pizza

[Bloganuary] Pizza

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What snack would you eat right now?

Pizza.

Always pizza.

Forever pizza.

A pizza slides off a peel into a wood-fired oven. One half seems to have salami and olives, the other half perhaps just cheese and tomato. — Every pizza is beautiful. Except for the half of this one that has huge chongin’ black olives on (eww!).

Do you know what I love about pizza? Everything. Every little thing¹.

First up, it’s a bread product. Bread is magical. You take flour, water, a pinch of salt, and a certain other magical ingredient, knead it, let it rest, knock it back, and bake it, and you end up with food. The magical ingredient is yeast, and it’s a tiny living organism that eats carbohydrates and excretes a lot of carbon dioxide and a little bit of alcohol. Humans use both, but whether you’re brewing beer or baking bread the process feels somewhat mystical and otherworldly.

A circle of pizza dough on a worktop, a rolling pin atop it. — Making pizza, like making any bread, is a wonderful experience. But pizza can be brilliant even if somebody else makes it.

But it’s not like rising a loaf nor is it like finishing a flatbread. Pizza dough is risen, but kept thin to act as a base for everything else. And already there’s such variety: do you spin it out in a classic thin Neapolitan style to get those deliciously crispy leopard-print cornicione bites? Do you roll it out thick to hold a maximum depth of tomato sauce and other toppings when you pile it high, per the Chicago tradition? Do you go somewhere in-between? Or perhaps do something different entirely like a calzone or panzarotto? There’s no wrong answer, but already so many options.

Pizza is cooked fast: the relatively thin surface absorbs heat quickly, and you keep your oven hot, baking the bread and heating the toppings at the same time. If you’re feeling fancy and fun then you can add some extras as it cooks. Crack an egg into the centre, perhaps, or drizzle some chilli oil across the entire thing. Or keep it plain and simple and let the flavours combine as the dish cooks. Whatever you do, you’ll be enjoying delicious hot food within minutes of putting it into the oven: the cooking-speed to deliciousness ratio is perhaps the highest of any savoury food.

Close-up of a pizza whose four quarters contain four different toppings. — Many pizzas² include tomato sauce and cheese as basic toppings, which is already genius: both are rich in naturally-occurring monosodium glutamate, which coupled with the rich fats and saltiness in the cheese and the sweetness and mild acidity of the tomato makes them frightfully moreish even before you’d added your favourite meats or vegetables.

Pizza is incredibly versatile, not just in the diversity of ways in which you might prepare and serve it, but also in the ways in which you can eat it. Sit at a plate with a knife and fork. Divide it into slices and pick up one at a time (with optional “New York fold” if it’s otherwise too limp). Carry a large slice on-the-go, al taglio. Fold it into a portafoglio so you don’t risk losing a single jalapeño off your hot-and-spicy meal, if you fancy. There’s no wrong answer.

If my favourite meal is pizza³, my second-favourite has to be leftover pizza. Because it reheats easily and makes a great next-morning snack. Or can be enjoyed cold, hours or days after the fact. It’s even suitable for parbaking and chilling or freezing, making it an excellent convenience food⁴. It’s widely produced in a variety of styles (and qualities) in restaurants and takeaways wherever you go, and its convenient shape means that it can be boxed and stacked with little more help than, perhaps, one of those little plastic “tables” that stop the centre of the cardboard box sagging onto it.

So yeah, I’ll take a slice to go with mozzarella, peppers and red onion for my snack, please.

¹ If you know me well, you’re probably well-aware of my love of pizza, although you might previously have seen it articulated so thoroughly.

² #NotAllPizzas! You don’t have to feel constrained by the bread-plus-tomato-plus-cheese-plus-other stuff paradigm. Swap out the tomato sauce for barbecue sauce on the base of a meaty pizza with a spicy tang or omit it entirely for a pizza bianca. Replace the cheese or remove it entirely for a vegan or lactose-free alternative. Or dispense with both entirely and spread pesto on your base, topped with roasted vegetables! The sky’s the limit!

³ It is. What gave it away?

⁴ Obviously I prefer a lovingly-crafted hand-stretched pizza, freshly-made under ideal circumstances. But pizza is so good that it’s still usually perfectly acceptable even when it’s mass-produced at economy scale and frozen for later consumption, which is more than can be said for many foods.

Further Lessons in Wood-Fired Pizza

Earlier this month, I made my first attempt at cooking pizza in an outdoor wood-fired oven. I’ve been making pizza for years: how hard can it be?

Charred non-stick coating on a tray. — Do you know what temperature Teflon (PTFE) burns at? I do. Now. (About 470ºC.)

It turned out: pretty hard. The oven was way hotter than I’d appreciated and I burned a few crusts. My dough was too wet to slide nicely off my metal peel (my wooden peel disappeared, possibly during my house move last year), and my efforts to work-around this by transplanting cookware in and out of the oven quickly lead to flaming Teflon and a shattered pizza stone. I set up the oven outside the front door and spent all my time running between the kitchen (at the back of the house) and the front door, carrying hot tools, while hungry children snapped at my ankles. In short: mistakes were made.

Pizza dough balls under cling film on a black marble surface. — I roped in Robin to help make dough, because he’s damn good at it. And because I had a mountain of work to do today.

I suspect that cooking pizza in a wood-fired oven is challenging in the same way that driving a steam locomotive is. I’ve not driven one, except in simulators, but it seems like you’ve got a lot of things to monitor at the same time. How fast am I going? How hot is the fire? How much fuel is in it? How much fuel is left? How fast is it burning through it? How far to the next station? How’s the water pressure? Oh fuck I forget to check on the fire while I was checking the speed…

Digital infared thermometer display reading 246ºC. — “How hot is it?” is a question I’m now much better at answering. Thanks, technology! This oven’s still warming up. (!)

So it is with a wood-fired pizza oven. If you spend too long preparing a pizza, you’re not tending the fire. If you put more fuel on the fire, the temperature drops before it climbs again. If you run several pizzas through the oven back-to-back, you leech heat out of the stone (my oven’s not super-thick, so it only retains heat for about four consecutive pizzas then it needs a few minutes break to get back to an even temperature). If you put a pizza in and then go and prepare another, you’ve got to remember to come back 40 seconds later to turn the first pizza. Some day I’ll be able to manage all of those jobs alone, but for now I was glad to have a sous-chef to hand.

Pizza in an oven, fire raging behind and jumping onto the floor of the oven. — Also, if too much of the flour you use to keep your peel moves slick falls into the oven, it catches fire. Now you have two fires to attend to.

Today I was cooking out amongst the snow, in a gusty crosswind, and I learned something else new. Something that perhaps I should have thought of already: the angle of the pizza oven relative to the wind matters! As the cold wind picked up speed, its angle meant that it was blowing right across the air intake for my fire, and it was sucking all of the heat out of the back of the oven rather than feeding the flame and allowing the plasma and smoke to pass through the top of the oven. I rotated the pizza oven so that the air blew into rather than across the oven, but this fanned the flames and increased fuel consumption, so I needed to increase my refuelling rate… there are just so many variables!

A salami and basil pizza with olives on half. — You know what, though? Everything turned out pretty-much okay.

The worst moment of the evening was probably when I took a bite out of a pizza that, it turned out, I’d shunted too-deep into the oven and it had collided with the fire. How do I know? Because I bit into a large chunk of partially-burned wood. Not the kind of smoky flavour I was looking for.

But apart from that, tonight’s pizza-making was a success. Cooking in a sub-zero wind was hard, but with the help of my excellent sous-chef we churned out half a dozen good pizzas (and a handful of just-okay pizzas), and more importantly: I learned a lot about the art of cooking pizza in a box of full of burning wood. Nice.

How Not to use A Pizza Oven

Clearly those closest to me know me well, because for my birthday today I received a beautiful (portable: it packs into a bag!) wood-fired pizza oven, which I immediately assembled, test-fired, cleaned, and prepped with the intention of feeding everybody some homemade pizza using some of Robin‘s fabulous bread dough, this evening.

Fuelled up with wood pellets the oven was a doddle to light and bring up to temperature. It’s got a solid stone slab in the base which looked like it’d quickly become ideal for some fast-cooked, thin-based pizzas. I was feeling good about the whole thing.

But then it all began to go wrong.

Animated GIF showing the fire blazing as seen through the viewing window on the front of the oven. — The confined space quickly heats up to a massive 400-500ºC.

If you’re going to slip pizzas onto hot stone – especially using a light, rich dough like this one – you really need a wooden peel. I own a wooden peel… somewhere: I haven’t seen it since I moved house last summer. I tried my aluminium peel, but it was too sticky, even with a dusting of semolina or a light layer of oil. This wasn’t going to work.

I’ve got some stone slabs I use for cooking fresh pizza in a conventional oven, so I figured I’d just preheat them, assemble pizzas directly on them, and shunt the slabs in. Easy as (pizza) pie, right?

Pizza on fire in oven. — Within 60 seconds the pizza was cooked and, in its elevated position atop a second layer of stone, the crust began to burn. The only-mildy-charred bits were delicious, though.

This oven is hot. Seriously hot. Hot enough to cook the pizza while I turned my back to assemble the next one, sure. But also hot enough to crack apart my old pizza stone. Right down the middle. It normally never goes hotter than the 240ºC of my regular kitchen oven, but I figured that it’d cope with a hotter oven. Apparently not.

So I changed plan. I pulled out some old round metal trays and assembled the next pizza on one of those. I slid it into the oven and it began to cook: brilliant! But no sooner had I turned my back than… the non-stick coating on the tray caught fire! I didn’t even know that was a thing that could happen.

Flames flickering at the back of a pizza oven. — Hello fire. I failed to respect you sufficiently when I started cooking. I’ve learned my lesson now.

Those first two pizzas may have each cost me a piece of cookware, but they tasted absolutely brilliant. Slightly coarse, thick, yeasty dough, crisped up nicely and with a hint of woodsmoke.

But I’m not sure that the experience was worth destroying a stone slab and the coating of a metal tray, so I’ll be waiting until I’ve found (or replaced) my wooden peel before I tangle with this wonderful beast again. Lesson learned.

Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app

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The owner of a pizza restaurant in the US has discovered the DoorDash delivery app has been selling his food cheaper than he does – while still paying him full price for orders.

A pizza for which he charged $24 (£20) was being advertised for $16 on DoorDash – and when he secretly ordered it himself, the app paid his restaurant the full $24 while charging him $16.

He had not asked to be put on the app.

…

Zoe Kleinman (BBC News)

This entire news story is comedy gold.

So it looks like food delivery network DoorDash try to demonstrate demand for their services by providing them even if you didn’t ask, then show you how popular they were. So if you run a pizza restaurant, they might start selling your pizzas as “deliveries” to customers, then come and pick them up as “collections” and deliver them. Because they’re trying to drum up support and show how invaluable they would be to you, they might even resell your product at a loss in order to get customers on-board early. It’s all pretty slimy, but I’m sure that wherever they’re operating (New York, in this case) they’ve had the common sense to make all the legal language line up.

(If you can’t see the problem with this model, remember that the customers will be reasonably assuming that the restaurant is involved, so when their pizza turns up cold they’ll phone the restaurant and complain and ask for their money back [or slate them in reviews online]. Plus, let’s not forget that this is a strongarm tactic: once a restaurant has been seen to be offering delivery, customers will be upset if you take the option away… even if you never actually offered it in the first place.)

Anyway: this guy noticed that his restaurant was on DoorDash without his consent, and that they were selling his pizzas for less than he did. So he ordered them from himself: he paid DoorDash $160 for the pizzas, DoorDash paid him $240 for the pizzas, DoorDash sent somebody around to pick them up from him and deliver them to his neighbour. Free money.

Next time he did it, the restaurateur didn’t even bother to put toppings on the pizzas. After all, he didn’t need to be eating them anyway! He was just paying DoorDash to pay him (more) to move them from place to place. The restaurateur and his friend pulled off several off these trades and DoorDash never seemed to catch on. With some investigation, they discovered that it was probably an imperfect scraper that had resulted in the price DoorDash advertised being lower than the price they would pay the pizzeria, which immediately makes me wonder whether you could honeypot it with deliberate scraper-traps… (Owing to various bits of work I’ve done in the past, I’m pretty well-versed in offensive and defensive screen scraper techniques.)

And to finish the news article off, we’re reminded about the attitude of Mosayoshi Son, the CEO of DoorDash’s parent company (which incidentally also tried to buy, and then got sued by, WeWork, demonstrating his financially-savvy). Recently, defending his company’s general trend to attract venture capital and then lose it very quickly, he compared himself first to Jesus, who was also a “high-profile visionary who was initially misunderstood”, and then to the Beatles, who “did not become a success overnight”.

Comedy gold I tell you. And now I want pizza. (Especially if I can persuade a stupid startup to pay me to make and then eat it myself.)

Pineapple

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Channelate

Fellow pineapple-pizza lovers of the world, unite! Let us rise up against those who oppose us, and especially against those freaks who like anchovies on their pizza.

I Staked Out My Local Dominos to See Just How Accurate Its Pizza Tracker Is

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It wasn’t that long ago that I stumbled across a piece in The Atlantic about how TurboTax uses bogus progress bars when completing a tax return. Since reading this, I got to thinking about the most important progress bar in my life — the Domino’s Pizza Tracker. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the Domino’s Pizza Tracker is the colorful, light-up progress bar in the Domino’s app that tracks each step of your pizza’s progress, from when it’s first being prepared until it arrives at your home.

Curious about its accuracy, I decided to stake out my local Domino’s. The plan is as follows: I’m going to place an order for delivery while hanging out in the restaurant, then compare each progress mark on the tracker with what’s actually happening with my pizza. Then I’m going to follow the delivery guy in my car until he arrives at my house, where my wife will be ready to receive him. For the record, I’m going into this hoping that the pizza tracker is not in fact a lie, but I’ll be honest, I do have my suspicions, so I plan to get to the bottom of this hunch.

…

Brian VanHooker (MEL)

I knew it! I totally knew it! I’ve long been highly-sceptical of Dominos’ Pizza Tracker ever since – long ago – Paul got me thinking about how much easier it’d be for them to have it just “tick along” than to actually, you know, track pizza. Still, I’m pleased to see some serious (?) investigative journalism into the matter!

Note #13621

1. Step out of my office.

2. Receive handful of free pizza.

Thanks @PapaJohnsUK!

Ideas

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Ideas (Invisible Bread)

Invisible Bread

Review of The White Rabbit

This review of The White Rabbit originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.

The White Rabbit, 21 Friars Entry, Oxford OX1 2BY, United Kingdom.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Lovely to selection of beers and great pizzas, at typical Oxford prices.

Pizza Cake

I’m a big fan of pizza. I use it to celebrate people moving house back to Aber; I use it to bribe people to help me move house; I’ve been known to travel into the next country over in search of the “right” one; over the course of the 300 or so Troma Nights I hosted between 2004 and 2010, it got to the point that our local pizza place would bring our food in through the front door and directly to each consumer; and once we got as far south as Naples, finding the world’s best pizza was among the first things on Claire and I’s minds. I like pizza: you get the picture.

More-lately, I’m also a big fan of making pizza. I’ve always enjoyed making bread, but over the last five years or so I’ve become particularly fascinated with making pizzas. I make a pretty good one now, I think, although I’m still learning and periodically experimenting with different flour blends, cooking surfaces, kneading techniques and so on. Those of you who know how capable I am of being a giant nerd about things should understand what I mean when I say that I’ve gotten to be a pizza nerd.

In pizza-related circles of the Internet (yes, these exist), there’s recently been some talk about pizza cake: a dish made by assembling several pizzas, stacked on top of one another in a cake tin – ideally one with a removable base – and then baking them together as a unit. Personally, I think that the name “pizza cake” isn’t as accurate nor descriptive as alternative names “pizza pie” (which unfortunately doesn’t translate so well over the Atlantic) or “pizza lasagne” (which is pretty universal). In any case, you can by now imagine what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is an artery-destroying monster.

Not wanting to squander my dough-making skills on something that must be cut to size (proper pizza dough should always be stretched, or in the worst case rolled, to size – did I mention that I’d been getting picky about this kind of stuff?), I opted to go for the lazy approach and use some pre-made dough, from a chilled can. That was probably my first and largest mistake, but a close second was that I followed through with this crazy idea at all.

I didn’t have as deep a cake tin as I’d have liked, either, so my resulting pizza cake was shorter and squatter than I might have liked. Nonetheless, it came together reasonably well, albeit with some careful repositioning of the ingredients in order to provide the necessary structural support for each layer as it was added. I eventually built four layers: that is, from bottom to top – dough, tomato, cheese, pepperoni & mushrooms, dough, tomato, cheese, pepperoni & mushrooms, dough, tomato, cheese, pepperoni & mushrooms, dough, tomato, cheese, pepperoni & mushrooms. As I went along I found myself thinking about calzone.

Using a cake tin with a removable base turned out to be an incredibly wise move, as it proved possible to separate the food from its container by simply running around the outside and then tapping the tin from underneath. It had the weight and consistency of a cake of similar size, and smelled richly like freshly-based bread and cheese: exactly what you’d expect, really. I sliced it into six wedges, “cake-style”, and served it with a side salad to my courageous test pilots.

Ultimately, though, the experience wasn’t one we’re likely to repeat: the resulting dish was less-satisfying than if I’d just gone to the effort of making four regular pizzas in the first place. It was impossible to get an adequately crispy crust over the expanded surface area without risking burning the cheese, and as a result the central bread was unsatisfyingly stodgy, regardless of how thin I’d rolled it in anticipation of this risk. Having toppings spread through the dish was interesting, but didn’t add anything in particular that’s worthy of note. And while we ate it all up, we wouldn’t have chosen it instad of an actual pizza unless we’d never tried it before – once was enough.

But that’s just our experience: if you give pizza cake/pie/lasagne a go, let me know how you get on. Meanwhile, I’ll stick to making my own dough and using it to make my own regular, flat pizzas. The way that the pizza gods intended!

Earth Sunset

As regular readers will no-doubt know, the other Earthlings and I are currently in the process of moving house. Last weekend, as well as watching the Eurovision Song Contest, of course, we packed a lot of boxes (mostly stuffed with board games) and moved a handful of them over to New Earth, our new home, by car (this weekend, we’re using a van, which – in accordance with our BSG theming – is dubbed the “Raptor”).

Isis, Ruth and JTA's car, laden with boxes. — Isis, Ruth and JTA’s car, laden with boxes.

Part of this pack-and-move process has been to cut down on all of the things that we no longer want or need. Of particular concern was all of the booze we’ve collected. I’m not just talking about the jam-jar of moonshine that Matt R left here after our last Murder Mystery, although it is one of the more-terrifying examples. No; I’m talking about things like the Tesco Value Vodka, the blackcurrant schnapps, and the heaps of absinthe we’ve got littering the place up.

The more we drink, the less we have to box up and move, you see! So we’ve spent a lot of the last fortnight inventing new (sometimes quite-experimental) cocktails that make use of the ingredients that we’d rather not have to take with us to the new place. We’ve refrained from buying alcohol, promising ourselves that we won’t buy any more until we’ve gotten rid of the stuff we’ve got and don’t want by one means or another. And it’s just about working.

JTA, Paul and Ruth eat pizza and drink Earth Sunset.

Earth Sunset – a mixture of cheap vodka, grenadine, and lemonade, with stacks of ice – caused some debate when Paul compared the drink to a Tequila Sunrise, claiming that “it isn’t a sunrise without orange juice”. He’s certainly right that you don’t get that cool “gradient” effect without something lighter (both in colour and specific density) to float on top of the grenadine. But on the other hand – as JTA pointed out – this is an Earth Sunset: it’s name has little to do with what it looks like and a lot to do with what it represents – the end of our life on (what we’re now calling) Old Earth.

Earth's "Battlestar Galactica" poster, hanging in New Earth. JTA, under Ruth's direction, adjusts Earth's "Red Kite" photo (which we eventually decided to move elsewhere). — Earth’s “Battlestar Galactica” poster, hanging in New Earth. JTA, under Ruth’s direction, adjusts Earth’s “Red Kite” photo (which we eventually decided to move elsewhere).

For those who are following our progression and comparing it to Battlestar Galactica canon, you’ll be glad to see that this works. We arrived on Earth, but now we’re leaving because it was irradiated and inhospitable (okay, perhaps it’s a slight exaggeration, but the house was a little run-down and under-maintained). And so we find ourselves making our home on New Earth.

There’ll be a housewarming thingy for local people (and distant people who are that-way inclined, but we’re likely to have something later on for you guys) sometime soon: watch this space.

Offshore Oil Strike

The Metro have a fabulous article about this board game:

Yes, it’s a game about drilling for oil using offshore digs. With a remarkable picture on the front of a rig in distinctly stormy seas. And look – there’s BP‘s logo on it: yes, Offshore Oil Strike got their official endorsement when it was released in the 1970s, but it’s coming back to haunt them now as board game collectors dig out their old copies and give it one last go (apparently it never sold very well, not least because it’s a dull and uninspiring game).

I was particularly amused by the card which reads “Blow-out! Rig damaged. Oil slick clean-up costs. Pay $1 million.” – one of the worst cards to draw as a player. A whole million dollars?

That diversion aside, there’s more fun and games here on Earth:

The other night, we got the chance to try Fat Boyz Pizza, our second-nearest local pizza place (after the Pizza Hut Express just around the corner). I was reasonably impressed: good-sized pizza at a reasonable price, very tasty, and only slightly too greasy (we’re talking a little bit too much grease, not Hollywood Pizza – from ~~whom~~ whose menu we ordered for many, many years back in Aberystwyth – here).
We have a green woodpecker who visits our garden. I’ve never seen a woodpecker in an urban environment before, but this one certainly seems keen. We speculate that his appearance right after we overturned a couple of ants’ nests while digging the garden is not a coincidence, though, but rather a tasty treat.
We’ve started planting! Only herbs and flowers, so far – and we’re probably too late in the year to kick off many vegetables – but it’s a start. Our garden still has a long way to go.

Getting Your Money’s Worth On Pizza Hut Salads

I’ve always enjoyed free food at pizza places. On my 16th birthday, I went to Winston’s Pizza in Preston for their lunchtime buffet “all you can eat” deal. We took board games. Four hours (and many, many slices of pizza and bottles of beer) later, we were finally thrown out: the manager let us have the food and even the drinks for free in exchange for us leaving. That was a fab birthday party.

Once, I got a free meal from Pizza Hut when they used to do their “food in 10 minutes or it’s free” deal. The timers are tamper-proof, so the trick is ensuring that the waitstaff get distracted by something on the way back to your table. They don’t do that special offer any more. I wonder why?

But here’s somebody who really takes the biscuit. Well; the salad, anyway. A number of particularly creative Taiwanese students have found the way to maximise their ROI at Pizza Hut, using their engineering inginuity to fill a salad bowl (without spilling) to over a foot high. Well worth a look.

Hollywood Pizza And BT Online Billing

If only BT.com online billing provided an XML feed… we could integrate our Hollywood Pizza order call times and lengths into the Troma Night web site.

Probably not a good thing, actually.

Security Through Obscurity Reaches A New Low

PowerPizza! It’s a laptop bag that looks like a pizza box! No longer do you have to worry about your attractive laptop being an easy target for thieves – who’d want to steal a pizza box?

Fucking crazy. But I love it.

Footnotes