Excited! 3: Homemade Pizza (Part I)
You're going to want to turn on images for this one. Trust me.
Homemade Pizza
Meet Andy.
(Imagine a drawing of Andy here. He's waving to you. Hello!)
Last tinyletter, I asked what YOUR favorite domain languages were, and Andy replied with a winner:
I love the domain languages of cooking! They combine so many languages just as cuisine combines so many cultures—from the beurre blanc of French to the crudo of Spanish and the al dente of Italian, but also the fundamental dashi from Japan… [Hyperlinks added afterward.]
We. are. definitely. speakin’ my language now. Auspiciously, I met Andy while waiting for an order from a food truck, and it’s fair to say that he’s a tiiiiiiny bit fond of cooking. Go read the way he waxes mouthwateringly poetic about vegetable stock and TELL ME that you don’t immediately want to be rifling through mounds of leeks, carrots, and onions in the produce aisle.
In honor of Andy, today we’re going to talk about food—more specifically, a food that I make several times a week:
✨🍕PIZZA🍕✨
Why pizza?
- It involves bread. C’mon, admit it: Everybody loves bread. Oprah loves bread! You loaf bread, too! I certainly do.
- It’s easy to make. And you can save a ton of time by using a no-knead recipe. Mix up a batch in a matter of minutes, and you have dough in your fridge for a week or two. Cut off hunks and make pizza whenever you want! (Need to knead? You still can! No one is stopping you.)
- It’s a complete meal. Like sandwiches, or burritos, but with just enough cooking to make you feel accomplished.
- It’s forgiving. With baking, there are so many things that can go wrong to make your bread dough not rise, or your loaf not bake properly. That’s less of an issue with pizza! It’s rolled flat, then baked at the hottest temperature that your oven can bear. Even ugly pizza is delicious pizza.
- It encourages experimentation. Within simple constraints, you can combine things that you’d never usually think to combine, and if you’re new to cooking, it gets you to think about flavor pairing in a low-threat way.
STOP TALKING, JASON! LET’S MAAAAAAKE PIZZZZZZAAAAA DOUUUUUGH!!!!
(adapted from "Bradley Benn's Beer Bread" recipe in Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D., and Zoë François)
(adapted from "Naan Dough" recipe in Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D., and Zoë François)
In a future email, I'll get! excited! about the actual making and baking of the pizza, now that you've got a fridge full o' dough. (Also, please consider buying the BREAD IN FIVE books—they get into far more science nerdery AND helpful baking tips, and are the best cookbooks I've found for getting started in baking. They even have a book for baking gluten-free artisan loaves, if that's your yen!)
In the meantime, should you be hankerin' for other (illustrated) recipies, check out Lucie Byron's, or Lucy Knisley's, or Katie Shelly's ingenious Picture Cook, ...or let Becky Cloonan school you in the ways of zucchini bread. (So so good!)
Wishing you many delicious pizzas! If you make one, please zap me a picture of it, via email or twitter.
BECAUSE THEN I WILL BE HUNGRY FOR PIZZA ALL DAY
Many thanks to Matthias & Bethany & Rachel & Derek for getting me on this no-knead crazytrain. 🍞
It's time for a progress check! What's happened in the world of codenamed projects in February?
- [⋯] ATREYU makes slow progress. Step by step. Reigning in scope. Collaborators are making great strides!
- [⋯] Got a NodeJS server set up with Wintersmith and Socket.io for HANDSFORD this week. Super excited to be able to work on this one—it involves robots! I know, right?
- [⋯] Inadvertently started on COLLINS this week, by desoldering headers for the first time.
- [⋯] Had a conspiratorial Sunday brunch with the Soso crew, and we're about to kick off a new educational extracurricular project here in San Diego which I'll dub MAILLARD. More on that in the next tinyletter!
- [→] No time yet for RIO GRANDE. Maybe by next week.
- [→] With minor format revisions for the paper for EOMAIA finished, a short reprieve and then it's time to start working on the slides. And the zine.
- [→] I'm speaking in Atlanta in May at the Information Architecture Summit, amidst an impressive lineup! Time to add SPACE MOUNTAIN to the list, and start work in March.
- [✓] Finally, the reason why there's been no tinyletter for a week or three: DAMERON is sent off! Alongside a record 18,300+ other applicants (a whopping 10,300 more than the 1978 record), I put in an application to be a NASA astronaut, because ...why not?!? (Astronaut Reject makes a great title on a tombstone of life accomplishments, I figure.) Massive thanks(!!!) to both my space-ace friend Elissa and my brother for eleventh-hour resume feedback and copyediting. Could not have done this without y'all.