I tried my hand at pizza crust again the other night, just for kicks. Although I’m pretty much Queen Disaster when it comes to the kitchen, I refuse to be conquered. I am like a rogue nation that keeps on no matter what. Pizza dough = hockey pucks? Never mind, we’ll buy new yeast and try again. Forget the baking powder in the cookies you baked for your final art class? Make nuts and bolts instead.
I don’t know what it is about me and the kitchen. I follow recipes scrupulously, because improvization invariably leads to disaster. Yet, I have some magical quality that makes me choose the lamest recipe any given publication can have to offer. If someone gave me Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking, I’d find the blandest, most awful recipe in it and make that. It would sound good, on paper, but it would universally be acknolwedged that, indeed, that recipe was not Ms Child’s finest work. And I, not knowing this, would subject my delightful significant other to my experiment.
Last time I made pizza dough, I used a recipe from Fleischmann’s. You know, the yeast people? The people who make yeast? It was awful. This time, I used a recipe from Cooking Light, because they sometmes have some great recipes. I also bought a pizza stone. Not the $45 one at Williams-Sonoma that I’ve been coveting, a $10 one from Safeway that I figured would do the job and would still fit in my 50s-era cabinets (they didn’t have Williams-Sonoma or giant pizza stones back then. Lots of things don’t fit. Like, for instance, my Kitchen-Aid food processeor, which is a millimeter too tall to fit in any cabinet).
I mixed. I kneaded. I punched. The dough rose. I preheated to 500 degrees.
It worked!
The only flaw is that I followed the Cooking Light recipe to a T, and when I pre-baked the dough (as they said to do), it rose like a crazy, bubbly loaf in the oven. So I yanked it out and stabbed it a few times to let out the steam, and it collapsed again. While I was doing that, the cornmeal I used on the stone started to burn. So I got rid of that and put my topping-filled pizza back in the oven, and watched it rise gloriously in my sweltering kitchen for ten whole minutes. At the end, I had a perfectly-browned crust. Though I will confess that it was a little thicker than I’d have liked, and I probably could have made two pizzas out of the one recipe. And may, in fact, try that. I’m also not going to pre-bake the shell next time, because I wasn’t trying to make pizza bread.
But still. Phew. It wasn’t a disaster. Let’s hear it for not sucking. It’s sometimes the least I can ask out of a day.