Pizza Perfect

This weekend I was a disaster waiting to happen in the kitchen.  Everything I touched turned to shit, which doesn’t seem like a good time to try new things, right?  For some reason I got a bug up my ass to make pizza margherita, like I haven’t had since I left Italy.  I’ve never made pizza dough myself, and cakery aside, dough is not really my thing.  We don’t really get along and this weekend was no different.

I decided to follow Jamie Oliver’s pizza dough recipe because he always makes things look so easy and he’s always making pizza so he should know what he’s doing, right?

Not so much.

His recipe calls for a pile of flour sifted onto a work surface with a well in the middle to hold the liquid.  Just like making pasta right?  Should be easy peasy!  Except when you make pasta you put eggs in the well, which are a little thicker than yeasty water.  And you don’t use 2 1/2 cups of liquid for pasta!  Twice I made the well.  Twice I very carefully poured in the liquid.  Twice I very carefully blended the liquid with the flour making sure not to break the dam and let the liquid out.  Except that it’s impossible to not break the dam!  Twice a goopy pasty mess flowed over my counters, over the sides, down the cupboard, into the silverware drawer, all over the place.  It was like paper mache exploded all over the kitchen!  Twice.

To say I had a hissy fit would be the understatement of the century.  It would be like saying Kim Jong Ill is a little eccentric.  Twice.  I said every bad word I could think of, and then I made up more.

That was yesterday.  Today I flipped Jamie the bird and hunted down another pizza dough recipe.  I know I could have just thrown it all in the bread maker on the dough cycle, or thrown it in the Cuisinart, but that’s not the point.  I wanted to touch the dough, knead it, manhandle it.  Make it my bitch.  I needed (ha! get it?) to get in touch with dough because it bothers me that I have this mental dough block, and I wanted to make it all by myself.

I had to buy more flour because I used an entire bag of flour on the exploding dough volcanoes.  My trash can smells awesome right now – like fresh bread.  I measured and mixed and this time I used a bowl.  And I made dough!  And it rose.  And I rolled it.  And it was good.  It was sooooo good!

Pizza Margherita, the way I haven’t had it since I lived in Italy.