Thank Goodness

Fancy flour. The last major concept to investigate in my exploration of the glorious world of pizza, until I get really curious and buy a 650-degree pizza oven.

I ordered two kinds of chi-chi flour. Caputo 00 pizza flour and King Arthur pizza blend. The Caputo arrived yesterday. Still waiting on the other.

I have almost no faith in this stuff. Not because I think it won't make a good pizza, but because the pizzas I have been making over the last month have been absolutely perfect. How much better can pizza get? I hope the flour is disappointing, because the cheapest I can get it is about a dollar a pound. And that's for a 50-pound sack, which I would have to store.

My results so far tell me the "best flour" arguments have about as much substance as a summer camp fart-lighting contest. Every flour I have used has given me great results, although the cake flour blend was a little weird. Good crust seems to depend chiefly on how you cook it and whether you put crap in the dough that makes it mushy. When I use Mike's stone-and-screen method and either olive oil or no fat at all, my pies are 100% flawless every time. Lard, which at least one famous Italian cook recommends, seems to make the crust spongy and soft.

I feel like I should make another pie with grocery-store Sargento cheese. The one I made yesterday was really good. I hate to tell people to avoid store cheese if you can get good results from it. I was very surprised to see low-moisture whole-milk mozzarella shredded in a bag at a grocery store. Maybe there is hope for humanity.

Here's something weird. I've lost a little weight since going on a too-much-pizza diet. I guess it's the exercise I've been doing.

I ought to try to come up with a really sick combination of toppings, although that aspect of pizza has been done to death. I believe the last truly revolutionary topping was pineapple. I think pineapple could be improved a lot. If you used fresh pineapple and sliced it down to an eighth of an inch in thickness and put a little oil on it, it would be much better than the big soggy chunks pizzerias use.

Shrimp has turned out to be the best meat topping I've ever had. I didn't realize how good it was until I used it in very small pieces the size of a Life Saver.

I am not a big pepperoni fan. I suspect that most pepperoni is bad to begin with. Too salty and spicy, perhaps to cover up a fundamentally cheap sausage. And the grease that pours out of it is nasty. It would probably be much better if I used a quality pepperoni and nuked the grease out of it before baking.

It's bizarre, how deeply into the cooking side of the book I've gone. I almost feel like I know what I'm doing sometimes. I have a lot of faith in my writing ability, and I expected a good response to that. The thing that surprises me is that people respond so well to the food itself, which was only intended as a frame to hang a book on. Maybe if this branch of my writing prospers, I should sign up for some cooking classes. We have a school here in Miami. I could get a degree in being a fatass. Bachelor of Fatass Science, with the emphasis on "bachelor."

The pizza success, I owe to Mike. Without question. I would never have gotten to this point without him. I found the sauce on my own, but if he hadn't given me the tools to make a good crust, I never would have reached the point where researching sauce would have occurred to me.

I'm going to get up and make a cheese pizza and garlic rolls with Caputo flour. If it's significantly better than what I've been doing so far, it will be a sad day for all concerned.