On pie

10 Jun 2008, 4pm

As with, say, tea, or American independent cinema, pizza is something the French consume a great deal of, yet understand not at all. Down here in the bottom of the country it’s inescapable, not just from restaurants and freezer sections, but from a hundred thousand or so roadside caravan vendors whose signage always brags of a wood-burning oven (every time I see this, the idea of open wood flame in a fuelled vehicle gives me a start, but then I’m a delicate little flower). What you usually get is a wafer of hardtack barely supporting something extraordinarily oily (which is in turn kicked up a notch via dollops of flavoured oil from a spouted bottle known colloqually as a pipioli, a homonym for pipi au lit: bedwetting); there are lots of nasty variations involving half-cooked lardons, anchovies, but I suppose the ultimate ubiquitous example is rounds of sour cheap chèvre and four eye-crossingly salty-sour snots of unstoned olives ‘à la grecque’.

Very pleasing to see it still exists.

As a child my definition of a good pie was one made at Bella Pizza in Vancouver because, as a child, any discussion of the subtleties of dining will always be drowned out by a massive salty-sweet wodge of starch and cheese. Bacon, pineapple, beef, sausage: pile it on. What I remember most is the incredible sledgehammer flavours of salty bread and intense tomato sauce, and of course all the great and glorious cheesy grease. I think if I ate such a thing now it would taste great, but my body would stage a small, noisy revolt lasting several unpleasant days. Delicate little flower.

I lean therefore much more now to the opposite side of the pizza spectrum, the best examples of which I’ve had in the US, in restaurants where the mission seems to be to out-Italian the Italians with excellent wood-oven pizzas, focusing on the importance of the crust itself, and on simple, minimal toppings, rather than the mountain of greasy kid stuff which may be piled on top.

I’m not going to get into the whole thin-crust vs thick-crust balderhooch, though I’m sorry, that Chicago thing is fucked up.

The mission for the past few years here in hicksville France has been to duplicate that, which is ordinarily only ever done in 60–90 seconds on the stone floor of a 600° C wood-fired oven, using dough meticulously prepared by people who do nothing but prepare pizza dough.

A couple years of research and eight hundred failed experiments flew by, as I gradually learned that good bread and good pizza dough start with the same ingredients: hard, high-protein flour, yeast, salt, sugar, water. More important, though, are the steps during which these are kneaded and rested: dough can’t ever develop a good complex flavour if, as a baking book would advise, it’s simply left to rise in a warm place for a few hours. All the complex chemistry that goes on between yeast and gluten has to happen very slowly, in very controlled temperatures, ideally under the watchful eye of people who do it for a living. Bakers.

So after a lot of bad pizza, I finally started asking the girl behind the counter at the boulangerie to sell me some of their basic white bread dough, which they store frozen in little 300g boules (in math that makes no industrial sense to me whatsoever, three boules make up two baguettes). This dough has been expertly kneaded, albeit by machine, and left to rest until absolutely developed enough to go in the oven. With these, the road to quite good homemade pizza is actually quite short: you let them rise once on the counter, roll or tug or twirl or do whatever you like to the diameter and thinness you desire, and then you do the one thing that pizza cannot be pizza without, you slather the fuck out of it with olive oil. Salt and pepper, and then whatever you like on top. Dough issue solved, and all it requires is the effort to walk in a shop.

Now the other problem is of course heat – nothing you can do at home (short of building a stoked woodburning oven) will ever approximate the furnace of a stoked woodburning oven, the intense heat of which makes the crust knock-hard on the outside and chewy, pull-apart tender on the inside. You can get close, however, using a good heat-absorbent pizza stone in a convection oven. I’ve read people say a cheap quarry tile from a hardware store is all you need, but I haven’t found anything better than the (yea, I know they’re the Microsoft of barbecue technology) Weber pizza stone, which they very grandly announce on the packaging to be quarried from select South American soapstone reserves. True or not, when left in an oven set to max (250° C hereabouts) for an hour, it does an amazing job staying hot, which is what you need for the knockable, fully cooked crust and nicely melted whatevers on top. Of course you won’t get results in 60 seconds, but about six and a half minutes should do the trick. You don’t get the lurvly charred, smoky flavour of a wood oven, of course, but no matter. It’s good pizza.

This is how I like it, just salt, pepper, tomato coulis, little basil and thyme, some finely (like seethrough) sliced red onion, and fresh mozzarella. Particularly good the next day for breakfast.

Awhile ago, on a nostalgia lark, we did one with chunks of pineapple and the other multi-year project, homemade bacon, of which more later.

Incidentally

Oliver is continuing to recover nicely; our heartfelt thanks for all the concern and best wishes. We truly appreciate it.

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