Pizza Outside the Box

Pizza is deceptive. It seems pretty uncomplicated. A little bread dough, a little sauce, some meat, mushrooms and cheese and there you have it. It seems so simple, Chef Boyardee put all the ingredients in a kit. Chef Boyardee pizzas are the first pizzas I made as a child. Inside the kit is a cellophane bag with a “just add water” mix of flour and other magic ingredients that make dough. There is also a three inch high can of tomato sauce and a similar size can of yellow powder that is labeled as parmesan cheese. To make the pizza, you pour the flour stuff into a bowl, add water, and stir with a spoon. Then you press the dough into a cookie sheet. You pour the tomato sauce all over and then sprinkle with the yellow powder. I was one of the few children on my block who wasn’t warned away from hot stoves by his mother, and so I would also fry some ground beef to put on top of my kit-pizza.
My pizzas were not round, but rectangular. The crust was not crisp, the tomato sauce tasted like ketchup and whatever was in the parmesan can would never be confused with actual cheese. But I never tired of making it when I was young. Getting my hands in the dough and pressing it into the corners of the cookie sheet, trying not to make it too thin in the middle and too think at the edges, spreading the watery sauce over the dough with the back of a spoon – I felt almost like those guys I saw on TV who would twirl rounds of dough high into the air and catch it on the backs of their hands.
I graduated from kit-pizza to Bisquick dough, Contadina canned sauce and that parmesan cheese that comes in the round green cardboard shaker. I even bought a round cookie sheet so my pizzas would come out of the oven in their traditional shape.
Well, as St. Paul says, “When I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” Now I make pizza almost every week from scratch. I make the dough and the sauce myself, and I grate the cheese from a fresh block of parmesan or mozzarella. I do this because I love to cook. I like the smell of the yeast as it is proofing, the familiar weight of the flour in the cup as I measure it into the bowl, the sting of the red onions in my eyes as I slice them. I enjoy the puzzle-piece choice of ingredients to put on the dough, in what order, and how much of each. And I like the oohs and ahs as I place the circle of golden brown crust, loaded with goodness and melty toasted cheese in front of my guests.
The secret to great pizza that doesn’t come from a kit or a teenage delivery person is a pizza stone. Even frozen pizza comes out better when cooked on a pizza stone. If you want a great-tasting pizza without the work of homemade or the impersonal feel of delivered, get a stone that fits your oven (Wal-Mart has them) and a basic cheese pizza from the frozen food section of your grocer. Put the stone in the oven, and turn the heat up as high as it will go. Scrape off all the frozen cheese. Put all the stuff on top that you would have asked the kid at Dominos to put on it. If you are adding sausage or ground beef, be sure to sauté it first. Then replace the frozen cheese with freshly shredded mozzarella. Bake the pizza directly on the pre-heated stone for five to ten minutes. Keep checking so it doesn’t burn. Then serve it with a nice red wine or a good beer, some candlelight and soft jazz.
If you want to get a little more daring, go to your favorite gourmet pizza spot and read the ingredients listed on the menu from some of their more exotic pizzas. Try recreating your own version using the same ingredients.

Super-size Me

For my mother, widowed at 25 with three babies to feed, fast-food must have seemed like manna from heaven. The first McDonalds “restaurant” opened two years before I was born, about 300 miles from where I grew up in suburban St. Louis, Mo. Our dining room was the back seat of a 60s-era Beetle, and I, being the oldest, would dole out the tiny bags of fries to my brothers. (This was way before “medium,” much less “super-size,” were menu options.) By the time I was in grade school, the Colonel had opened a Kentucky Fried Chicken nearby our house. I lived for the evenings Mom would come home from work, and I would see her unload from her battered bug a bucket of artery-clogging breasts and legs flavored with those secret 11 special herbs and spices.

Fast-food dinners were not so common then as they are in our culture today. Fast-food was still a small luxury, and, in some circles, thought of as a less-than-adequate substitute for the home-cooked meals 1950s homemakers were expected to provide for their families. So I remember those occasions as being a little exciting, a little decadent and always festive. Each of those meals was a sugar-induced spiritual high, a salty sacrament of the joy of being alive.

Now before you get the wrong idea, let me clarify that the only McDonalds I’ll patronize these days are in foreign countries, and then only if I need to use the bathroom. Say whatever you like about the cholesterol content of their fries, you can always count on Mickey Dee’s for clean toilets. It is not the food itself I’m nostalgic for. It is the event of the feast itself. Rosalind Russell once said, “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving.” This Web site is a journal of what I do to keep from starving. Eating and drinking is an art, even if it is eating and drinking a Quarter Pounder and a Coke.

Well, maybe that’s not true for anyone over the age of, say 12, but you get the idea. What distinguishes dining from feeding-at-the-trough is symbol, ritual, fellowship and simply the intent to be human and humane. So I am firmly resolved to follow the advice of Orson Well’s doctor who told him to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless he invited three other people. Consider yourself invited.