Talk of pizza and homemade pizza dough

So a sad, Jewish lady walks in to a bar….

Yeah, that was me. And the bar was in, of all places, Albany, California. Like there is something about places called Albany, and how I have to find them when all else goes to hell.

Yes, I am here in California, which is why Celinabean has been a bit too quiet for the last few weeks. I wish I could say that I was taking long walks on the beach and otherwise pretending to be a personal ad, but I’m out here to deal with a family emergency. I’m not ready to write about it yet, I’m pretty much just trying to get through the day, but, for the sake of this story, let’s just accept the fact I was one sorry sucker walking into the bar last night.

This being me and all, the bar was a sushi bar, and that is yet another story. I promise to tell you all about it soon because really the place is part of how I survived my trip out here. But for now I am trying, in the middle of all this mess and confusion, to work my way into a story about pizza. So here it goes.

Where was I, oh yes, sad lady walks in to a bar.

And soon I had a bowl of udon in front of me and a row of regulars asking me questions and pouring me drinks. The guy next to me, Aaron, finds out that I am from New York and immediately launches in to the one sure conversation starter when talking to a New Yorker: pizza. And like everyone else I’ve ever met, Aaron has his own vision of the perfect pie, which he described for me down to the last misty-eyed detail. Thin crust, wood-fired, charred bits, and on and on.

In the restaurant review side of my life, I’ve been writing a lot about pizza recently. And that got me thinking about my own vision of pizza perfection. It can be summed up pretty quick: crust. Yes, yes, sauce matters and too much goopy cheese can be a bummer and so and so forth. But, for me, perfection is found and lost in the mix of yeast and flour and air. It is that yin-yang balance between crisp and pillowy, between chew and empty pockets of warmth, between thick and thin. And because in Albany (New York, that is) it is possible to find bright and lively sauce, and wonderful toppings, and pizza made with heart, but it is not possible to find a crust that would bring a pizza anything close to perfection, about a month ago, I decided to quit my belly-aching and learn to make my own.

There was one major problem with this. Yeast and I don’t get along.

Yeast is for people who are orderly, and keep clean houses, and own kitchen scales, or at least can find the measuring spoons. I tried for years to force a relationship with yeast. It seemed important some how to be able to bake, I don’t know, something, anything really, besides Nestle Tollhouse cookies. But after producing brick after brick of “bread,” I gave up and relinquished the baking books to my husband.

But, I reasoned, I’ve grown up since my brick bread days. I’m a mature woman now, and in the relative scheme of things, I’ve even got a bit of patience. In the end, though, it didn’t really come down to logic. You can’t reason your way to great pizza. It has to come from a more passionate place than that. And I found that passion in Peter Reinhart’sbook American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza.

(Thank you to Heidi at 101 Cookbooks for recommending it.)

I followed Reinhart from Arizona to Italy to LA in his search for the perfect pie. As he described his own childhood pizza memories and the places and people who changed his world along the way, I found myself retracing my own pizza evolution from rural Oregon (think canned mushrooms, bready dough and sweet red sauce) to the tiny mountain town in Italy that I happened on during the porcini harvest. The pizza that night, topped with fresh porcini mushrooms and seasoned with the hunger that follows a day-long hike along winding mountain roads, was one of the best meals of my life.

Reinhart is a master baker, and yet he writes with such simplicity and conviction that I became convinced it was time brave the rise and fall world I had abandoned years ago.

I asked my husband to help me, or at least stand nearby and lend me some of his good yeast mojo.

Here are results of my first attempt. I used Reinhart’s recipe for neo-Neapolitan crust. I also read and re-read his list of pizza making tips. (These were invaluable.)

Here is a link to one of his crust recipes reprinted with permission at 101 Cookbooks.

And Aaron and friends, thanks for the wonderful conversation. There is nothing like passionate talk of pizza to cheer me up on a sad day.