Fast-forward to the present time, I kept hearing from my mom and my sister how easy it was to buy the raw pizza dough from Trader Joe's to make homemade pizza. This sounded great because the most time-consuming part of making pizza is getting the dough made. This cut out that almost full day of mixing, kneading, and proofing before you can even think of eating it. We got the dough. It seemed a little more wet than than we had expected. So, we thought we'd add a little flour to it and knead it. It still was super sticky and not like the pizza dough we had worked with before. We both worked to get this dough into a pizza shape. Once shaped, we piled on the toppings. Both of us love pizza with lots of toppings: sauce, cheese, pepperoni, sausage, peppers, mushrooms, onions, and olives. We get ready to slide it off onto our [metal] pizza cooker, which had been sitting in the oven getting nice and hot and the pizza won't slide off the peel. That peel had cornmeal and flour and we were both stumped as to how it was still stuck. With the oven wide open and all the 500F heat escaping into the kitchen, we grabbed all the spatulas we could find to get the pizza into the oven. We finally did and this is what we ended up with:
Yeah...we ended up with a very ugly, half-assed calzone, rather than a pizza. Granted, it tasted really good, but when you're looking for pizza and this is what's on your plate, it's rather disappointing.
Marshall really wanted to get this pizza right, though, so he dug out our copy of Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food (2004) and looked up the pizza dough recipe we had used long ago. He prepped the dough: mixed it, kneaded it and proofed it. Everything was going well. We learned from our original failure and when it came to topping our pizza, we scaled things back a bit. This time we went with only a few toppings: sauce, cheese, spicy Italian sausage and bell peppers. It stretched correctly and wasn't sticky. It slipped right off the peel into the hot oven and we finally got a pizza. It was delicious. I like Brown's pizza dough, which is the thin crispy type of pizza dough and not thick at all. There is a bit of chew, but it's not too chewy either. It was apparently too delicious to photograph and we devoured it before we could snap a photo of its beauty. Just imagine a lovely pizza topped with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, crumbled hot Italian sausage and green bell peppers - delicious!
We can only learn from our past failures. If we don't fail at least once, how would we know how much we've learned? I've had those nights were dinner just didn't go right at all. The recipe wasn't written well or I was too tired and misread a step. I remember one night trying to make miso soup all from scratch, even down to the step of making my own dashi. I ended up with a kitchen full of random packing and bits of chopped ingredients scattered about and a soup in a pot that just didn't look right at all. It was just enough to push me over the edge and I dumped everything and we ordered take-out. A few weeks later, I tried again and it came out like it should have. Granted, I don't think I will attempt to make it all again, unless I was truly into it, but the point was I dusted myself off, got back up and tried again.
Here's to more learning experiences! :)
