Pizza

In other cum news, had a pizza in Palermo with chestnut cream on that I was dreaming about for years

Do you guys reckon there's a chance you might be losing some of the joy of making and eating pizza by becoming bogged down with trying to replicate a specific type with particular ingredients?

This is the joy for me. Sometimes I want that Neapolitan, sometimes I want crispy NY style, sometimes I'll bang out a quick and dirty dough, sometimes I'll really take care with a slowly fermented sourdough.

But a big part of the fun is really nailing a pizza, regardless of the style. And shitty ingredients can hold you back. Balls of mozzarella that piss water everywhere aren't ideal, but neither is supermarket dried mozzarella that tastes of nothing. I equally like banging out ham and pineapple (much to the chagrin of half of this thread!).

Also, there's a joy in sourcing good ingredients. I find it quite funny going to the Italian wholesaler to get ingredients (so do they it seems). And I love making pizzas for friends and sharing these ingredients and new techniques.

It's like anything, just do it in the way that you enjoy. To what degree you take it is a very personal thing.

Thats the beauty of pizza. Much as some people on this thread will scoff, a 99p oven pizza from Iceland is enjoyed by millions. Quite rightly. Pizza is one of the rare foods that just works even in its most shitty forms.

Pizza is like sex, when it's good, it's the best thing in the world, and even when it's average, it's still pretty good. *

*it has been pointed out that this seems to be a particularly male perspective regarding sex, but you get the idea.

So far pizza making for me has been a fun learning and adaptation experience. I have an ideal that I aspire to in terms of the base and after that wish to assemble good quality ingredients on top that work well together.

Finding great ingredients and seeing how things can be changed and evolve has been really satisfying. For me there is a simple perfection to a light thin dough with a puffy crust, topped with good quality ingredients. If I am doing it I’d like to do it well. I’d rather source decent flour, make a dough etc than just go to the corner shop, buy a loaf of bread, ketchup, industrial long life cheese flip the toaster on its side and make pizza toast.

Yep, would agree, and both done in 45 seconds.

@Stonehedge I see your point, and each to their own, but for me I like to find what I like (pizza style) and refine and perfect it as much as possible using the best ingredients I can find.

This

There’s a time and a place for pizza toast. Inviting friends round for food and drinks may not be the one though.

It’s like anything, if you enjoy it, you probably want to get better at it. And your enjoyment will manage your investment - I don’t think people are striving for the perfect pizza and not enjoying it.

Yep, would agree, and both done in 45 seconds.

Standards drop when alcohol is involved and can get messy.

I don't see it as any different from anything you cook at home, if you enjoy cooking you're naturally going to try and replicate things you like. Up until a couple of weeks ago I'd never used caputo flour or fior di latte mozzarella and even though I think they've made nicer pizza I'm not going to be worried about using plain flour and whatever cheese I can find at my local shop as it all makes tasty pizza in the end.

There’s a time and a place for pizza toast.

My student days are long behind me

I think this is what I wasn't realising when I wrote my first post.

I suppose that if it doesn't affect your enjoyment of pizza overall, it's no different to learning to become good at making anything.

I made some pizza toast under a shitty 1970s grill using stale sliced bread and an unidentified cheese that didn't even melt properly in a mountain hut in Austria a few years back. Might have been the best pizza I've ever had. Definitely top five.

Much like when people ask if they can make bread with the flour they have at home, it pisses me off when people say they need proper bread flour. You don’t. It’ll be better with more appropriate ingredients, but you can definitely make bread with plain flour or whatever, and what’s more you can definitely enjoy the process and the final product.

And DJ, while you denounce pizza toast, I’d imagine you’d still make cheese on toast - and if my judgement doesn’t fail me - you probably chuck some extra bits on there too.

I guess my point is that while we all seem to enjoy the minutiae of perfecting pizza, I’d be very surprised if people don’t also enjoy other levels of bread + cheese + whatever.

This thread has descended into the equivalent to “you guys custom building your own bikes are overthinking it, some of my best rides were on a Create or Unipak.”

Or posting “have you tried Nescafé” on the coffee thread.

News just in- Different people have different opinions shocker.

After the break, exploring whether hot potatoes are hot or cold.

I still haven't found the right (for me) Mozzarella.

After the break, exploring whether hot potatoes are hot or cold.

Fuck me dead, lollin, would rep.

I am a fan or Welsh rarebit, egg, flour, cider, cheese and Worcestershire sauce. But I wouldn’t claim it to be a white pizza.

Also made a fantastic muesli bread which I paired with Baron Bigod the other day.

I think everyone in this thread likes pizza.

C O N T R O V E R S I A L

For us non-pros, there's an upper limit to custom bike building after which the gains are marginal and the increase in time and cost to the builder is purely about the joy of the unique and the love of tinkering.

Likewise a well crafted pizza is going to blow most peoples minds at 90%, above that and it's just the makers joy of sourcing ingredients and tinkering with their method. It's in this final 10% that there can be no objective argument because the joy is in the eye of the rider/chef.

tl;dr it's really fucking hot in my sunroom and I'm just typing to distract myself

Also made a fantastic muesli bread which I paired with Baron Bigod the other day.

Of course you did. Lol.

I've just filled up a paddling pool.
I have no children.

Lidl also have a remarkably similar offering

https://www.lidl.co.uk/en/p/bbq-essentials/barbecue-pizza-oven/p31937

I keep forgetting how effective sitting with your feet in a washing up bowl of iced water is

I really didn't intend my posts as a criticism of anybody having a particular personal taste or interest so I don't think the comparisons to custom bikes or coffee fanaticism is particularly accurate or helpful. We all know there are different grades of bikes, pizza and coffee. It's just a bit joyless if you end up ruining your joy for those things by becoming a fanatic.

It's quite easy to read this thread and interpret some posters as only being able to enjoy pizzas made to the highest standards, using only the finest expensive ingredients and only to their method above all other pizza. I was wrong about this and people have set me straight.