Quod subigo farinam

 

Looking back, the blog has been getting just a tad deep and meaningful, which is fine; but only in moderation, I feel. It’s probably time to talk about more frivolous things. For instance, I think the cat might like classical music. She’s usually hiding under the bed at this point in the day, or sleeping on Stacey’s pillow. Today, though, it’s a relatively tranquil and pleasant day in Cayucos and instrumental music helps me write, because their words don’t get in the way of mine. So this morning the cat is dozing on the sofa, quite clearly listening to Beethoven’s 9th. She’s obviously a cat with hidden depths.

We (Stacey and I, not me and the cat) went to SLO farmers’ market this week, which is not unusual, but instead of getting street food from the many, many, many vendors we got Buffalo Chicken pizza from a great little local shop. And there, in between watching the baseball on TV and trying to make up food-related names for baseball teams (Baltimore Oreos, Chicago Subs, Cilantro Blue Jays…..) we started wondering why pizza is one of those things which, 99% of the time, somebody else cooks for you, whether it’s take-away, frozen or in a restaurant.

It boils down to two main reasons. Firstly, home-made pizza is generally very disappointing. Getting the base crispy is damn nigh impossible because you have to put wet ingredients onto raw dough and leave it there long enough for the topping to cook through. Secondly, it’s an absolute arse to make. There are many components which have to come together at once, cooking with yeast is a trial at the best of times and you need about 3 hours from starting to make the dough to sitting down to eat.

My reaction to the very American solution to the home-made-pizza dilemma was one of disbelief. It can’t possibly work. There are so many things which are bound to go wrong. It doesn’t make sense. Whoever came up with it must have been stoned or drunk or both. It’s lunacy; it’s the most ridiculously counter-intuitive idea since bungee jumping. There is just no way you can barbecue a pizza. Here’s how.

You need two things pre-made before you start. I’ll tell you all about one of them- pizza dough- later. The other is a decent pizza sauce. This recipe is fail-safe:

Half an onion
Three cloves of garlic
Olive oil
1 tin of tomatoes
1tsp oregano
1tsp basil
little bit of cayenne pepper.

Fry the chopped onion and garlic for about 2 minutes in olive oil. Add the herbs and stir through; allow to cook for another minute or so, before adding the tomatoes. Bring this all to the boil. Liquidise the whole lot until it’s smooth enough to spread with the back of a spoon. You might want to return it to the pan and reduce the sauce to a thicker paste if there’s too much liquid; use your own judgement.

Now to the barbecuing of the pizza:

First: Preheat the gas grill for fifteen minutes. The grill needs to be very hot and as clean as humanly possible. Roll out your pizza dough (more about this later) thinly. Brush one side with olive oil and put it, oiled-side down, on the grill. Lower the lid. It needs barely three minutes to take a bit of colour (see left) before you remove it from the grill.

It is this browned side you’re going to put your topping on. Unlike raw dough, it won’t go soggy when exposed to sauce.

 

Then: Rub the raw side with olive oil. This raw, oiled side will be the bottom of the finished pizza and will cook at the same time as the topping. The olive oil adds flavour and stops it sticking to the grill.

-This is the bit I didn’t believe would happen. I thought there was no way you could prevent dough from sticking to hot metal. But it works, honest.

 

 

 

After that: Turn the pizza base over so it’s grilled-side up. Spread it with sauce and arrange your chosen toppings on top. Ours had spicy beef (beef mince cooked with garlic and chilli powder), Italian sausage, peppers, onions and cheese.

Remember your toppings have to cook quickly. Whatever you’re putting on, cut it thinly. Grate cheese finely rather than coarse. The topping should be no thicker overall than the base, roughly speaking, otherwise there will be too much water in it and it won’t cook before the dough burns.

Lastly: Return your pizza to the grill. It will have to spend longer on the grill this time in order to cook the top, but the dough on the bottom will cook just as fast. You will therefore probably have to reduce the temperature of the grill. If you find the dough is cooked but the cheese still needs finishing off, put the pizza on the warming rack, where the heat is less fierce, to make sure the topping is cooked properly.

 

 

Now, while we have a delicious home-made pizza, crispy of base and melty of cheese, perfect in many ways, you may have noticed that I’ve totally glossed over the solving of the second problem with making pizza at home: making pizza dough is a pain in the arse. Not only that, but making good pizza dough is the work of a genius; certainly far beyond me. I can make a disc of tough bread which has the ballistic properties and mouth feel of Kevlar. But just because you could theoretically top it with meat and cheese doesn’t mean you should do so. Now, in the UK you can buy pre-made, part-baked, so-called pizza bases. Frankly, don’t. Buy a frozen one. It’s cheaper, by the time you’ve bought topping ingredients, and it’ll be better. Here, there’s the vastly superior option of buying vacuum-packed fresh dough. This works well on the barbecue. We did neither- we used a bread-maker.

It’s cheating, I know, and not everyone has got one. But they are wonderful things, if you can get a high enough level of use out of it to make it worthwhile. Frankly, we do. It’s $4 here for a loaf of bread you’d want to eat, and you can still pay more than that for one you wouldn’t. There’s a certain argument that there is a certain nobility of purpose in baking one’s own bread. It’s a fair argument, I suppose, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to be able to eat sandwiches made of the stuff. Home-made bread is nearly always too dense, for several reasons: it’s rarely warm enough for dough to rise to its full extent within realistic domestic time limits; it’s hard to find a place whose temperature is consistent enough to allow it to do so; kneading for 10 minutes is damn hard work and anyone who says it’s not is either lying or not kneading hard enough. There is also the necessity, when working dough with the hands, of adding more flour to the hands, dough and work surface to stop it sticking. This flour starts to add up eventually, and it makes the finished loaf very heavy. The bread maker maintains constant temperatures, kneads effortlessly and consistently, and there are only 2 pieces to clean. You put ingredients in, wander off and wander back once it goes beep.

Not only does our bread maker make ordinary bread and pizza dough, but it allows me to muck about with more exotic stuff- pictured left is last week’s effort. There’s a story to it.

In our kitchen lives our newest pet. It has no name, but if it were to have one, The Thing or Cousin It would probably be a good place to start. It bubbles, has its own moods, is fed daily, produces alcohol and is allergic to metal. It’s a symbiotic culture of  Lactobacillus Sanfranciscensis and yeast, known to the world of cookery as a sourdough starter. The yeast leavens the bread, while the lactobacillus both protects the yeast from chemical damage, and lends the bread you bake with it a distinctive firm, open texture and pleasantly sour flavour.

As you might guess from the name, L. Sanfranciscensis is a California native; it is the foundation of San Francisco Sourdough bread. It first started being used by people to leaven bread during the gold rush era. Getting supplies from anywhere to the goldfields was a royal pain in the neck, and you could forget perishable goods like bread. So the miners had to bake their own. You feed a sourdough starter every day, and although you remove some of it daily, it self-renews. Ideal when you’re in a cabin, in a canyon, excavating for a mine. In fact, in the goldfields, I am told, the miners mostly ate thick pancakes made light and fluffy with the stuff. We tried this last weekend and they are really very addictive indeed. They also used to skim the alcoholic liquid off the top to drink. There’s is no way on Earth I’m going to do that.

Having been given a packet of the freeze-dried starter culture, manufactured by this appropriately-named San Jose company, it now sits on top of the highest surface in the kitchen in an airtight container to keep the fumes in, all the while developing a deeper character and gradually growing sourer as the L. Sanfranciscensis culture becomes more established. In fact, I think I’ll call it Frank. I wonder if he likes Beethoven.