On Spaghetti, by #fritz.

by #fritz

In order to make good pizza dough, one must also love food on some level. We make choices when we consume frozen or convenience foods, or spend the time to make something truly exceptional.

We are professionals, and yet this is our home kitchen, in a third-floor walkup, in some grimy, northern industrial town in the northern hemisphere. My singles ad reads, ‘just a big guy who loves to cook’ and after that I keep it pretty short indeed.

With roughly five ounces of lean ground beef, a 400-ml tin of plain old tomato sauce, #fritz is making spaghetti sauce. There are onions, green pepper, a bit of crushed celery and exactly five olives in there. I put all the veg into the pan on top of a teaspoon of oil, cracked black peppercorns and maybe a faint sprinkle of seasoning salt.

With a dash of lemon juice and one of Lea & Perrins, the addition of very gentle touches of garlic powder, onion powder, thyme, black pepper, basil, oregano, the recipe is just enough to make two good-sized portions. I soften up the veggies before adding the beef to brown it.

The last thing that goes in is the actual tomato sauce.

This is a hell of a lot better than freezing sauce that would ultimately be thrown out, or eating leftover spaghetti five days in a row. Okay, bear in mind that estimating the actual dry noodles so that they correspond, ah, is a whole ‘nother problem. We make up the sauce, let it simmer, then turn it down and turn our attention to the noodles.

Fritz, for those who haven’t met him, is our Swiss-born Cordon Bleu chef, whom we adopted as a very small boy and he lives in the broom closet. I’ve always liked to think that he killed a man, but the fact is that he flies home once or twice a year, (he visits his crazy old mother), and other than that, he really is quite all right…

If one must have an imaginary friend, then they should at least make themselves useful. #fritz serves that purpose very well.

I can get a single portion of frozen spaghetti for $2.99, and sometimes less. My spaghetti blows theirs out of the water with one salvo. And man does not live by bread alone.

As for the home-made bread using #superdough the dough was frozen. I pull it out of the freezer the night before, just as in the pizza recipe. I let it thaw in the fridge, pull it out in the morning and let that rise on the counter. This was my own dough, although we do have another crew.

At some point we spray a bread pan with butter-flavoured, non-stick cooking spray, although a liberal use of liquid cooking oil is also effective. (The first time you try it, you won’t put enough on.)

This loaf was also sprayed on top, which affects the colour. It smells good while baking. This loaf was done by turning on the oven to 375 degrees, opening the door, and gently placing it on the shelf.

Twenty-three minutes later, after turning it once on the lengthwise, the bread is done. This is a soft, chewy and flavourful bread that is especially good for toasting.

I reckon a couple of slices of #artisanal_toast with peanut butter is worth about $22.00 in any pretentious café in Silicon Valley.

 

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What Is Pizza, Ladies and Gentlemen. #superdough

What is pizza? This is more than a #rhetorical_question or some sort of philosophical question.

No, this has practical application in the real world...

The Dough.

Superdough is handmade pizza dough. The product is frozen. When using the dough, we take it out of the freezer the night before, thawing it in the fridge where it stays below the danger zone for food safety purposes. By morning it can be taken out, left in the bag while preparing other ingredients including all the favourite toppings. It rises a little in the thaw, but the greatest rise in actually in the oven.

This is important. Where there is sauce and the weight of ingredients, it will not rise. This is why we take the toppings out to the edge so far and no more.

This is where timing comes into play, for the centre should be dry and crispy enough underneath for the slices to be handled and enjoyed rather than falling in someone's lap and all of that sort of thing.

A twenty-ounce dough-ball can be cut cold, into two ten-ounce portions. Re-wrap the one and put it back in the fridge where it will keep for a day or two. This makes for a thin crust pizza, twelve inches in diameter and with a crunchy ring of crust on the outside.

Put a small handful of flour on the countertop and take the half dough-ball and basically just make it round and flat. Roll that with the typical rolling pin. Go different directions in turn. 

Four or five inches in diameter is about the usual. Sprinkle flour on top, flip it once or twice and then begin with an initial heavy roll. This is for home use, assuming not a lot of experience. Is the dough cold or cool? Let it sit for a while, and then roll it multiple times, in multiple directions. The dough is quite elastic, and by changing direction, the irregular shape of the dough can be pushed into something more circular.

Once the dough has been thawed and warmed up a little, worked out as best one can, we pick it up. We really don’t ‘throw’ pizza dough like in popular imagination, but rather holding it by the edges, rotating around the circle and letting gravity pull the dough out sufficiently to bear putting it in the pan.

A #superdough pizza before baking. With genuine parsley flakes...

The pan.

Our experimental, quality control pan is twelve inches in diameter, a simple pan of pressed sheet metal.

We spray that liberally with butter-flavoured non-stick cooking spray.

Once the dough is in the pan, we work it into position by flattening and pushing from the centre, rather than attempting to pull the dough into place. With normal elasticity and oil on the pan, the tendency will be for the dough to pull back from the rim, but with fingertips and thumbs, the dough can be worked until it stays in the classic round form.

Push dough around to thicken any thin spots, easily visible with the typical blackened pan.

The sauce.

We just use regular tomato sauce, although there are many fine pizza sauces available, usually in a pretty small tin. Considering that we use as little as two or three really good table spoons of sauce on our typical twelve-inch pizza, having some plastic snap-lid containers for freezing is essential. Any ‘heat’ in our pizza flavour-wise comes from the ingredients and not necessarily the spices in a commercially available sauce. Even tomato sauce has herbs and spices as well as other ingredients.

Once we have the dough in the pan, we put an initial spoonful of sauce in the middle and then tilt and rotate the pan, using a round-bottomed sauce or gravy spoon to take that out to the edges of the pizza. More on that in a moment.

Okay.

The Ingredients.

We can purchase pizza mozzarella, blended and shredded cheeses, sliced pepperoni, fresh mushrooms, peppers of various colours and heat, onions, other ingredients at any local grocers. If you want bacon on there, you have to fry that up ahead of time. You want to let that dry and de-grease it on paper towels.

The typical 500-600 gram bag of cheese or pepperoni is good for three lavish or four to five rather sparse pizzas, however, other ingredients can make up for any deficit. Let’s be honest: some people like arugula and goat’s cheese. They don’t even need pepperoni.

(And that’s okay too.)

So, in terms of an attractive outer ring of crust, a very thin swipe of tomato sauce and a bit of raw white flour adds colour and makes the mouth water because we can see what we are about to eat...it's kind of hard to explain but just believe me.

Let’s be honest, ladies and gentlemen, you have to slice them mushrooms pretty thin, the onions have to be diced just so, any ham has to be shredded properly and the peppers have to be cut rather small or they just don’t cook in time. Any sort of other ingredients have to contend with that nine to eleven minute cooking time in our crummy little apartment electric oven/range. The best that thing can do is about five hundred degrees.

It’s the typical galley-type kitchen.

Right?

Right.

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What is #pizza ladies and gentlemen. Have you ever considered that.