You’ll still screw up on occasion (witness my pizza yesterday, which was only so-so), but damn it, they’ll be your screwups, and you’ll pay a lot less for your own screwups than you’ll pay if some distracted Dominoer puts his marijuana cigarette out in your sauce. Not that I have any evidence of that ever happening, but I know for damn sure it doesn’t happen in my kitchen.

How do you make Chicago-style pizza, you may finally ask? Well, I myself haven't climbed that mountain yet. But when I figure it out, I'll let you know.

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