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.

This is a paid advertisement

Ads via The Deck

Nothing at all

9 Jun 2008, 5pm

Second in a trilogy.

Swellings

8 Jun 2008, 5pm

(You’ll need to be a dog person to get through this.)

When Oliver was struck with the canine horrorshow that is Volvulus – in which a dog’s stomach flips and ties off at both ends – almost five years ago, the shock and aftershock of just how immediate the problem was never wore off. We were lucky that everything worked out, but in the time since two constants have remained: my awe at the patient competence of the vets who treated the problem that Sunday night, and my inability to stop looking at my dog as ready to expire at any second. This manifests itself in a sort of manic parental over-protectiveness, the irritating qualities of which Herself has no trouble pointing out. I find this irritating in turn.

Anyway, barring some unpleasantness with a stick in early 2006 and the occasional cut and bruise, Oliver’s been fine the past five years. And then on Friday morning we woke to find that after seven years of pretty reliable house-training he had, shall we say, let one drop in the bedroom. He spent the morning walking around hunched over, moaning through his nose and generally looking supremely pissed off. Didn’t want to eat or drink, and out on the walk he just kept straining his hindquarters and turning around to point us back home.

I knew it couldn’t be Volvulus again, because his stomach wasn’t swollen, and assumed that, since his digestive system was clearly working, there must be something working its way through, probably something he’d found in the garbage, happens all the time. Anyone can be both overprotective and blasé about what can and will pass through a dog. Here’s me cracking wise like an idiot about it as it happened.

To be sure, we went to see the vet in town, an experience that always delivers the odd, first because no one else is ever there and because he and his wife/assistant both have crazy crazy eyes. He did a quick once-over, said Oliver’s temperature was up, but no visible problems with his prostate or digestive system, and agreed wholeheartedly that there was just something slowly making its way through. Call me later.

On Friday afternoon there was a bounceback; Oliver got all energetic again, seemed to want to eat, drank some water. Whew, in the clear. And then through the night he got worse. And worse. In the morning we went into the vet, who still looked stymied, but finally suggested we go see the other vet in town (there was another vet?) for an ultrasound. Calls were made, previously administered medicines communicated, off we went.

Holy Fuck, it was like finding a vast library hidden behind a comic book store. The place was booming with women carrying cats in cages (though, it became clear, most were there just to flirt and bat eyes at the Self-Styled Renaissance Vet with whom we were about to meet).

Self-Styled Renaissance Vet whisked us in to a massive gleaming exam room, sort of a shrine to himself and his love for animals, his published volumes of poetry and philosophy, his degrees in artificial insemination and (I’m not kidding) tortoise surgery, and his INEVITABLE rumpled rugged good looks. We told him what the other vet’s opinions were, to which he sort of politely rolled his eyes, as though clearing up the other guy’s mistakes is part of his daily routine, and, giving Oliver a quick look over, reported how grave the situation clearly was, and that thinking an animal this dehydrated, in this much pain, was merely passing something awkward would be a fatal mistake. I decided we had a new vet. We left Oliver there at his clinic, and last night we waited, got a couple courteous update phonecalls, and goofed around with Hugo, who was amazed at his sudden status as top dog in the house.

The crux of this story is that the (now ex-) vet was able to say, with confidence, that there was nothing wrong with Oliver’s prostate. The (now) vet informed us this morning that the ENTIRE PROBLEM was a severe prostate infection, which had, by the time we arrived there, already led to peritonitis and the beginnings of blood sepsis, which is just about as urgent and dangerous as it gets. Overnight they’d treated it with such speed and skill we were able to pick him up today, and he’s now home, with prescriptions for a two-month course of treatment, but should be fine. I am exhausted.

And how was your weekend.

The Plot

7 Jun 2008, 4pm

Welcome back to Languedoc-Roussillon’s Vaguely Funniest Home Videos Produced in Part by Heroic Acts of Procrastination Ltd.

Sixty Seconds

20 May 2008, 2pm

So much to do these days. I keep forgetting to direct my great Zeus-like gaze of approval to David Friedman’s site Ironic Sans, which you may recall made a very loud splash a couple years ago with the first of what would be many ‘ideas’ proposed on the site, pre-pixelated clothes for Reality TV shows. I remember thinking at the time that, as ideas go, ‘that’s fucking brilliant’. The site is relentless if measured fun, and as you click around you find out things like he’s a cleverly stylish professional photographer, who also writes a mean about page.

And hey, he just turned up on Favrd.

Anyway to me one of the best things about Ironic Sans is the utterly compelling collection of short videos of otherwise unremarkable things, 60 Seconds, the latest of which, 60 Seconds in the Lives of Commuters, just made coffee shoot out of my nose.

In a sort of homage to David’s project, in no way at all connected to being desperate to do something stupid with a new Flip camera, may I present 60 Seconds in the Life of an Armchair, 12 Seconds After I Leave the Room.