I have a lot to say about pizza. I expect that this will be the beginning of a series of posts on the subject. I grew up in New York. My first experience of pizza was the wonderful kind of pizza that was around the city in the 1970s and ’80s. If you got a pie to go, it always came in the red and white box that said “You’ve tried all the rest, now try the best”. These places always offered Neapolitan or Sicilian pies, always sold by the slice, and always had the big, steel pizza ovens. Gas, not coal or wood. They seemed to be run and manned by pizza artists of either Greek or Italian descent. The pizza was always good. I don’t think I ever encountered bad pizza until I tried Domino’s as a teenager. Looking back, I realize that the ubiquity of the take-out boxes probably indicated a common supplier for all of these places and thus a common source of flour, cheese and sauce, ergo the consistent goodness of the product. Returning to NYC over the years I’ve noticed that mediocre pizza has crept into the city and that those boxes are no longer in every pizza joint. Could there be a connection? Who knows. I’m not entirely alone in my opinion: http://nymag.com/daily/food/2009/05/friedlander.html

Frank Pepe’s pizza in Connecticut has generated a lot of hype around its traditional, coal-fired pizzas. A much better example of this style is Patsy’s on 74th St. in Manhattan. This is wonderful pizza and probably quite authentic, but it is a different style than modern, good NY pizza. During my years in California, separated by 3000 miles of deserts, mountains and mid-western Republicans from a desirable slice of pizza, I began experimenting with ways of duplicating the experience at home. I begin with two premises: that there are many styles of pizza that are good and that, lacking professional ovens and mixers, I will not be able to duplicate exactly anything that I find in a commercial pizzeria. My homemade pizza is pretty good. People like it. I’ll share with you the basic recipe. At it’s best, it’s closer to the coal fired style.

So there’s really no recipe… I have a mental block that keeps me from measuring anything in the kitchen. But I start with some flour. A bunch of it, in a bowl. maybe it’s all white, unbleached, organic King Arthur brand flour, maybe it’s about half semolina. It depends on whether I can find semolina anywhere. Whatever you do, don’t use up all the flour in the house. Not yet.  Throw in a spoonful of salt. What size spoon? I dunno. A big spoonful will make it taste saltier than a small spoonful. Use a little more than you think you should. A splash of olive oil.

Half fill a pint glass with room-temperature water. Stir in about half a packet of yeast. Maybe more, maybe less. Depends how much flour you started with. You can add a little honey to the water. Stir it up well before you pour it into the flour.

Mix the dough with a wooden spoon, adding flour if it gets soupy, water if it stays powdery. When it starts to look like pizza dough, knead it with your well-floured hands, folding it over as you knead. Form it into a ball, coat it with oil, and cover the bowl with a damp cotton washcloth. Let it sit for a few hours. Then punch it. Boom. If you made it right, it should deflate when you hit it. fold it and knead it a couple more times, then start to shape it into a disc.

At this point you may have the urge to spin it in the air and toss it hand to hand. This is fine. Just don’t act on the urge and everything will be ok. Flatten the thing out. Get a rolling pin if you need to. Empty beer bottles work too. Do not use full ones. Make sure to dust the counter with plenty of flour. The dough shouldn’t stick to anything. Make it even and as thin as possible. It should be a little elastic. Make it a little large and it will shrink to size. You can use a pizza pan or stone or a cast iron pan or cookie sheet. Make the pie on the counter, then move it to a peel or to the cooking surface before topping it.

Sauce is a whole other topic, for another time. Go, make pizzas, be happy.

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