We Were Talking About Food, Weren't We?

We were talking about food, weren't we?

I could tell you about places I've eaten. I'm not wealthy at all, but I've still had some fairly amazing food in a place or two.

But the thing is, I'm a restaurant guy. I work in a pizza place right now; we're a chain, and while our food is pretty darned good, that's not what I'm going to talk about, either. Exactly.

Because I don't have children. I have the kids who work for us. And I take care of them. (Okay, not all of them. The white supremacist that I fired, not so much.)

So when the kids have been good, and time allows, I feed them something special, something they can't just get off the menu-- but something that I can make with only the ingredients that I have on hand.

Let's look at a typical example.

I start with a crust. What kind of crust? I'll use any of them; our signature crust is a Detroit-style deep dish, which has a fluffier crust (lower-protein flour, closer to AP Flour than the bread flour that pizza dough normally uses), but I'm a past master at hand-tossed dough, and we have a very tasty thin, cracker crust as well. (The key to hand-tossed dough is to not use the dough press they provide, nor the docker they provide, but hand-toss it as God intended. But it's a skill that takes a while to master, so we have the press for the sake of new hires.)

Imagine the one you like best.

I don't just start there, though. There really ought to be veggies. My kids need to eat their veggies! But the default technique is fresh raw chopped veggies put on the pizza; they don't really cook very much due to their high internal water content (and actually make the top of the pizza cook less; pizzas with a lot of toppings, but especially wet toppings like tomatoes or pineapple require significantly more cooking.)

So let's improve things. Because of our deep-dish dough, we have no shortage of well-seasoned iron pans for the dough. In this, we add a mix of chopped green peppers (I'd prefer red or yellow, but I have to stick with what's available), chopped red onions, chopped tomatoes and sliced mushrooms. We're going to pour a little bit of garlic butter over this veggie medley and run the pan through our oven on the medium-cooking rack. (We have a conveyor-driven impingement oven, and that's it. It's very good for what it does, but it makes an awkward sauté device. But one learns to adapt.) This will nicely "grill" the veggies with the butter; the mushrooms will add some nice umami.

So, back to that pizza crust. We're putting tomato sauce on; it's not the only choice, but it's the most popular. But it needs something more, doesn't it? Over the layer of pizza sauce (uncooked; it's ground tomatoes, some water, and a seasoning mix of salt and herbs and no doubt other things) I add a drizzle of our ranch dressing.

Do NOT underestimate our ranch. The seasonings in it are pretty standard, but we start with extra-heavy mayo and buttermilk, the kind of thing that you can't buy in local stores. We have to special-order this stuff, and we make it ourselves every single day, like the sauce, like the dough.

You don't get the same quality with frozen dough shipped to stores and thawed, and you cannot convince me otherwise. Our dough isn't complicated at all, but fresh, hand-made dough is so much better than the alternatives.

Next, we must add cheese. Our cheese? No, not like those chains that buy frozen, pre-shredded boxes of cheese, each particle coated in cellulose to stop it from sticking. Ours? We take logs of mozzarella and a shredder, every day, after carefully assembling the cleaned blades and making sure that the machine will not commit awful mechanical suicide (the torque on literally every engine in the shop is insane) we push 'em through and carefully gather the shreds. We call this stuff "White gold," and it isn't cheap.

But I'm fond of cheese blends; I'll mix in other cheese that we have on hand-- cheddar, Romano, perhaps feta, sometimes even the provolone slices that we still use for our weird sandwich/calzone hybrid things. I'd add more, but, again, using what we have so we don't risk the wrath of corporate. Distribute evenly by hand, don't leave thin spots, for who wants those?

Those veggies are done now, caramelized and tasty, and they go on top of the cheese. Some of my kids don't eat meat; they're mostly set now, but others insist on further animal proteins. I often put grilled chicken on here, and maybe the addition of some nice, smokey bacon. I have to be careful with bacon, though-- it's tasty, but it tends to overwhelm subtler flavors. Still, it blends very nicely with the chicken indeed.

Okay, in the oven. I have a lot of stuff on this pizza; it will need a higher temperature and time to cook, but that's OK-- unlike most other places, our oven has three decks and four different chains, three different cooking temperatures and four different cooking times. Thickness of the pizza crust is an important detail here, so I make the necessary adjustments.

The pizza cooks; the cheese melts, and I used a lot of heat, so it becomes golden-brown, despite the cooking vegetables, the meats, all piled on top of each other, juices from the meats and veggies soaking into the flavor sponges that mushrooms are and transforming them while, in turn, adding that subtle vegetable umami to the blend. The grilled onions become sweeter and more tender; the peppers, likewise, the bitterness of green peppers becoming a subtle note in the symphony rather than a dominant aftertaste.

Okay, I cooked it. Are we ready to eat yet?

NO!

No, no, we have more work to do! A light dusting of garlic salt-- the garlic another flavor note, the salt light enough to bring out the flavors rather than becoming a flavor itself. (Alas, we have no fresh or roasted garlic! But one adapts.) Now we add the final touches-- perhaps some garlic butter around the crust, if it's hand-tossed, but otherwise, over to another station (once we've cut it with huge curved knives like scimitars fitted with an additional grip-point that would make them far too unbalanced to use as weapons using orthodox techniques) and NOW we add a little more mayo-- it doesn't take much; it's just a foundation for the real last step. Fresh, chopped lettuce and tomato. I'd add fresh spinach if we had it, but alas, it went bad too quickly, so corporate dropped it. Am I making a salad on top of the pizza? It may look like it, and I suppose I am, but the crisp, fresh taste of the lettuce, the acid of the tomatoes, these perform a wonderful contrast the the heaviness of pizza dough, cheese and meat, and one needs contrast in these matters.

Now, now we eat it. Carefully, though-- if it's thin crust, it MUST be cut in squares, or it won't be strong enough to support the toppings. If it's hand-tossed, consider the New York Fold as an approach to eating. Our deep dish can handle this as long as you manage to not spill the toppings everywhere when you bite into it.

If I used the deep dish, your lower jaw and tongue will encounter the crisp, fried outer layer of the dough first; your upper jaw, in turn, goes through a layer of fresh, crisp veggies, to the complex blend of flavors in the toppings, mixed together in the alchemy that is cooking, the hot cheese underneath still a bit melty, spreading over your mouth, the tomato sauce enhanced by the tangy richness of the ranch. You eat a slice. Perhaps two, if you are truly hungry.

And that will be enough. We're going to be hauling around fifty-pound bags of flour and fifty-pound boxes of mozzarella logs and hundred-pound buckets of freshly-mixed dough and stacks of pizza pans still rather warm from the oven and stacks of deep-dish dough and, later, cutting boards that are squares three feet on a side.

But this will give you the strength to go on. It fills your stomach in every regard, and-- hey, were you adding hot sauce to yours? That's fine. That's fine. I don't use it, but some people like the endorphin rush, and who am I to deny them?

But you got this pizza because you were good. Enjoy it.

And grab a slice quickly. Myles is coming back from his run, and he'll boggard the whole thing if we let him.