Sunday, June 13, 2010

Pizza on Earth






The pizzas I made during the week from Tony's dough and Peter's dough were virtually the same outcome as far as the crust goes. Tony's dough was very good in the rustic sense of pizza dough. I did make a couple of pizzas using his dough which were both highly successful. One of them was a New York white sauce with chicken with some tomato slices. He suggests chicken breasts but I prefer thighs as I believe they have more flavor and are less dry. Covering the precooked chicken pieces in mozzarella and slices of provolone cheese and sprinkling some thyme on them, made for a pizza worthy of royalty. The second one, I made from Tony's dough was amazingly successful also. I think I cracked the code. He has a pizza on his menu in San Francisco that is called the Clam and Garlic made on a thin crust. It doesn't appear in his book but after making his chicken pizza I didn't think we were far away from the one that he isn't telling. Each slice of pizza has it's own unshelled short neck clam on it plus others under the layers of cheese. It is worth a drive into the City just to have one of his Clam & Garlic  pizzas. However, I think I can save myself the gas money by doing it right here in my kitchen. Sorry Tony, but I guess that what this journey is all about. Yes, it's called reverse engineering! Maybe I have unlocked more than the pizza code, maybe this is primal man breaking the hunter or gatherer code. It appears that the pizza is out there but you have to hunt it down. On the other hand, if you are to gather up the right ingredients and information,  you can construct your own pizza. If Robert Oppenheimer knew for certain that splitting an atom was possible then all he had to do was reverse engineer it. But if you don't know that it is possible, then building an atomic bomb may be as easy as understanding inter-dimensional travel, string theory, the size of the universe, or the female mind. Impossible!
    Tony wasn't the first to construct a clam & garlic  pizza, but he sure knows how to do it over and over, and to do it right each time. I think maybe, that instead of trying to determine which dough and sauce make the best New York pizza, I could be attempting to replicate each of Tony's pizza recipes. It sort of sounds like a movie and a blog a while back called Julie & Julia or the Russians stealing the plans to the atomic bomb.


  I can't begin to tell you how good this clam & garlic pizza is! Not only does it taste amazing, but the presentation with the clams on top gives it that, "Oh this is going to be special" pizza. 
   Let's see Round Table, Papa Murphy, or Einstein & Oppenheimer do that!                      

1 comment:

  1. Making your own pizza is really fun. You can put all the ingredients that you want and i think that one of the pizza sites is www.learnaboutpizza.com

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