April 2022: Pizza

I love all kinds of pizza. If there is bread and cheese and they’re baked together, I’m in. My father used to make pita bread pizzas. Yum. I went through a phase of making pizzas on English muffins. Yum yum yum. I can still remember the greasy rectangles of pizzas that my elementary school cafeteria would serve. And the overly sweet, soggy pizzas they served in the café at my grad school (my friend Flav called them “pizza nasties”) were also delicious. There is no such thing as bad pizza. Well, pineapple on a pizza comes close in my book, but even then I’d definitely eat it. I’ve only met one person (who was not lactose-intolerant) who did not like pizza. I wonder what happened to him…

Making pizza from scratch is not hard, but it does take some planning. The dough can take a little bit of time with rising and such so I tend to make the dough ahead of time. My favorite doughs to make are deep dish and thin crust; they’re the papa bear and baby bear of the culinary world. The recipes I use are from the New York Times Cooking website, but you can find similar ones all over the internet (some examples: https://www.amateurgourmet.com/wprm_print/20928; https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/crispy-cheesy-pan-pizza-recipe ). These recipes are so easy that I don’t really have a lot to say about them. The one tip I’ll share is that if you want to cook on a pizza stone but struggle to get the pizza on and off it, try this: parchment paper. Put the parchment paper on top of the pizza peel and the pizza on top of the parchment paper. Then transfer the pizza with the paper to the pizza stone. When it’s done cooking, it couldn’t be easier to get the pizza and paper back on the pizza peel.

"You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six."

— Yogi Berra