Saturday, April 6, 2013.
Making Pizza Out Of Demi-Garbage.
I spent much of the day working on our tax return. Although the results will not be pretty, I am not gripped with the fear that had made me hate this exercise in the past. It helps to be one of the seemingly few people (although I suspect there are far more of us than the hard right thinks) who believes that every nickel I pay in taxes returns benefits unmatched by any other investment.
After a two-and-a-half-hour radio show, Mary Ann announced that she wanted me to make grilled pizza. I would have objected, but making dough sounded better than rendering it into figures on TurboTax. I got right to work on it.
Although I have made dozens of pizzas on a grill in the past, I have never done so with the Big Green Egg. I made enough dough that I could conduct a test based on the Law of First Pancakes, First Waffles, and First Pizzas. It states simply, "The first one is the worst one." Indeed, the first pizza did not come out right, with the fire burning too hot. It burned the underside before the cheese on top was even warm.
When Mary Ann saw this, she said that she didn't really want me to bake the pizzas on the grill, but that she thought this is the way I like to do it. In fact, at home a pizza stone is the way to go, but I thought she wanted some special flavor or aroma from doing it on the charcoal grill.
I'm glad we got that worked out. Now on to the next hidden problems: sauce and the cheese. It took me longer than it should have, but in the middle of spooning the sauce onto the second crust, I noticed something funny about it. It was watery. I strained it, which reduced its volume by at least a third. And then it hit me. Mary Ann had cleaned out the freezers in the past couple of days. This was leftover pizza sauce from who knows where or when.
The cheese was funny, too. It came from a big bag of previously-grated mozzarella, but it was stuck together in clumps, and had a sort of wet quality. So there I was, with very nice crusts on which I'd worked for about three hours, being brought down to sub-mediocrity by these awful toppings.
But really: why should my cooking hobby supersede my wife's artistic endeavors in the saving and creative reclamation of old, near-dead ingredients?
Let's return to my own shortcomings. I have the technique of tossing pizza dough without tearing it with any great frequency. They bake perfectly and have a good, yeasty flavor. But the one thing I cannot seem to do is make a round crust. Ovals are the best I can do, no matter how hard I try. Well, they're unmistakably homemade, anyway.
The fourth and final pizza was the best of the batch. I gave up on the broken tomato sauce and used olive oil and fresh garlic. The gross cheese I had to live with. We topped it after it came out of the oven with arugula. And everybody seemed to be happy.
I came away with this solemn pledge: I will always make a fresh batch of pizza sauce and buy new cheese every time I make pizza in the future, no matter how many gallons of suspicious red water Mary Ann feels the need to employ.
