pizza

I've made a lot of pizzas but yesterday I made my best one yet. This is the culmination of decades of pizza-learning. I was surprised because it lacked three elements of advanced pizza techniques so I wasn't expecting it to be great as it was. I took shortcuts and did not buy expensive ingredients like buffalo milk mozzarella or top ham. I did not include 20% semolina flour into the dough with regular all purpose flour, and worse of all, I did not age the dough. I have herbs growing out of my ears over here, live herbs growing in the Aerogarden, cut grocery store herbs kept alive in the refrigerator, and little jars of every dry herb imaginable, but oddly, I didn't use any of them. And that's just plain herb-neglection right there.

But here's what I did that made it so irresistible that it makes you want to keep eating it even though you are already full.

I made it thicker than ever and bread-y instead of thin crust as I usually do, and gave it a rim. 1+1/3 cup water to 2+3/4 cups flour. Thereabout. It wasn't measured numerically. The dough was kept a bit wet and sticky. (A teaspoon of sugar to kick-start the yeast, and a few tablespoons of olive oil mixed in the dough.)

That is a lot of flour for a person to consume. The very idea is just wrong.

I coated the finished dough ball inside the bowl with finer semolina instead of with coarse cornmeal.  Then pressed out the dough into a square, the shape of the parchment paper, coating the sticky dough as needed with more semolina. So this granular semolina is pressed into the surface of the flattened dough. It makes a big difference in texture. The granular semolina incorporates as the dough continues to rise as a flattened square. Parchment for ease of sliding the prepared pizza onto the pre-heated stone by way of a cookie sheet in place of wooden pizza peel.

Everything else was the usual things that you will have on any regular pizza. I like best of all fresh jalapeño. That is the main non-standard addition. It roasts in the oven and it's a lot better than tinned or jalapeño marinated in vinegar.

I would confidently serve this to snobby hard-to-please pizza elitists, if there are any such people. I would enter this in a pizza contest and win. I may as well just award myself a First Place ribbon and skip the whole effort of competing and discouraging all those other hopeful contestants.

I still have two pieces left.