Pizza

Pizza is the cook’s blank canvas.  It is a way to express feelings, emotions, or attitude.  As a lot of you already know, I love making pizza.  Growing up I never really like it.  I was only ever interested in the crust; I never wanted anything to do with the rest of the pizza.  There were only slight differences in Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, or Domino’s.  They all tasted like greasy cardboard that had some government cheese spread on top.  I don’t even want to talk about the school cafeteria’s square pizza.  I hate to sound like such a food snob because I love and appreciate all kinds of food, but my past experiences with pizza have just been awful.  While Domino’s did recently improve their recipe, all they really ended up doing was adding garlic salt all over everything.  That is not what pizza was meant to be.

Pizza is a great way to show off creativity and a little bit of who you are as a person.  For example, I love making barbeque pizza with barbeque sauce and tons of cheddar cheese because I am fat and love barbeque.  People from New York love chewy, thin crust pizzas so that they can fold it in half while eating it.  I don’t really understand the purpose of folding a pizza, but to each his own.  People in Chicago are famous for their deep dish pizza.  This reflects their go big or go home attitude.  Some people enjoy more sophisticated pizza such as Wolfgang Puck’s salmon and caviar pizza, while others love taking leftovers and throwing them on some dough.  I’ve even been known to make a pizza using leftover Chinese food along with a chopped up eggroll.  I don’t want to ramble too much about different types of pizza because I want each and every one of you to try a unique pizza.  I started out using Marcella Hazan’s recipe for simple Italian pizza dough, but I always found that I needed to add some form of sugar whether it was brown sugar or honey powder.  I found another recipe that is very similar to Ms. Hazan’s recipe except it contains brown sugar, which helps the yeast produce CO₂ and gives a thicker crust.  Have fun and post your ideas in the comment section!

Pizza Crust Recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/jays-signature-pizza-crust/