Kimchi is a lot like sauerkraut. Both start with cabbage (or whatever) and salt, and ferment the cabbage through lactic fermentation. Kimchi generally goes in the fridge to slow the fermentation after a few days, with older kimchi being reserved for cooking rather than eating raw; sauerkraut is fermented for weeks. Kimchi is usually seasoned more heavily than sauerkraut, although not always.

Once in a blue moon you see fennel sauerkraut on a restaurant menu - or in your grandmother's house, I don't know - and I thought, well, how about fennel kimchi instead. I actually left out most of the kimchi seasonings, though, using only salt, sugar, and Korean red pepper flakes - the idea was to get a lactic-fermented fennel, slightly spicy, that would work with anything you'd usually pair fennel with, and so I didn't want too much in the way of garlic, ginger, or seafood.

Thus tonight, fennel kimchi pizza:

yes, more potatoes

There's a pizza joint here that makes a mashed potato pizza, using what I'm pretty sure are instant mashed potatoes as the sauce, topped with mozzarella, bacon, and scallions. It's good starchy food and I've had it in the back of my mind, minus the bacon, for Lent. I didn't use instant potatoes.

Colcannon pizza, because tomorrow is St Patrick's Day and because greens are good for you. I think colcannon is properly made with cabbage, but I used spinach because I had some on hand: I sauteed garlic and spinach in a little butter, added smoked mashed potatoes, and put that on a parbaked pizza crust with cheddar cheese and scallions.

stromboli's

Stromboli's in Billerica maintains its status as the best pizza in the area. Lunch was the Capri pizza: red sauce, mozz, spinach, zucchini, and whole cloves of roasted garlic. You can't see the garlic in this photo - it had rolled off of this slice when I pulled it away from the pizza.

I have to say, pizza is the best possible destination for zucchini or summer squash. I know it looks like pickle slices you'd put on a hamburger, because the brick oven made it so tender.

Definitely going to have to hit Stromboli's a few times next Lent. Even aside from the white pizza, their vegetarian pizzas are at least as good as - and maybe better than - their meat pizzas.

this week's pizza

This week's pizza started with Pecorino Romano grated onto the crust, and everything else piled on top: sauce (the usual - tomato puree with herbs), fresh mozzarella, fava beans, and ground beef seasoned heavily with ras el hanout.

pizza paparazzi

I made a pizza the other day and liked it enough that I decided to recreate it today, with some photos, so that I could blog about it.  

The idea is basically to direct all the elements of the pizza towards the ideal of a homemade pepperoni pizza -- from the ground up, every part of the pizza is chosen with "hey, this will make a great pepperoni pizza" in mind.

Crust:

This is my standard crust recipe lately, for four pizzas of the size you see here, or two larger (or thicker-crusted) pizzas: 

3/4 cup water
1 teaspoon yeast
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup semolina.  The one change I made was this time I used a little bit of rye flour instead of some of the semolina.  About 1/8 cup rye, the remainder semolina.

Combine, knead, let rise a little, cover with moist towel, and let sit in the refrigerator for at least a day.

A slow rise in the refrigerator leads to a better-tasting crust -- more flavor develops -- and in many cases seems to make the dough easier to handle (once it's brought back to room temp).

Preheat your oven to 500-550, with a pizza stone or overturned cast-iron pan in the hot oven for at least an hour.

Take a piece of dough out of the fridge, keeping it covered with a damp towel, and let it come up to room temp.  Stretch it out.  Let it rest for 15-20 minutes.  Assemble your mise en place.

Sauce:

I've been obsessed with miso lately.  That'll be a whole nother blog.  It has a crazy umami character that seems to make everything better -- barbecue sauce, rice, Buffalo wings, soup, the other day I even made homemade "Hot Pockets" with ground beef, cheese, and miso in a soft pretzel crust.

This sauce is super-simple: half canned tomatoes (I used San Marzano tomatoes specifically), half roasted peppers, a hefty spoonful of red miso.  Blend it up.  Taste for saltiness -- if it needs to be a little saltier, add a little more miso.  Add a few herbs -- I used pebrella (a wild thyme-like herb) and marjoram -- and a sprinkle of crushed red peppers.

I suspect you could go heavier on the peppers and still have good results, but I happened to be using Spanish piquillo peppers and didn't want to use them up on an experimental pizza.  I think peppadews could also be good, in moderation and in combination with other peppers: the peppadews are lightly pickled, after all, and you don't want a ketchup pizza.

Pull the hot pan out of the oven and work quickly: sprinkle it with cornmeal, drape the dough across it, sauce it, top it.

This is an extra-sauce extra-cheese pizza.  If I weren't using a pizza "stone" (a pan in this case), I absolutely wouldn't use extra cheese, and would go lighter on the sauce.  You want to do everything you can to keep your pizza from needing more than 10-12 minutes to cook (depending on the doneness level you prefer).

Toppings:

The toppings proper are pepperoni and peppadews, both of them torn up (because on the first pizza, the pepperoni rounds kept curling upwards).  I happen to be using Vermont Smoke and Cure pepperoni, which I love, though it is milder than the imported brands I like.

For cheeses, I shredded the leftover hunks of clothbound cheddar, super-aged gouda, and 4 year old cheddar that I had, and mixed that up with shredded dry mozzarella.  The shredded mix is tossed with chopped onion tops (including a blossom).  There's also a careful, moderate amount of locally made fresh mozzarella and some chunks of feta.

If you look at the edges of the pizza, you can see the crust is already cooking.

Get the pizza back in the oven for 8-12 minutes.  Took closer to 12 on this one because of the amount of cheese and sauce.

when the moon hits your eye

After writing that pizza post, you won't be surprised to hear that I was craving pizza.

I really should try making one of those spinach pizzas, I thought.  So I picked up some pizza dough, rather than attempt another draft of fool-proof dough myself, and some spinach, some garlic, some ricotta.

The results ... made me realize just how high-fat Nashua House's spinach pie must be.  Because while I added a ton of fat to mine, it came out "delicious but kind of lean-seeming."  Maybe just drizzling some olive oil on would make a difference, I don't know.

What I did was, I combined garlicky creamed spinach with whole-milk ricotta and spread that on the dough, and topped it with cheese.  It was certainly very good!  It just wasn't as delectable as Nashua House's, and didn't seem NEARLY as high-fat as I knew it was.

This pizza, today's pizza, is not that.  But I found that the creamed spinach makes a great addition to a red sauce pie: spinach, ricotta, and lampascioni pie:

First, the creamed spinach:

I minced about half a bulb (that's half a bulb, like six cloves) of garlic and cooked them in half a cup of heavy cream in a saute pan until the cream reduced to the point that the garlic was frying in butterfat.

Meanwhile, I took one bunch of cleaned spinach, blanched it (boiled for about 45 seconds, shocked in ice water), squeezed every drop of moisture out of it that I could, and chopped it fine.  When the butterfat broke from the reducing cream, I added the spinach to the pan, cooked it quickly, and added a touch of cream at the end to bring everything together -- and then seasoned with a pretty healthy pinch of salt.

You use about a third of that spinach for a pizza.

Next, the lampascioni.  Nevermind the label: these are not wild onions.  They're labeled that way sometimes because they sort of look like onions and a lot of English-language guides to Italian food refer to lampascioni that way.  They're wild hyacinth bulbs.  You can't eat most varieties of hyacinth, but you can eat this one, which grows wild in Italy.  It's bitter -- punishingly bitter if you don't precook and/or soak them in olive oil before your final preparation.  The brand I have, sold by Zingerman's, has been roasted and packed in olive oil.  Noticeably bitter, but edible.  (My bitterness threshold: I can drink Campari straight, but bitter melon is almost completely inedible for me.)

There is maybe a gene for the enjoyment of bitter foods.  I'm half-Italian, and the Italians certainly love their bitter things, from bitter greens to Campari and other amaros to chinotto oranges.  Salt reduces bitterness-perception, so all those bitter things pair well with salty cheeses like Pecorino and parmigiano, or meats like prosciutto.  One of the finest flavor combinations in the world is broccoli raab (rabe, rape, rapini) with pork and Pecorino or parmigiano.  

On a pizza like this, the cheese, the garlic, the tomato, they all provide great contrasts for that bitterness, which in turn distracts you from how much cream and cheese is involved here.

and for my 100th post...

I might not have heard the story at all if I hadn't been waylaid by this greasy Irish wop named Gino just before we turned off Main Street. Back then Gino was always waylaying me -- he could reach right through a closed car window and do it.

Gino's Fine Italian Pizza is on the corner of Main and Basin Drive, and every time I saw that sign with the pizza going up in the air and all the i's dotted with shamrocks (it flashed off and on at night, how funky can you get, am I right?), I'd feel the waylaying start again. And tonight my mother would be in class, which meant a pick-up supper at home. The prospect didn't fill me with joy. Neither my dad nor I was much of a cook, and Ellie would burn water.

"Let's get a pizza," I said, pulling into Gino's parking lot. "What do you say? A big greasy one that smells like armpits."

"Jesus, Dennis, that's gross!"

"Clean armpits," I amended. "Come on."

...

Gino's is run by a wonderful Italian fellow named Pat Donahue. He has a sticker on his cash register which reads IRISH MAFIA, he serves green beer on St Patrick's Day (on March 17 you can't even get near Gino's, and one of the cuts on the jukebox is Rosemary Clooney singing "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling"), and affects a black derby hat, which he usually wears tipped far back on his head.

The juke is an old Wurlitzer bubbler, a holdover from the late forties, and all the records -- not just Rosemary Clooney -- are on the Prehistoric label. It may be the last jukebox in America where you get three plays for a quarter. On the infrequent occasions when I smoke a little dope, it's Gino's I fantasize about -- just walking in there and ordering three loaded pizzas, a quart of Pepsi, and six or seven of Pat Donahue's home-made fudge brownies. Then I imagine just sitting down and scarfing everything up while a steady stream of Beach Boys and Rolling Stones hits pours out of that juke.

-- Stephen King, Christine

Good pizza is one of the most satisfying meals there is, up there with cassoulet, grits, and a nice vegetable soup. I love pizza.

... but I didn't always.

It's true. I loved pizza when I was a little kid, and was very excited to discover that on the first day of school (EVER), we were going to have pizza for lunch. For LUNCH! Can you imagine? I was so thrilled. So in I went to the cafeteria, and was served ... some terrible square thing, with that cheese that doesn't quite melt, that too-sweet sauce, that cardboard crust, and ... look, you know school cafeteria pizza.

Well, I didn't eat pizza again for six or seven years.

Now, this is thirty years ago, so forgive me if I can't wiggle out my exact reasoning at the time, but I think it was something like this:

Holy shit, they broke pizza.

It's like I just assumed that either pizza had stopped being good, or that I had abruptly stopped liking it. After a couple years, I obviously realized this couldn't be the case, but I'd gotten in the habit of having a meatball grinder and a Ramblin' root beer (or a Dr Pepper: like Jesus and Kurt Cobain, we were graced with Ramblin's presence for too brief a time) any time pizza was on the menu, and let me tell you, meatball grinders up here -- especially at C&S Pizza in Pepperell, Massachusetts, which is where my family usually got pizza -- are fantastic.

But I eventually came back to pizza, just in time for my teens, for having enough pocket money to split a cheese pizza three or four or eight ways just to have something to do other than going home, for driving to Little Caesars to get two pepperoni pizzas and hit Rally's for a sack of cheeseburgers on the way back, and eventually the pizza/cafeteria relationship came full circle in high school, when a bunch of people would pile into a couple cars and hit the all you can eat lunch buffet at Pizza Hut in lieu of eating at the cafeteria.

After high school, I lived in other places, and came back to southern New Hampshire thirteen years later, at age 31 -- with a new appreciation of pizza, because Jesus fuck, in most of the country nobody can make it worth a damn. There are five foods New Hampshire is very good at: corned beef hash, steak subs, black raspberry ice cream, fried seafood (really fried clams and fried haddock, I just didn't want to list them separately), and pizza.

There's this Pizza Cognition Theory that says the pizza you grow up with is what you measure pizza by, and I suppose that explains why so many good folks in good parts of the country are content by galactically shitty pizza or actually bother to waste their money on Pizza Hut and Dominos.

I have had very little good pizza, and even less excellent pizza, outside the northeast (to be clear, I've never been to Chicago).  It's probably not a coincidence that the best pizzas I've had outside the northeast have been the more unusual ones -- the ones that were really "food on flatbread" rather than a failed attempt to emulate traditional pizza.

So let me introduce you around to the pizzas near me.

First off, here's C&S, in Pepperell, Massachusetts.  This is, was, and remains my #1 pizza parlor.  I don't go very often cause, well, it's in Pepperell, and I'm never there for anything else.  C&S is a good example of the Greek-style pizza parlors of New England, which nearly always have subs, gyros, Greek salads, and baked pasta dishes (which might include American chop suey), but do not as commonly have steak bombs, that other staple of the central New England pizza parlor.

That's the bacon pizza from C&S.  The crust of the Greek-style pizza is thicker than the local Italian-style, but not as thick as national chains' pan pizza, nor Chicago's deep dish.  The sauce is zestier than Italian-style; if you order sausage, it will often include noticeable amounts of fennel.

This is the Pizza Americano, from my #2 pizza parlor: Stromboli's, in Billerica, Massachusetts.  The Americano is double pepperoni, double cheese.  Stromboli's serves Italian-style brick oven pizza, and skews towards what you might call the neo-classical -- too many fancy ingredients for it to be a "traditional pizza joint," but they're all Italian, not mashed potato and chicken curry and what all.

Stromboli's serves an amazing white pizza, something that's easy to take for granted in the northeast.  I didn't fully grow up with it -- you tend to find white pizza at the Italian-style pizzerias far more than the Greek-style ones -- but it was a specialty at Elvio's, in Center Harbor, NH, where my family has a place on the lake.  And Elvio's was near about walking distance -- hell, it's summer, we didn't have much else to do -- so I went there a lot more often as a teenager than I would have had I had to wait for my parents to want pizza again.  Elvio's isn't there anymore, but there's a new pizza joint in the same location, and they're still real good:

As you can see, the Center Harbor white pizza sprinkles some herbs on top.

White pizza comes a few different ways: pizza with Alfredo sauce (really "white-sauce pizza," but some places that serve it will just call it "white pizza"), pizza that's just like red sauce pizza but without the sauce (cheese directly on top of the crust), and pizza in which instead of the red sauce, you've got some olive oil, some chopped garlic, maybe some ricotta -- some sort of flavor between the cheese and the crust.  That third is what I think of as what white pizza should be -- a little garlicky, a little oily, with some good ricotta.  Lot of people don't like ricotta cheese, or think they don't -- I'm guessing they've just never had it good.

That's Stromboli's salsicchia -- sausage and ricotta.  Damn good.  See how the crust is thinner and flatter than the C&S pizza?  Italian-style.  Notice the amount of cornmeal dusting too.

I don't know why I don't have more, or better, photos from this pizzeria, but this is my #3 pizza parlor, Papa Romano's, in Nashua.  That's the meatball pizza, and meatball pizza is a special feature of pizza around here, and Papa's has its own spin on it, so let me back up and explain that first.

First, typical "meatball pizza" around here has nothing to do with meatballs.  It's an offering of the Greek-style pizza parlors, and what you get is strips of highly seasoned gyro-like meat on your pizza.  Sometimes the meatball subs are the same, so that you get "meat strips" instead of "meat balls."  I had no idea growing up that every pizza parlor in the country didn't serve meatball pizza, though I should've twigged to it since Pizza Hut doesn't serve it.

Now, Papa's isn't a Greek-style place.  I think Matt calls them Italian-style -- and the crust fits that description -- but I think they're in their own category, slightly skewed from the traditional Greek/Italian/new-school/bullshit-national-chain categories of the New England pizzeria landscape.  The meatball topping is more like the meatballs you make at home, only crumbled up onto the pizza instead of balled up and simmered in sauce.

Though I'm listing Papa's as my #3, they're the first local option on my list here, and they deliver.  So as you can imagine, I've had an awful lot of their pizza ... just not lately.  They haven't answered the phone any time I've tried ordering in the last couple months, and I'm not quite sure what's going on.  Keep your fingers crossed.  Not only are they terrific, but they're cheaper than most, and the steak subs were until recently the best in the area (they've declined in quality in that category).

My #4 for a long time was Monument Square Market, in Hollis.  I've talked to the owner quite a bit about pizza, and he knows a lot about what he's doing, and why he uses the brand of pepperoni he does, etc.  I always get some variation of "pepperoni, ricotta, and--" -- in this case, the "and" is sausage.  MSM was a convenience store when I was a kid, and more or less still is, except half of it's taken up by the pizza oven and deli counter, and the beer selection's a lot better.  

Why's it not my #4 anymore?  Because two times in a row, when I ordered "pepperoni, ricotta, and--," they put the ricotta on INSTEAD of the mozzarella, not ON TOP of mozzarella.  The first time I thought it was a mistake, didn't think to say anything about it.  The second time, the owner was there and I didn't think to doublecheck my pizza until I got it home.  I've ordered that pizza 20 times, I've talked to him about that pizza and why I like those particular toppings together -- it makes me wonder if they're deliberately leaving the mozzarella off to save money.  I don't know.  Either way, they fucked up twice, and at the prices they charge (they're the most expensive pizzeria on this list and don't deliver), that doesn't encourage me to go back.

This is a terrible photo of pizza from my new #4, the Nashua House of Pizza, a Greek-style joint.  Sausage and gyro on the left; spinach pie on the right.

The spinach pie is without a doubt one of the best pizzas in the region.  It's like a white pizza with spinach, garlicky and very rich.  That's one reason I'm including it despite the quality of the photo -- I feel like discussion of the local pizza scene would be incomplete without Nashua House's spinach pie.

So that's my family tree, you dig.  And that brings us into the complicated matter of authenticity.

Now as you know, I think the whole idea of authenticity is basically bullshit.  Why should anyone, why should a single person outside of Italy, give a shit how they make their pizza?  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Italian pizza.  I'm saying there's no reason to consider it the best, to consider it the standard against which other pizzas should be measured, or to consider it at all.  There's no reason food should be like that.  That would be like doing Goodfellas in British accents, or letting your grandfather decide which college classes you should take and who you should date.  It doesn't really matter where pizza comes from.  The regional pizza styles of New York, New England, Chicago -- Japan, for that matter, with its corn and shrimp and goddamn Hello Kitty designs squirted out in mayonnaise -- are no less real just because some other pizza preceded them.  The notion that they are is bullshit nonsense left over from colonial thinking.

I think the Pizza Cognition Theory makes a lot more sense.  You basically inherit your idea, your ideal, of pizza -- it's not "real" exactly, the way authenticity-fetishists claim their Neapolitan whatever represents a more "real" pizza than later adulterations.  But it's real to you.  It certainly affects your taste, what you want, what satisfies a pizza craving, and ultimately that's what pizza is and all it can be -- that thing which satisfies your pizza craving.

Politically, I'm a moderate, a centrist, a Clinton Democrat, which means frequently taking the intelligent but unthrilling position of saying "what you just said is wrong, but so is its opposite."  So too with pizza.  I think the authenticity-fetishism that wants to turn back the clock and only acknowledge pizza as it's made in Naples is ridiculous, even anti-food, anti-cooking -- but I think the "anything goes, do whatever the fuck you want and call it pizza" attitude is appalling.

Pizza on a bagel is not "pizza anytime," jingle be damned, because it isn't pizza at all.

Pizza on French bread isn't pizza.

Pizza with barbecue sauce isn't pizza.  Sorry Indiana.

Chicken curry on flatbread isn't pizza.  It's curry on flatbread.

Now that doesn't mean any of those are bad food.  But words need to have some limits or there's no point to them at all, and just as "slider" can't mean "small sandwich" or we lose the word completely, "pizza" can't mean "some food on flatbread."  It has to be more specific than that.

That's why white pizza is called white pizza -- just like a turkey burger is called a turkey burger.  Because people know that if you say "burger" without a modifier, you mean beef, and if you say "pizza," you mean tomato sauce.

"Food on flatbread" can be really really good without being pizza.  Look, I love a Reuben.  But if there were no word for "Reuben," and you tried to convince me that "corned beef, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing on rye" was a "hamburger" just because there was no other word for it, as though some sort of grammatical rounding-up were possible, I would punch you right in the face.  "But it has beef and bread and it's really good --"  IT IS NOT A HAMBURGER.  DAMN.  That's what people keep trying to do with "pizza" -- and with "burger," for that matter!  Sons of bitches.  This is like calling all vegetables "potato," and having to constantly explain what kind of potato you mean.  "Can I interest you in some Buffalo wings with a side of celery-potato and carrot-potato to dip in your ranch dressing?"  NO.  NEVER SAY CARROT-POTATO AGAIN.

So when I'm ordering pizza, when I say "let's get some pizza," these are my "rules" for "what I mean by pizza."  Now, keep in mind these are more narrow than I would expect the world at large to follow, because it's a combination of "what I think the word pizza must mean and how it must be used" with "what I think makes for a good pizza."

Crust: not cracker-thin but not bready.  Noticeable flavor.

Sauce: tomato-based, zesty, not too creatively spiced.

Cheese: not too much.  "Extra cheese pizza" is a distinctly different pizza.  Pizza is about the balance of ingredients, and heaping the cheese on shifts that balance enough to make it a whole different thing, in as real a way as leaving the Russian or Thousand Island off of a Reuben makes it a totally different sandwich.

Toppings: if there's more than one topping, vegetables should not outnumber meats.  There should be no more than four toppings (probably no more than three, I'm just open to the possibility of four).  Ricotta, feta, anchovy, and garlic do not count as toppings for the purposes of these rules.

Obvious variants: The above describes what is meant by "pizza" without a modifier, just as "burger" without a modifier means "made with beef," which doesn't invalidate the turkey burger but requires it to be separately named.  Variants on this modifier-free pizza therefore include: spinach pie; white pizza; extra-cheese pizza; tomato pie (cheeseless, or with cheese under the sauce); chili pizza; clam pie (white or red); macaroni and cheese pizza; fried egg pizza; chicken pizza (which I think can be very good, but which is as different from this narrowcast "traditional pizza" as a turkey burger is).  Variants are not lesser pizzas.  They just have their own names.

Like I said under cheese, these rules are about balance.  Pizza Hut and its imitators make their name on "super supreme" pizzas, which pile toppings on until they're rolling off the slice, which totally misses the point.  Not only should you not have that many toppings, the total volume of toppings -- regardless of how many different toppings are involved -- should never overwhelm the pizza like that.  You should taste the cheese.  You should taste the sauce.  You should taste the crust.  Distrust any pizza involving toppings you wouldn't want with tomato sauce and cheese.  Too many toppings will also keep the cheese from melting properly.

Pizza involves a near-emulsion of cheese and sauce with crust.  The toppings become trapped in the cheese, and don't fall off when you pick up a slice.  That's pizza.

So that's eating pizza.  Let's talk about making pizza.

Now, I gotta say this: when it comes to pizza, cocktails, baking, confectionery, the use of smokers, charcuterie, hamburgers, or beer, there are blogs out there that will give you much more extensive coverage than I will, because they are devoted just to that thing. I'm not a specialist. I'm a generalist. There are people who buy professional pizza ovens or build wood-burning pizza ovens in their backyards, just as there are people who build barbecue pits or have temperature- or climate-controlled spaces for their charcuterie. I am not one of them. While lack of resources plays a role, it's also that I enjoy being a generalist, I'm a generalist by nature. Even if someone built a brick pizza oven for me, using it would require a greater degree of devotion than I really want to give, because it would take time away from other areas of cooking.

I probably wouldn't make pizza if it had to be a big production every time. Some people want cooking to be like that. They want it to be all elaborate and flowery, for it to be a big performance, like they're putting on a show for you, like this basic everyday act of survival is something you're supposed to applaud. Hell, a lot of cooking blogs leave you with the impression that the blogger treats cooking that way, as something done for an audience. Fuck that. Hey, Martha Stewart, you already have a holiday for that -- Thanksgiving. You want another one, I'll give you Arbor Day.  I cook pizza because I want to eat pizza. Because it's a good way to use good tomatoes. Because it's not too hard once you figure it out, and it's not very expensive, and it's easy to keep the ingredients around.

So what I want from homemade pizza is:

1: Something that is recognizably pizza, which is where all of the homemade pizza I see on the Food Network etc fails.  Red sauce glopped on top of a thick piece of bread isn't pizza.

2: Something that tastes great.

3: Something that does not take forever to make, though advance planning (making dough in advance, etc) is fine.

4: Something that doesn't break the bank.

Here's the thing.  I treat homemade pizza like homemade barbecue.  I can't make "the real thing" at home, because home kitchens aren't suited for it -- if you can't put a smoker in your backyard, you can't make real barbecue at home.  That doesn't mean you can't make pretty good pulled pork, though!  Likewise, though I can't make pizza at home that's the really-real real thing, it doesn't mean I can't make something worth eating.

I make pizza very simply:

Preheat oven, for an hour or so, to 500 degrees or more.  Put a heavy cast-iron pan in the oven at some point in there, to get hot -- it doesn't need to stay for an hour, though.  No, I don't have a pizza stone.

Meanwhile, bring your pizza dough to room temperature.  Assemble your other ingredients.

When you're ready to go, work fast.  Pull the cast-iron out of the oven.  Dust it liberally with cornmeal.  Stretch the dough out as thin as you can and put it on the cast-iron.  Spread sauce thinly on the crust, toss cheese on, toss toppings on, put it back in the oven and bake until ready.

It should take less than ten minutes to cook.  Even this is really too long, but you don't have a pizza oven and neither do I.

Some specific discussion:

Crust.  I don't have a pizza crust recipe for you.  I haven't worked one out that I'm really happy with yet.  Either it's reasonably easy to work with, or it tastes great, or it cooks up with just the right texture -- sometimes two of these three, never yet all three at once.  I've found storebought dough -- not crust! not Boboli flatbreads or anything, but the premade dough -- is pretty pretty good.  It's also far more than you need for a pizza.  Use half.  Maybe even a third.

Sauce.  In tomato season, thinly sliced fresh tomatoes can be great.  Outside of tomato season, don't use anything too watery -- it'll increase your cooking time -- and don't use too much sauce.  People get this wrong allll the time.  You should not cover up the dough with sauce.  It should remain visible, not enshrouded in red.

Cheese.  Forget fresh mozzarella.  You don't have a pizza oven.  Do you understand how much moisture is in fresh mozzarella?  Even at 500 degrees, it will sog up your pizza and either increase your cooking time or keep your dough from fully cooking, or both.  If you want to use fresh mozzarella sparingly, use it as a topping -- small pieces of it (never big thick rounds!) interspersed around the pizza, with plenty of space between them.  Do not crowd them.  

You are much, much better off using dry mozzarella.  Fresh mozzarella is better in salads anyway.  Fresh mozzarella is fine -- terrific! -- in pizzeria pizza, but you can't make that at home.  I have to keep coming back to this.  It's important to understand that you are never going to discover some trick that will fool your kitchen into thinking you have a professional pizza oven.  A home oven just isn't the same equipment, period.  There are no secrets to uncover, only the acknowledgment of your local limitations.

Pecorino, parmesan, feta, and ricotta are all swell in addition to mozzarella, not instead of it.  Mozzarella is made to be stringy.

One trick: save a handful of mozzarella aside while the pizza cooks; toss it on as soon as you remove the pizza from the oven.  The heat of the pizza will melt it.  This is the best way to make "extra cheese pizza" at home.

Toppings.  Because you don't have a pizza oven, any meat that isn't ready to be eaten as-is should be precooked -- bacon, hamburger, fresh sausage.  Whether or not vegetables should be precooked is a matter of personal preference.  Be spare with your toppings.

Some pizzas I've made at home:

Pizza with ramps and meatballs.  I'll explain ramps when they come into season in a couple months.  This pizza was slightly overcooked, though not as badly as it may seem -- there were only a couple bites where you could tell.

Pizza with a little bit of fresh mozzarella; sliced fresh tomatoes instead of sauce; pepperoni.  That's chopped Cuban oregano from my garden on top.  The crust is a little too bready.

Again slightly too bready, but a phenomenal-tasting crust, thanks in part to the Pecorino Romano mixed into the dough.  Sliced tomatoes, sliced peppers, Pecorino Romano, and bacon.  A combination of dry mozzarella, crushed red peppers, and dry herbs was sprinkled onto the pizza after baking.  A very flavorful late summer pizza that complemented the flavor of the tomatoes.

Pan-fried pizza: heat olive oil in a cast-iron pan on the stove, and get ready to quickly assemble the pizza in the pan: spread crust out to just the right size and place it in the oil; as it fries, ladle a small amount of sauce, followed by a small amount of thinly-sliced pepperoni or other toppings, and top with dry mozzarella; when the crust has mostly cooked through, lift pizza onto plate, pour excess oil out, flip pan onto plate, and invert pan and plate together so that the pizza is now cheese-side-down.  Let cook for a few minutes until cheese hardens, as pictured.  Serve with additional sauce, preferably mixed with anchovies.

And that's about all I have to say about pizza right now.

Well hang on, one more thing on pizza, because if I hold it all for the big long pizza post, it's gonna be too long for anybody to read:

Umami Pizza Sauce:

Tomato base: Roast a quantity of good flavorful tomatoes until they have lost quite a lot of liquid; do not use salt.  Remove skins and puree; you can strain the seeds out, but don't need to.  If good flavorful fresh tomatoes aren't available to you, puree a can of San Marzano tomatoes and cook until thickened.

Aromatics, any or none of the following, diced and sauteed: onion, fennel, sweet pepper.

Aromatics, any or none of the following, pureed with the tomato base: garlic, carrot, charred onion, sweet pepper, hot pepper.

Umami/salt component: fish sauce to taste, or anchovies pureed with the tomato base, or soy sauce.  You can also simmer parmesan rinds (sometimes available cheaply at your supermarket) in the tomato base and then strain them out.  You should use a sufficient quantity of your umami component so that you don't need to add salt.

Let sit in the fridge for at least one day.  Include a hard grating cheese -- Pecorino Romano, aged gouda, Parmesan, etc -- in the cheese element of the pizza.

Always sauce your pizza lightly.  More heavily sauced pizza styles are perfectly fine if that's what you like ... but not when you're working with a home oven.

loo loo loo

A note on pizza, first: though I think flavored doughs should be approached with caution and reluctance, I made a nice one today with Pecorino Romano, grated sweet Italian pepper, and large amounts of ground black pepper.

Onward:

You must both forgive and get used to the terrible lighting (and my dirty thumbnail).  It's rainy and dark out, and there are no good places in my house with good lighting for food photographs. This situation will not improve until spring brings better light, so you will have to just deal with it through the seasons of braising and pumpkin-pecan pie and duck confit and roast beast and eggnog and Reubens, until we come at last to radishes and pea shoots and the last of the frozen cherries.

Apples.  There's so much to say about apples.  First, because it's the easiest place to start, this apple crisp: sliced Cortland apples, tossed with Grade B maple syrup, sorghum, wheat whiskey, and cinnamon; a topping of equal parts sugar (I used white sugar and sorghum) and flour, with butter and oats.  I often use crushed pretzels in apple crisp (and in general I cook with pretzels more than anyone I know; the pretzel-crusted pig tails predate this blog, but I'll do that again sometime), but today was an oat day.

Let's digress and talk maple syrup and circle back therefrom to apples.

From age 2 to 15, I lived on a splash of old-school New Hampshire land -- a Colonial farmhouse built in 1743, with a chicken coop (complete with chickens), wild and domesticated grapes, wild and domesticated raspberries, a little creek where I caught "crayfish" too small to eat, horse stables (no horses; we kept the gas generator in one, the riding lawn mower in the other), and, well, a gravel tennis court.  New Hampshire in the 70s and 80s was a place in transition, obviously.

One of the owners back in the day when this place's farm elements were more practical than decorative had planted sugar maples, and we tapped them for sap.  Maple sap has two active seasons: spring and fall, when the days are significantly warmer than the nights, causing the watery sap to run back and forth through the tree.  Hammer a spigot into the trunk, hang a bucket from the spigot, and every day the bucket will collect some barely sweet water.  Dump the buckets into a kettle, cook the sap down, and the water cooks off until you have maple syrup.

Naturally, when I was 8, I preferred Vermont Maid "maple-flavored syrup," but by my teens I had come back around.  Real maple syrup tastes like what it is -- something from a tree.  It has a flavor that's more developed than just "sweet."  Most of the pancake syrups on the shelf offer nothing beyond their texture -- they're just sugar in pourable form, either next to flavorless or packed with artificial flavor.  Ugh.

Real maple syrup is offered in various grades, depending on where you live.  Grade B is the "cooking" grade, while various Grades A are "table" grades.  Grade A is lighter in color and flavor, see, while Grade B is stout enough that if you add it to coffee, the maple flavor won't be overpowered.  The idea that Grade B is too strong for people to use as a condiment ... well, it's fucking ridiculous, frankly.  We're not talking about molasses here.  I understand that not everyone can handle straight-up molasses -- shoo-fly pie's a lot for me to handle.  But maple syrup never gets that strong, and it can be tough to make a gingerbread, for instance, with a strong maple note, without resorting to flavor extracts (which I try to avoid).

Anyway.  I use Grade B.  Even up here, you can't find it in the supermarket.  You buy it from the producer or from a farmstand that carries somebody's maple products.  It often sells out when maple season is over, unlike the large amounts of Grade A which are available year-round, so I pick up a big jug in the spring, a big jug in the fall (which I ought to do next month, come to think of it).

The other thing plentiful up here?  Apples.  Told you we'd be back round.  There is an equivalent divide in apples to the Grade A/Grade B issue in maple syrup.  People who aren't from apple-growing regions, and some of those who are, don't always realize the vast array of apple varieties, but they tend to be divided into "eating apples" and "cooking apples" (or "pie apples" or "cider apples"), the second category being those that are widely considered too tart for eating.

Now, this, again, is nonsense.  Yes, such apples are tarter than Granny Smiths, but apart from crabapples I have yet to encounter an apple that's unpalatable when it's ripe, and when I lived in Indiana a great many of the local orchards made their cooking/pie/cider apples available for the public to purchase ... always noting carefully that they weren't intended for eating out of hand, I guess out of fear that somebody would complain the apple was too sour.

The tartness of apples comes from malic acid, while that of citrus fruit comes from citric acid.  (Grapes have both malic acid and tartaric acid, though the tartaric is present mostly in the vines.)  This is one reason that even a very tart apple isn't tart in the same way as a somewhat tart orange or grapefruit, for instance.

The idea that cooking apples are too tart to eat must stem from the timidity of the British and New England palate, I guess.  That's my theory.

Now, apples are one of the few fruits that travels well all on its own, without needing all the flavor and interest bred out of it the way supermarket tomatoes do -- so if you don't live somewhere with apple orchards, there are plenty of perfectly good apples in your supermarket, for eating or cooking.  The real appeal (ha) of local apples is the sheer variety of them: Ginger Golds, Cortlands, Braeburns, Golden Russets, Winesaps, Northern Spies, and crab apples, for instance, are all excellent user-friendly apples which lack the marketing power and supermarket presence of Granny Smith, Red Delicious, McIntosh, and Fuji -- to say nothing of the hyperbranded varieties like Jazz and Zestar.

One of the nice things about having lived both here and in Indiana is that both areas had plentiful orchards -- Indiana had far, far more, New Hampshire having been largely paved over to put up an office park -- which led to my discovering that the same variety of apple can taste different when grown in different areas.  Arkansas Black, in Indiana, was a spectacular apple -- not just crisp but crunchy, with full flavor.  Up here... meh.  This has held true for tomatoes, too -- the Cherokee Purples I've had in New Hampshire have been fairly watery and bland, compared to the deep tomato flavor of those in Indiana.

Not that New Hampshire lacks good tomatoes and apples, obviously -- but the "hey, this was great there, why isn't it here?" varieties are the ones that have stood out.

So get out there, see what they carry in your neck of the woods.  There's a huge spectrum of flavor, texture, and acidity.

There's a lot more to say about apples -- apple varieties, crab apples, apple cider, apple butter, my remixed appletini -- in the future, but I'll leave that until later.

you're never returning to the usa

We've talked about whiskey, we've talked some about vodka: let's talk about gin.

Gin is great.

... okay, I'll say more than that.

There are several kinds of gin, all of which have juniper in common as one of the primary botanicals -- though, just as Coca-Cola led to a spice-citrus combination's association with "cola" more than kola nuts themselves had, there are certain taste expectations that surround the idea of gin, and at least one spirit which is reputed to be very gin-like but doesn't actually contain juniper (and therefore can't be labeled as gin; I'm referring to Square One's rye-based Botanical Spirit), just as Coca-Cola and Pepsi no longer use real kola nuts.

Almost every gin you've ever heard of, almost every gin in your local bar or liquor store, is London dry gin, which starts with neutral grain spirits (vodka), infuses them with the juniper and other botanicals (citrus, spices, and anise-like flavorings are all common), and then distills the result.  Distilling smooths out and removes flavor, which is why vodka has so little of it -- it starts with something that has little flavor to begin with, and distills it multiple times, with most premium vodkas distilling at least three times.  In gin's case, because the infused mixture is strongly flavored, distillation acts more like a remastering, a graphic equalizing, chopping off highs and lows and smearing everything together.  Beefeater, Seagram's, Bombay, Tanqueray -- these are all London dry gins or London gins.  London and London dry are the same style -- the "dry" just means nothing, except in some cases a small amount of sugar, was added after distillation.  Not all ingredients survive distillation, so for example, a gin tinted with saffron is London rather than London dry.

The googlewhack of the gin world is another British style: Plymouth gin refers both to a distinct style of gin and to the only brand currently producing that style (which by law must be made in Plymouth, England).  The difference between Plymouth and London is not significant: Plymouth's botanicals are more pronounced, and it is the traditional gin used in cocktails, especially those associated with the British Empire and her Navy, such as Pink Gin, Gin and Tonic, and the Gimlet.

Several styles of gin are derived from British gins: sloe gin and damson gin are British-style gins infused after distillation with sloes or damsons; both are members of the Prunus family, aka the stone fruits, the same family as plums, peaches, cherries, apricots, almonds, and the Japanese ume.  Both are considerably difficult to find: several brands make sloe gin with artificial flavoring, but Plymouth (the brand) is the only manufacturer of actual sloe-infused gin widely distributed in the United States, and even it isn't that easy to find yet (not available in NH, so feel free to send me some).

Britain -- like the rest of Europe -- never developed the extensive cocktail culture that the US did, though contrary to what you're likely to hear on the Discovery Channel or some shit like that, this has nothing to do with Prohibition, American cocktail culture having been well-established in the 19th century.  Old school British gin drinks tend to have two or three ingredients, and often some practical purpose: the Gimlet, which must be made with Rose's lime cordial and not fresh lime juice (fresh lime juice is a Rickey), helped sailors combat scurvy; the Gin and Tonic made quinine-containing, malaria-fighting tonic water palatable.

Anyway, because of the lack of, for instance, a Gin Old-Fashioned in the British repertoire, Old Tom gin became popular.  Another member of the British gin family, Old Tom is sweetened more than London styles (the sweetness of which is barely noticeable) and is more palatable to many people straight.  The original Tom Collins -- gin, sweetener, and lemon juice -- used Old Tom.  Old Tom isn't in general production now; Hayman's is available in the US, but ... again, not in NH.

You think we're done, don't you?  WE'RE NOT DONE, BONKER.

Allll of these gins descend from Dutch gin, aka Holland gin, aka genever, the name under which it is most likely to be found in the 21st century.  While everything we've discussed so far starts the same way -- add things to neutral grain spirits and then distill them -- genever does not.  The Dutch popularized genever in Britain when Dutch prince William of Orange overthrew his uncle James II and became king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, in the 17th century.  They lost a king, gained gin ... it all worked out.

Genever is made with malted grains, like whiskey.  There are, today, two styles of genever: oude, the original genever, and jonge, which is oude genever diluted with neutral spirits (like "blended whiskey" in the US and Canada).  Both are flavored with juniper, but the use of a non-neutral base spirit makes for a very different final product.  Genever has not been commonly available in the US; Bols, the leading importer of genever, discontinued importing it for several years before a highly publicized cocktailian-friendly relaunch.

Either genever or British gin can be aged.  Citadelle, a French gin producer of London style gins, produces Citadelle Reserve, which is aged briefly in oak; as far as I know, this is the only aged British style gin on the market.  Boomsma ages its Oude genever for "at least" a year.

There is an additional style, maybe two or three, that doesn't have a name yet -- I've seen suggestions, but none of them have caught on.  The 21st century has seen a revival of interest in gin, and a number of new gins have been introduced, often playing with new botanical blends (incorporating grape flowers, lychees, or spruce, for instance); some of them reduce the juniper to an afterthought, some of them play it up big and bold, and the most common complaint from old-school gin drinkers who don't dig this is that the botanicals lack the balance of older tried-and-true formulas.  Because so much of that action is on the west coast, few of the brands are carried in the US, so I can't really comment.  I've tried some of them, mostly before moving here, and few of them seemed worth paying an extra $5, $10, or more for, especially when my go-to brands (Plymouth, Bombay, and Citadelle) do so well.

Okay.  So.  Here's the gin I have in the house at the moment:

The aforementioned Citadelle Reserve, which doesn't taste drastically different from regular Citadelle but is certainly worth trying.  The effects of oak aging are pretty predictable -- there's a smoothness and the familiar vanillin presence from the oak -- but the aging is brief enough that much of that disappears in cocktails with strong supporting casts.

Plymouth is the cocktail standard, with good reason.

Boomsma Oude genever is one of the few genevers available in this country.  In addition to it and the (much more expensive) Bols, there is Anchor Distilling's Genevieve, but I've read that it's more "genever-like" than a genuine genever, so I decided that shouldn't be my first experience with this liquor.  The Boomsma ... it smells a lot like tequila when you open the bottle ... or more to the point, it smells like "tequila and...", where something uniquely genever follows the ellipsis.  The taste is a lot like whiskey.  British gins have a thickness to their texture, almost an oiliness, which is lacking here.  This is very very good, both familiar and new.

And the green stuff?  Because of the juniper, people who don't get gin say it tastes like a pine tree.  That doesn't taste like a pine tree, man.  Clear Creek's Douglas Fir eau de vie, which infuses an eau de vie with young fir buds?  That tastes like a pine tree. It's crazy expensive (eau de vie is resource-intensive to produce) and from what I understand, the proprietor of Clear Creek doesn't like his products being used in cocktails, so this probably shouldn't be here at all.  It's good, good stuff, and saying it "tastes like a pine tree" is a little misleading; this is no Pine-Sol.  It tastes a little like being in the woods in the morning.

Also pictured: Fever Tree bitter lemon, which is like tonic water combined with lemon juice.  I used to say tonic water was the best way to experience a new gin, but I'm no longer sure of that, because of the syrupiness of most tonic waters.  Fever Tree's product, however, while not widely distributed, is now carried on Amazon, and I have Amazon Prime so I get free shipping.

Postscript: I should make a real pizza post sometime, but in lieu this was lunch today: I used tipo 00 flour from Naples for the dough, very ripe tomatoes, cheap pepperoni, and a combination of fresh and dry mozzarella and Pecorino Romano. The danger of fresh mozzarella in home pizza -- the fresher, the more dangerous -- is the extraordinarily high moisture content and the inability of a home oven to reach the temperatures that real pizzerias rely on in order to dry that moisture out without interfering with the crust.  This pizza cooked for over fifteen minutes, which is ridiculous, but the mozz made me do it; you can see that the tomatoes are more cooked as a result.  I promise, I really will make an actual pizza post at some point, probably this month -- it may be later, because I realized I would probably be pretty good at developing and curing a sausage specifically designed for sausage pizza, which would take a little while and a little money that'd have to come out of my next paycheck, in October. Like hamburgers, cola, and oranges, it's a food I care a lot about: to eat great pizza is to sit in God's lap, hands on the wheel and eyes on the divine road while He works the pedals.

(Yes that sounds all fancy, "oooh you bought flour from Italy for your fancy schmancy pizza," but pizza is CHEAP, and the per-pizza cost of this flour is under a dollar.  It's made specifically for pizza, with up to thirty different wheats blended to achieve the desired results: dough that is extensible, not elastic.  Elastic means it will snap back when you stretch it; extensible means it'll stay put without either snapping back or breaking.  That said, this is my first time using the flour, and I don't have the dough where I want it yet, though the flavor is fantastic.  This is one of those pizzas with a crust -- cornicione -- that you will want to eat.)