I’ve always liked making pizza.

Growing up, mom and dad always made ‘American’ style pizza. You all know it – think of any of your typical delivery pizza chains. Red sauce, lots of toppings, a thick crust. That was pizza for most of my childhood. I still love it, and on very cold days, the thought of a thick, tomato-laden pan pizza from Pizza Hut is very warming.

At some point, I think via the Bertucci’s that opened up by Springfield Mall, I was introduced to brick-oven pizza, which is really more of a neopolitan style. Coincidentally, that’s also where I had barbecue chicken pizza for the first time. I liked it a lot – the crisp, chewy crust with light topping and char.

Since then, I have done a lot of experimenting with different doughs for neopolitan style pizza crusts.

• Quick Pizza Dough – great for when you need a quick fix, but not the best
• When you have a lot of time Pizza Dough – truly great, but don’t work the dough as long as indicated
• Alton Brown’s dough for Grilled Pizza – great grilled, and serviceable in the oven

My new favorite, though, is a recipe we got from the Pizza! Pizza! Pizza! class we took at Cook Street here in Denver, where the instructor told me, “You win the class.”  It helped that I had a lot of self-taught experience.  (I love taking classes at Cook Street – we also took the Fish Tale course.)

And really, the recipe isn’t much different than the second dough listed above – but really more the techniques used to make the dough and prepare the pizza.  Basically, you try and work it as little as possible to get it to come together, and let the yeast do its thing.  Flour hasn’t mattered, the quality of olive oil hasn’t mattered – at least not yet.

The class taught a pizza-making fanatic like me that I really do need a pizza peel.  It also taught us how to make Flammekuchen, which is a white pizza sauce made with bacon, butter, and cream.

We cooked our pizzas in an actual wood-fired brick oven that was running at about 750 degrees.  The way to get pizzas in and out of there was with a peel.  It made great pizzas – the extremely high heat charred the dough and made it crisp and melted and singed the cheese and toppings.  The char is what tastes good.

Sadly, we only have a Pampered Chef pizza stone that isn’t approved for temperatures higher than 425 degrees.  I was reading about this, though.  That may be something to try one day.

My current technique is to put the stone in the oven to let it get hot.  Pull the stone out, then try to work the dough quickly into a circle.  Then put the dough on the hot stone – at which point it starts to become inelastic as it starts cooking when it hits the stone.  Next, quickly top the pizza before the dough gets overcooked from the hot stone.  Load stone and pizza back into the oven.  It has to be done very quickly, which means that there is a huge margin for error.  This is true especially when trying to shape the dough.

We were taught in the class to make the pizza on the peel, and then use a quick flick of the wrist to unload the pizza from the peel into the oven (or in a home case, the pizza stone).  Saves some frustration and stress, since I wouldn’t be trying to very quickly assemble a pizza to avoid overcooking.

I always thought I wouldn’t use a peel, or didn’t think it was necessary.  I also thought it wouldn’t work in our house, since our oven opens towards the island in the center of the kitchen – but turns out, I’m wrong!

Now I want to eat pizza.

We hired a sitter and went to brunch yesterday at Snooze, a local place that does pretty good breakfast.

Anna had this, which I am now kicking myself for not taking a picture of:

Graceland Pancakes Legendary buttermilk pancakes griddled with fresh bananas, topped with peanut butter cream, whipped butter and bacon caramel sauce. Long live The King!

The bacon caramel sauce was delicious.

So the Saints won. As a fan of the Saints, I am pleased. Today I am wearing my Aaron Brooks New Orleans Saints jersey.

Amy was in town, and to celebrate the Super Bowl, she crafted a bacon explosion.

For a photojournal of the creation, look below the fold:
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It’s time to renew our farm membership!

We joined Monroe Organic Farm in 2008 – and apparently just in time. Members are grandfathered in at their original price when they joined, which means that for $200, we get a constant, weekly supply of more veggies than we can eat from mid June to late October. Now that I’ve learned how to can, and Owen is morphing into a grade-A vegetable consumer, this is a great thing.

But, before you call me a liar, let’s get to the meat! They’re offering sides and quarters of beef. For the sake of this particular rant, I’m going to assume that our family of two-and-a-half omnivores will not be able to eat two-hundred pounds of beef in a year, and so a side of beef will not be discussed further. But a quarter of grass-fed beef? I’m tempted, even though in order to facilitate this, I’d have to find a butcher, and buy a bigger freezer.

It’s tough to calculate value on this, since cattle vary in size and weight, and you’re not necessarily going to get formulaic X strip steaks, N filets, etcetera. But if I assume that a quarter of beef yields a meager ninety pounds of deliciousness at a cost of $450, which I am not sure covers butchering. That’s $5 a pound without butchering. Let’s say that the butchering fee is $300 – which seems about average in my initial research – ninety pounds of healthy, grass-fed beef is $8.33 a pound, and that includes ground meat, roasts, steaks, tips – all of it. That isn’t a bad deal, other than it’s more than the two dollars a pound we used to pay for pre-ground meat. Grass-fed beef at King Sooper’s (which is Kroger) is about eighteen dollars a pound for strip steaks – it seems like you make out pretty well in this deal.

They also do hogs, or as is the custom today, they are called “free range pork”. This pork is more marbled and has a lot more fat – and hence more flavor. It’s only $250 for a half hog – a half hog yields twenty pounds of pork loin, a five pound pork butt, ten pounds of bacon, sixteen pounds of ham, four pounds of spare ribs, and fifteen pounds of pork sausage. That’s $3.50 a pound, pre butchering costs. That would support one hell of a barbecue!

The foodie and hippie in me wants to do it, but this is all ignoring the fact that we don’t have a freezer that can store 160 pounds of meat. Yet. I feel like I should start saving up.

I’m always on the lookout for revolutionary bacon tech.

Cures hangovers!

I think it’s about time.  Time for BACON PIE!