And God Said, Let there Be Pizza & Good Beverage

According to reference.com, pizza is the third most popular food in America (behind hamburgers and hot dogs).  And for good reason … the strong savory flavors, the richness and saltiness of the cheese, the sweetness of the tomatoes or other sauces, and the chewiness of the bread make for a delectable culinary experience.  So it makes sense to make the first food presentation on this website about pizza.  

I’ve posted many photos of food I’ve prepared on Facebook in past years, and my pizzas have consistently gotten the most likes … along with the most requests for recipes. I’m always happy to share recipes. No secrets here. But it should be remembered that pizza is the jazz of American popular food in that it’s always an act of improvisation and different every time. That’s true even at the big chain pizzas, where the sauce or the cheese or the ingredient proportions or the temperature of the oven or the rise of the dough will be different from one occasion to the next. And it’s even more true at home, where the variation of ingredients, or the type and flavor of the sauce, or the types of cheese can … and should be … altered at a whim. In my case, I’ll generally buy stuff specifically to put on a pizza … but on the other hand, I use whatever I have at hand, and, as happens in improvisational music, throw in any riffs and licks that catch my imagination.

On occasions this results in some mediocre products, because my gastronomic imaginings and whims don’t always work out the way I hoped. But as long as I follow some basic tricks I’ve discovered, the mediocrity is never very profound, and just as often the product is pretty stellar. Either way, the simple truth is that it’s rare that I’m horribly disappointed with my own pizza, and very common that I’m underwhelmed with a bought pizza. Thus, bought pizza has become for me a self-conscious act of convenience, only justifable for those times that for whatever reason I can’t make my own.

And what has to be born in mind here is that Great Pizza is not that hard to make if the basic tricks are kept in mind. And what are the “basic tricks I’ve discovered over the years?”

1. Without a doubt, the number one trick for the typical home oven is to “think dry.” I think this would be less of an issue if you had a real, very hot pizza oven. But assuming you’re cooking in your own kitchen in a commercial range, water and moisture are the enemy of good pizza, unless you like soggy crust and poorly baked middles.

Q: And how to think dry?
A: Don’t put wet ingredients on the pie
For instance,

• I like fresh tomatoes on some pizzas. But I find that if I don’t drain sliced or diced tomaotoes (sometimes without, sometimes in addition to a thin layer of tomato sauce), I inevitably end up with a gummy mess. So I spread them out on towels (paper or non-linting cotton, like a flour-sack towel), put another layer of toweling on top, and compress them until there’s no more water to wring out of them. Or optionally, especially for really juicy tomatoes I put them in a colander over the sink, and mash the water out of them with some sort of tool like a bowl that fits down inside the colander, and then pat them dry with a towel. I might mention that I especially like cherry and grape tomatoes on my pizzas, and they’re easier to deal with. I just put them on the towel, and crush them with another another towel to smash them dry.
• I also like canned artichokes, which are even more problematic than tomatoes. If I happen to have whole ‘chokes, I find it works well to grab them in my grubby little hand and squeeze hard over the sink, mashing them till they’re a sage-colored mush. For quartered chokes or whole chokes, toweling them as described above with tomatoes also works well. On the rare occasion that I indulgently self-please with fresh ‘chokes, I wouldn’t dream of defiling them by smashing, in y hand or otherwise. Rather, I take the cooked hearts, cut them the way I want them, in wedges, slices, half-inch dices, or quarters or whatever, and put them on toweling long enough to render them somewhat dryer than they are just after boiling.
• Sometimes, especially when I have my garden in the summer and am picking more summer squashes than we can eat, give away, I like zucchini on my pizza. They too are wet. There are two solutions to this. First is to think in advance … at least several hours – or even the day before – lay 1/4-inch slices with a just a bit of salt out on toweling, sprinkle them with a little salt, then lay toweling on top, giving them an hour or two before mashing down on them with moderate pressure to squeeze out the water a few times. When they’re ready, they should be the texture of barely damp cardboard. Or alternatively, I spritz a tiny bit of olive oil over a pan (parchment paper makes cleanup easier), sprinkle the zucchini slices very lightly with salt, and bake them at 250 or so until they’re pretty much dehydrated. Or … if you feel up to it and really self-indulgent, they’re great deep fried. No breading necessary. Cook two or three minutes till a little brown, then drain well on paper.
• Remember that fresh mushrooms also contain a lot of water, so it’s a good idea to put them in a skillet with a tablespoon or 2 of olive oil or butter and cook them till the water boils away. They can be sprinkled with a garlic powder or black pepper while cooking if you like. For a strong mushroom flavor chop them; for nice pieces of mushroom, cut them any size desired and cook them at least till the water boils away (sometimes I’ll cook mine till they’re browned and little crispy).
• On some pizzas I also like fresh cheeses, like ricotta or fresh mozzarella (while I didn’t make it, I ate a very good slice of pizza once made with a smear of bechamel). These cheeses are also wet, so just be conscious when you’re baking the pizza that the crust may need a little extra time to get uniformly crispy if you’re using globs of those types of cheeses as toppings.

2. Careful with the salt and grease!

• Next to being too wet, the most common mistakes I’ve made with pizza has been to make it too salty or too greasy. The first consideration for either would be the sauce that you use. A meat sauce that is saturated with fat is never, in my opinion, a good option for pizza, because the pizza of my dreams always has a certain lightness and tartness that is just not compatible with meaty tomato gravy. And while most commercial sauces use salt, some are much saltier than others. Comparing the labels can be helpful. Or better yet, if you’re lucky enough to grow your own tomatoes, making your own is even better. I sometimes use my own homemade tomato paste to spread on in a mixture of my secret ingredient, onion jam.
• Of course I never took a salt shaker to a pizza, and I think very few cooks would do that. But remember that cheese is salty by definition, and dry cheeses like parmesan and romano and pecorino are quite salty. In fact, for salt-lovers who feel impelled to add a little sodium chloride to their finished pizza, a shake of one of the dry cheeses rather than table salt is virtually always a preferred option. I do not usually use any of the softer aged moldy cheeses on pizza, although I’ve had good pizza in Italy with gorgonzola, which is also very salty. Even some mozarellas are saltier than others, so taste them first before using a thick layer that accentuates the saltiness of other ingredients.
• Such sausages as pepperoni, meanwhile, are not only pretty salty, but can be greasy to a messy fault. Same with bacon or pancetta, which should generally be diced and fried in a dry skillet before using to make sure it has the right texture as well as to cook some of the salt and grease out of it. I actually like to use ribbons of prosciutto or speck (the cheap, stuff that Italians would angrily denounce, calling it imitation or fake, works fine for this). Fat is usually not so much an issue with these, and I actually add a bit of oil to a pan to crisp them prior to putting them on the pizza. But be conscious of the salt levels.
• Think about the saltiness of any toppings you put on. Olives, for instance, are variably salty, while other little morsels you might want to put on it can be very salty. Rinsing can help, if you like the flavor but want to cut the salt of salt-preserved items like olives. Capers, for instance, are also preserved in salt, and for pizza should generally be rinsed if they’re going to be used. I personally don’t like whole anchovies on pizza, more because of the extreme saltiness than the fishy taste. (I do like some tomato sauces to which a small bit of anchovy has been cooked in as a base flavor — but if there’s even a hint of fishiness, it’s too much). Anyway, any topping that might add salt should be considered.

3. Try to keep it simple

This is actually the hardest thing for me to keep in mind. My imagination runs away with me, and I start hauling whatever bits and packages I have in the refrigerator and end up with just kind of too much. So while I often end up with something over the top, I advise simplicity, with limited ingredients.

As a paradigm for simplicity, I am reminded here of a segment on Stanley Tucci’s wildly popular CNN series, “Searching for Italy,” which as I write this is one of the most popular weekly hours on TV (easily searchable online, if you’re interested). Tucci is in Naples, and stops at a street vendor’s pizza concession to watch the guy practice his craft. As Tucci has just spent the previous 5 or 10 minutes explaining, the tomatoes used for this sauce are not just any tomatoes, but the famed plum tomatoes grown in San Marzano, on the slopes of Mt.Vesuvius. But by all appearance the tomato sauce is utter simplicity, consisting of …. tomatoes. Maybe a little salt? Maybe not? And this very simple sauce is ladled rather thickly onto a 7 or 8-inch medium crust, quickly adorned with a few ridges of fresh mozzarella, and slid into a hot oven. It all looks sublime, and I’m going to try something like this very soon. Just. This. Simple.

Or maybe it will be just that simple. I will be sorely tempted to put some ribboned basil leaves, or … something, on top to give it a little more in the way of variegated color. Maybe even on the finished rather than pre-baked pizza? Because I’m impulsive by nature. But in full awareness that I often get caught up in my own fantasies and desire to use aging ingredients in the fridge, I try to limit my toppings to maybe three or four things … a small enough number that individual ingredients can actually be tasted.

4. The Crust

I sometimes make my own crust. But while I’ve gotten pretty good at making bread since the pandemic began, the truth is that someprepackaged doughs are both quite good and so cheap to buy it’s hardly worth the effort of doing it myself. . Specifically, I like Trader Joe’s crusts pretty well, particularly the Garlic and Herb one. I think it runs $1.25 or so for a 16 oz doughball. Even better, if they’re available, are the packaged pizza doughs from the “Portland Pie Co.” At my local Hannafords Grocery Store, the 20 oz garlic doughball costs about $2. I also like the Shipyard Beer variety from the Portland Pie Co. There could be good producers like the Portland Pie Company all over the country, and I would recommend checking to see what your grocery store has and checking them out. If you are inclined to make your own dough, there are plenty of recipes online, some of which work better than others. But since I like a crisp spongy crust, my favorite pizza dough is the same as my go-to crusty bread dough – the “six-fold kneadless bread dough” from King Arthur. But it takes a little over 3 hours – most of which is waiting – to arrive at a ball of dough with this recipe, so it does take some planning (The recipe calls for a kilo/2.2 lbs, of flour, which is plenty enough to make a 20 oz pizza crust and a large loaf of bread. The pizza crust actually works better if it’s refrigerated for some period of time, up to several days, before baking

You want to put your ball of dought on a lightly floured surface, and shape your dough to the basic form – rectangle for a sheet pan, round for a pizza pan, before trying to spread it out fully. There’s a general consensus among professional chefs that it’s best to spread the dough with your fingers than to roll it out, so as to leave more of the internal bubbles that form in the dough. Something I’ve learned is that if you have trouble getting the dough to a nice uniform thickness over the entire pan (as I always do), at least make sure the middle is the thinnist part, because it takes longer to cook. When I get the dough to the shape and size I want it, I sprinkle a few grains of cornmeal on the pan, which will make it slide off onto a cutting board easily (flour will work, but cornmeal is like little ball-bearings and actually looks nice too.

The oven should be hot … 450 to 500 … and in my oven the lower rack works best. I often put it in at 500 for five minutes, then turn it to 450 till it seems done. If the crust seems done but the top is not as dry and/or golden as you like, you can switch it to the broiler to finish cooking the top. If , and you should bake your pizza on the lower rack. As long as the pizza is not too thick, you should be able to guage the doneness of the bread by the color and texure of the crusty edges. If the pizza is too wet, though, or if the bread is pretty thick, it’s can be a good thing to lift the edge of the pizza and use a utensil to thump the bottom more toward the middle. It should produce a hollow sound.

I’ve seen some recipes that suggest putting all the toppings on without the cheese, then once the toppings are done, pulling the pizza out, sprinkling the cheese on, then putting it back in the over to melt. I haven’t ever done that, but I may try. Seems like a reasonable idea for some pizzas. Meanwhile, pretty often, I will get the pizza done, then turn off the oven and turn on the broiler, and giving it a few minutes, watching it closely, till the cheese gets well melted and, along with any ingredients I purposely put on top of the cheese for this reason, becomes a little caramelized and browned.