Bam!

 

   Does everyone remember Emeril? Emeril Lagasse: restauranteur and cooking show star. When he adds a special ingredient to his dish he says bam! He calls it kicking it up a notch and invites the audience to take a swig of their beverage.

   Emeril is based in New Orleans, but I liked him because he was born in my home state of Massachusetts. As a youth he was a good drummer. Maybe that's where he got his bam. He was offered a scholarship to a music conservatory but he went to chef school instead.

   While Emeril has mastered Cajun and Creole cuisine, my specialty is pizza. My love of pizza goes back to the days when my brother and I would scrounge up a dime or ten pennies and run to the local hole-in-the-wall pizza joint run by real Italians. From Italy. We'd sprinkle hot pepper flakes on top of our slice, cut it in half, then run to the park to ease our burning tongues at the big water fountain.

   I never considered making my own pizza. You don't make baguettes when you live in Paris. When I moved to Minnesota we found an excellent pizza place in our St. Paul neighborhood. But when we moved north six hours to Roseau things changed. We were reduced to eating frozen supermarket pizza. But were we really condemned to a life of cardboard pizza? 

   I had already taught myself to bake bread. Couldn't I just spread the bread dough onto a cookie sheet and go from there? Thus began my long apprenticeship in making a delectable pie. We ate a lot of questionable pizza in those years, but I kept kicking it up notch by notch, and eventually guests at the dinner table declared my pie toothsome. If I see a former guest after a long absence, his eyes will mist over and he'll say, "Pizza man."

   On a family trip to Ireland I made the mistake of bringing my pizza pans along. Mozzarella cheese is not a staple in Ireland and it took many euros to get each pie to the table. Also, our lodgings had new-fangled convection ovens and I kept scorching the top of the pizza while the bottom remained raw or vice versa. My sister's kids had made friends with the Irish kids in the next condo and they scarfed down the pizza which I considered way below my standard. One of them dubbed me 'Papa Joe,' God love him.

   That brings up the point that even bad pizza is pretty good. I tell that to people who want to learn how to make pizza. You'll create some embarrassments at first, but persevere. Keep on kicking it up a notch. People will love it that someone else is making supper. I've learned from bitter experience to have plenty of appetizers on hand. It's hard to bake more than one pizza at a time if you're not a pizzeria.

   Perfection is elusive, but improvements can be had. I'm always tweaking. Last fall my friend Ginny gave me a bag of Italian 00 flour. The Italians use this extra fine flour for pastry and pizza. I tried it mixed with bread flour in various proportions and realized this was a real kicker-upper.  But the 00 flour was only available in Italian markets or online and was ridiculously expensive. But I had to have it. After surfing the web awhile I found I could buy it in bulk for only three times the cost of regular flour.

   The new flour behaved a bit differently in the oven. The bottom was getting done before the top. The solution was to move the pan under the broiler for the last 90 seconds. Bam! I don't know what the future holds, but like to I imagine a line of mourners at my funeral coming to the pulpit and saying things like, "I don't care what you say about Joe, he did make a pretty good pizza."

My muse