Holy cow, is tomorrow Friday already?
Indeed it is. Friday night means Pizza Night. Or, at least, it did when I was a little kid, back in the beforetime. We’d go to The Roman Forum (closed about six years ago) and it was magic. A restaurant too dark to read in, real candles on the tables, a suit of armor guarding the bathrooms.
Since then, I’ve grown up and pizza has both gotten better and gotten worse. It’s now possible to get frozen pizza in the grocery store that is of higher quality than the non-Roman Forum pizza I had access to in Michigan growing up. But picking up a gourmet pizza on the way home from work isn’t half as exciting at 47 years old as it was when I was 8. It’s not a quarter as exciting.
But there’s a part of me that delights when I find a truly awesome pizza and I’ve recently figured out how to make one that reminds me of the ones I used to get at the Roman Forum.
Let’s start with the ingredients:
First off, I made spaghetti sauce last weekend. If you don’t have homemade, I’m sure store-bought will do you right. In our grocery delivery this week, we got a ball of Whole Foods’ Pizza Dough (three bucks… expensive when you think about it but cheap if you don’t). Mozzarella from Costco. Pepperoni. Garlic Salt. An Italian herb spice grinder. A little bit of magical cooking spray. (Not shown: garlic, parmesan, and any other toppings you’re inclined to put on there.)
First off, spray your pizza pan and drop the dough on it.
Go away for an hour. Let it rise and bubble a little bit.
Pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees, then beat the dough up and stretch it out and put it on the pan. Get some garlic and butter and a basting brush.
Get you a small spoonful of the garlic and put it into a bowl (get the garlic oil too).
Put some butter in the bowl and then microwave it for 15 seconds and melt it and stir it (don’t put the spoon in the microwave).
Brush the butter and garlic onto the crust. Pay a lot of attention to the edge of the crust, but go over the whole thing. You’re worth it. (Leave enough in the bowl to go around the crust again in a few minutes.)
Now we’re going to parbake the crust for 8 minutes on 450.
Mmmmm! Look at that! Set the oven to 500 degrees.
Now go over the edge of the crust again with the garlic butter and use the rest of the garlic butter up.
Spoon your sauce onto the crust…
And then apply your cheese.
Add toppings to taste.
Sprinkle a little bit more cheese on top of all of the toppings to make it pretty, then go around the edge of the pizza on your buttered crust with some Garlic Salt.
Now put it back in the oven for 8-10 minutes (you set it to 500 already, right?). Keep an eye on the cheese to tell you when it’s done. When it comes out, place the pizza on a cookie cooling rack and apply your Italian Herbs from your grinder.
And sprinkle on some parmesan as a finisher.
Give the pizza 5 minutes to cool and cure and finish baking in its own residual heat. Put it on a cutting board and cut it.
And, seriously, look at that crust.
This pizza was GOOD. It was seriously good. It was so good, I want you to make it for yourself. The parbaking makes the crust amazing and the garlic butter pushes everything over the top.
It was SO good that I’m going to talk to Maribou and see if maybe there’s anything else we might have forgotten from Whole Foods because, seriously, we need another ball of pizza dough for Friday Night. Hey, you know what else would be good on this? Jalapeños. I should get some jalapeños.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is a shot of the ingredients, taken by the author.)
Ah, jeez. Steam’s having a sale.Report
Ooh! Thanks for the info!Report
I just picked up Stellaris, after having seen it recommended on this site. I’m not sure what to expect – the only other Paradox game I’ve played is Sengoku, which was confusing and buggy. But I’ll give it a shot. I also picked up a game for $2 or something called Orwell. Just started it. You’re very much an unwatched watcher in this one. Could be interesting.Report
I talked about Orwell a couple of weeks ago. It’s a pretty fun game and it makes you *FEEL* like your choices matter.Report
Did you notice there’s some Gremlins Inc. content on sale?Report
It’s all cosmetic.
Which is not to insult it! New wallpapers, new character portraits, new animations as you stroll about the board.
But it doesn’t prevent you from playing the game to its full potential.Report
They’re really been playing up the Sahara dust cloud (dubbed Godzilla, at least locally) on the news. I guess it’s a change from coronavirus. (This is not something to worry about. Yes, this one is unusually big, but this kind of thing happens every few years. It’s not, like, blowing mummy dust onto us or something)
Supposed to rain this weekend so I guess I do this weekend what I do every weekend now: faff on the Internet, maybe knit a little bit.
Next week I deliver Meals on Wheels a couple days and I admit I’m slightly apprehensive about keeping everyone safe, but then again: maybe having a woman who’s been keeping strictly at home (except for grocery trips) delivering food to people who are essentially homebound (but might see home-health workers) is about as safe as volunteer work can get these days.
We’re seeing some precipitous rises in cases here and I want to wait a bit to see some parsing of the numbers, but for now, I’m staying locked down. Still missing going out for “fun” things.Report
I want to say that this is the first dust cloud that actually hit my radar. I know that it’s something that happens pretty much every year but this is the first one in a while that might hit Colorado Springs as well.
GOOD LUCK.Report
Meh.
https://www.outtherecolorado.com/sky-darkening-saharan-dust-storm-headed-toward-colorado-but-will-it-hit/Report
Are we SURE that there isn’t any mummy dust in the cloud? Like, really sure?Report
there’s probably only about as much mummy dust in the cloud as there are bug feces in a bag of corn chips. It’s fine, it’s really fine.Report
I guess we’ll be okay as long as it’s under the FDA limit for eldritch horror particles.Report
That’s a nice looking pizza! You’re opening up the meat under/over the cheese debate, however. I’m under.
We’re heading out to the farm for a little family do this weekend. It’ll be nice to get out of town.Report
The spaghetti sauce has meat in it. So my answer to the debate is “both”.Report
I always cooked my pizzas partway with sauce and toppings (except for really really delicate veggies, like spinach, if doing that – that goes on at the very end) so I am meat-under-cheese because I do the cheese at the end for like the last couple minutes or so.
but I also do a lower temp for pizza – old oven, have already replaced the heating coil once, don’t want to do that again. So I go more like 350-400 F for pizza. Also I have crap teeth so I would rather have a soft bready crust than a hard crispy crustReport
Nice…when I used to make pizza I used a Boboli crust with tomato paste, motz, cooked spinach and chicken. It be tasty.Report
My Boboli recipe has pretty much identical non-crust ingredients to what you see above (sometimes, instead of garlic butter, I brush pesto onto the bread). I was tempted to write a “how to make a truly decadent Boboli” post after a particularly good one a week or so ago… but, man, this crust was SOOOO good, I had no choice when it came to writing about it.Report
I knew a woman I briefly dated that made home made pesto with walnuts. That woman could turn you on narrating how to make a salad.Report
This looks like a tasty piece of bread with some stuff on it. Maybe an open-faced hot sandwich of some kind? Definitely not a pizza though.
Ditch the pan; get a pizza stone. Crank the oven as high as it’ll go (usually 550) and let that stone get hot…. maybe an hour plus. Build your pizza, pop it in, voila. You’re welcome.Report
An hour? It was bad enough waiting a half hour for this one.Report
You want that perfect crust?Report
I finally achieved it!Report
Okay, talked to Maribou and we priced some pizza stones. Already I’m thinking that this thing will pretty much have to live in the oven unless it is being washed or we’re making baked potatoes or something.
(I’m already wondering how many catastrophes I’m going to have trying to get my pizza from the prep surface to the stone.)Report
If you buy a pizza stone, then you need a pizza peel
Once you get a pizza peel, then you need 00 flour
Once you get 00 flour….well, you get the idea.
“If you give a mouse a cookie” is not just a kids’ bookReport
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I think they are $40? Totally worth it. And if you are feeling frisky, ask your local shop to do a ‘half bake’ where you finish it in the oven. Very good and better than delivery.Report
Keep it in the oven. It works as a heat sink, helping distribute heat more evenly. The oven will take a bit longer to heat but you’ll avoid hot and cold spots.
There are pricey ones but they’re basically all the same; a slab of high temp clay. Don’t overdo it. Just get a big one so you can stretch that dough nice and thin.Report
Okay. We got one.
Report forthcoming.Report
We have had our first transfer-related catastrophe.
It wasn’t a total catastrophe, granted. But we’re going to have to figure something out.Report
It’s curing as we speak.
The crust is crunchy, like a breadstick. I buttered the ever-living crap out of the dough before putting it on the stone and salted and cheesed it so it was quite nice…
But I’m going to have to do some compare/contrasts with the parbaked crust because I don’t know that the stone exceeded the parbake.
Tentative conclusion: More Study Needed.Report
Today my younger son and I played with a new Hot Wheels track. After some cars crashed, I exclaimed, “Double crash!” Unbeknownst to me my Siri was on taking a dictation. She wrote:
Democrats
Gulp!Report
That looks delicious.Report