Form before Function

Everybody says it's the dough that makes a good pizza. They are correct, but at this stage of the game I wasn't ready to accept that. Being an artist, I needed to work in color. I went on the quest to make a really good rich, red pizza sauce. Similar to spaghetti sauce, maybe a little firmer and ripe with flavor I thought I could just throw the ingredients I had in the house, pile up the garlic and simmer it til next Tuesday and voila', all done. It wasn't going to work that way. The more I read the more I realized I didn't know what I was doing. Every cook has their version and mine wasn't even close to any of theirs. I had to go to the pro's. Again I searched and found help. This time in the form of a DVD sold on the internet. I laid out my $30, sat back and waited. For a price you can buy all the knowledge you need. This is the link to take you to that DVD. The link to www.pizzeriasecrets.com is also at the bottom of this blog.

I had to admit, I'm not as good a pizza sauce cook as I thought I was. But, that has been changing steadily. The sauce I developed from the ingredients in the video and a trip to the store were exactly the taste I was looking for. A little spicier but that gives it a wang that stays with you and I want my pizza to be remembered. I, being of Danish extraction, did not grow up eating anything more spicy than a fish stick. The foods I liked as a child were not going to sting anybody's throat. I used to say that the Danes are the ones who put the 'dane' in 'mundane' when it comes to food. So any amount of spice was an eye popper for me. I used to think cinnamon flavored toothpicks were too hot as a kid. I was going to have to adjust. The flavors in the sauce mingled and complemented each other so well. I could see and taste that this was right and I had been way off. Search over for now.

World's Greatest Pizza Dough

After finding the recipe that self proclaimed itself the "worlds' best pizza dough" I started there. With what I had in the kitchen is what I was going to use. I hadn't baked anything with yeast for over 30 years. My last attempt was a failure at baking bread over 3 decades ago because nobody told me yeast was a living thing! I know it sounds stupid now and how could I have not known that but yeast to me was just another ingredient like salt or pepper. People are living things. Trees are living things. Dogs are living things. Insects are living things and even germs are living things. But nobody ever said to me, "Vincent, yeast are living things." So I proceeded to bake bread with a yeast packet that had long since expired but I was OK with that. I have eaten potato chips that were older than my dog. As you would've guessed, the dough didn't rise. I figured it needed heat and then it would rise. So I had an inspiration. Bake it in the oven and then it will rise. It didn't, it had died.

Here I was some 30 plus years later and ready to jump back on the horse! I followed his instructions as I couldn't afford another failure at 56. I would be 80 before I could try it again at the rate I was going. This time the dough rose and I was elated. I knew I had a future in baking somehow.

The dough was so much better than all those Bisquick recipes I had used or canned biscuits I had used. Suddenly I am launched into a new world of baking. Baking with yeast that was fresh was a new world to me. I felt inspired and it was "game on."

Suddenly I wasn't saying to my wife, "that pizza was OK but let's get a real pizza tomorrow."

I had turned a corner in a BIG way. Who would've thought that living yeast could make such a big difference!

I had come a long way with that first glorious success but I had a long way to go. Tomato sauce in a jar that says pizza sauce wasn't going to do it either. At least I knew better than to use ketchup. I started with the canned and jarred pizza sauces that you buy off the shelf. Then I realized what I hadn't done. I had not googled the best pizza sauce ever. OMG a whole new world opened up to me. Pizza sauce recipes of every imaginable combination started popping up. I think there were some 8,440,000 recipes found by Google in less than 15/100th of a second. This was going to be a bit lengthy. I dug in. It was now starting to become a challenge of Man vs Food if I may borrow that phrase from the Travel Channel.

I have always enjoyed cooking when I wasn't in a hurry and now with my work being slow it was a good time to sort it out and see why everybody's pizza sauce recipe was the best.

The best thing I could have done was throw out the recipes from famous chefs like Emeril and Wolfgang Puck and the like. They weren't pizza experts. The experts in my mind were the Italian family recipes handed down for generations. That was where I wanted to go. Suddenly I began to see the quest I was on and understand why I had chosen pizza as my ally and foe. Anybody can make crappy pizza. I had done it numerous times to prove it. Only a few understood what pizza really was. These were the people in the recipes and blogs that I read and absorbed to maybe catch a glimpse of what I had been missing most of my life. Good pizza isn't a goal. It is a journey.