Make A Pizza Night–Cooking Yer Pie

The Make a Pizza Night Post will appear Sunday around 7pm–at which point this sentence will turn into a link

Okay, so you’ve got your ingredients and you’re ready to go.  Here are a few final notes.

1. Preheat your oven a little longer than you think is necessary.

2. If you’re using a pan, make sure to oil the pan when you squeeze the dough out to the edge.

3. If you poke a hole in the middle, just tear a little extra off the edge and patch it!

4. A pizza peel and stone will raise your game considerably–the stone is just what it implies, a piece of porous rock-ish material that sits on your oven rack and provides a baking surface.  When you put your pizza on the hot stone, moisture is drawn from the crust into the stone, making your pizza lighter and crisper on the outside.  It’s like magic.  The peel is like a giant pancake flipper with which you slide your pizza onto the stone.  To use a peel correctly, dust the surface of the peel with cornmeal, which allows the pie to slide off and on easily. Its like magic.

5. A pizza will cook faster on the pre-heated stone than on a metal pan.  Keep an eye on that bad boy so you don’t burn it.

6. Remember, that necessity is the mother of invention–you don’t need anything fancy to do this.  Pizza is descended from a way to use leftovers–glopping stuff onto slices of flatbread.  An old Italian man I knew as a kid–a guy who fled Mussolini by stowing away on a ship, with no money and no documents, and jumping off the ship to swim ashore when it reached New York–wouldn’t have dreamt of eating pizza after he established himself in this country.  He owned a bar and two houses.  Pizza was poor peoples’ food and beneath him.  Enjoy it accordingly.

Oh, yeh–don’t sleep in your pizza.  It’s not done in the best of families.