If you aren’t making your own pizza…
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Anonymous
Pizza in france is pretty grim. Fish. I hate fish. I remember being in love with Uno's spinoccoli pizza in the 90s and am inspired to look up and make that recipe, so thanks, OP! |
Anonymous
Pizza oven is good but we've come up with some strategies that address these issues. Number one is using parchment paper under the pizza to slide it on and off the stone. Totally eliminates the issue of the crust folding. Second is play around with location of the stone or steel in the oven. We put our stone closer to the bottom of the oven, which has resolved the issue of the cheese cooking too quickly. It still winds up fairly brown, but not over-browned. In terms of timing, our dough recipe makes three 10-12" rounds, we roll them all out at once, then top the first and put it in the hot oven. It cooks while we top the second -- it's only about 12 minutes so not long. Then the second cooks while we top the third, and then the third cooks. If people are starving, we just eat as we go. But if we want to eat as a family, this process only takes about 30 minutes total, plenty of time for people to change and wash up, set the table, throw on some music, etc. It's not like we're making dinner for an hour. It absolutely takes less time to make pizza than to get it delivered, and is about the same amount of time as ordering for take out (but a million times cheaper and better quality). We still go out for pizza sometimes, and there are pizza places where fresh pizza served in restaurant is unquestionably better than what we make at home because they have a real pizza oven and top notch ingredients and good staff. But what we make at home is superior to pretty much all delivery/take out we've tried. Obviously if we're dead tired and just don't want to cook, we'll still order out. But most of the time we have the energy to make pizza. It's not that hard. |
Anonymous
| Dominos is lately taking 2+ hours to deliver so I may as well make my own! |
Anonymous
This. And it's extremely mediocre pizza. If you are lucky enough to have a legitimately good pizza place around the corner from your house and can pick it up and have it home in 5 minutes, it's probably worth it to order it. But Dominoes/Pizza Hut/Papa Johns are all aggressively mediocre-to-bad, take forever, and are often way overpriced. Plus then you're tipping the delivery person even though it took forever because it's not their fault. Not worth it. |
Anonymous
You cared enough to click on the thread and respond, so... |
Anonymous
Every nation, huh? |
Anonymous
“Basically” you either haven’t traveled widely throughout the US, or you haven’t adequately sampled the pizzas during your travels. It’s ok. Just know that generalizing about a whole entire nation based on your own limited experience isn’t exactly accurate. Do you really think that while you’re experimenting with “other countries’ recipes” at home, that people from those other countries aren’t making and selling pizza throughout the US? If you stopped at Domino’s, then you should know that there’s a lot more out there. If you’ve traveled and tasted widely, then you really should have managed to come across at least a few “delicious variations “ in the process. I’m curious. How much time have you spent eating pizza in New Haven and New York? Or Baltimore? Can you tell the difference between pizza cooked in a coal oven and your home experiments? I’m not doubting that you make great pizza. I am, though, wondering exactly what pizzas you’re comparing with your own. |
Anonymous
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OP here. This thread has more legs than I expected. Responding to various posts:
I use whatever parchment paper I can find — nothing special. I cut the corners off, but otherwise dont worry about it — never had it catch fire in my oven. To the poster who praised the grill: I do make it on the grill in summer, but I find it turns out just as good in a 500 oven, with the baking stone at the very bottom of the oven. My favorite atypical topping is that little red picante pepper you get at the olive bar at Whole Foods. Love those! With diced artichoke hearts and Kalamata olives. Sometimes I do a white pizza with softened garlic, figs, and arugula. |
Anonymous
NP. Wait what’s up with pizza in Baltimore |
Anonymous
I totally understand you're patriotic, PP, but I'm very sorry to say 99% of restaurant pizza in the US is objectively bad. No, I'm not talking about take-out pizza. It doesn't matter what city it's from, or how it's cooked, usually it's too oily, cheesy and salty. Bread depth isn't proportional to toppings either. The USA is a wonderful country in so many ways, but food isn't what people admire about it. I don't want to get you all prickly and offended, but it's the truth. |
Anonymous
Maybe for your taste buds. I like pizza here more than the pizza I had in Italy. I’m a New Yorker. The extra cheese and oil is part of the taste I’ve accustomed to since childhood . There, it tastes too dry, less oily, like tomatoes on clay, very little cheese. Granted, it’s healthier and we are a fatter country but so what? I find the food snobs that hate it are the first to wolf down things like pizza, mozzarella sticks, calzones, burgers, and French fries . And tuna on pizza is not some sort of brag worthy thing. You can place anchovies on pizza here for the same effect but better because it’s well done with the cheese. |
Anonymous
| I love homemade pizza but my kids consider it a totally different food group than pizza from ledos or flippin pizza. It is different. |
Anonymous
I’m not offended but I disagree. I’ve lived in Europe and, while fresh ingredients are easier to find there, the variety and innovation of cuisine is much richer in America. Even in major Spanish cities you are hard pressed to find anything other than a “standard” menu de la dia, outside of a few molecular gastronomy hotspots. Most European areas are simply too culturally homogeneous to innovate cuisine. The best American cuisine fuses elements from Asia, Africa, and Latin America in ways I’ve never experienced in Europe. Back to pizza… I think you can do an excellent pizza at home but it takes practice & technique. It’s a bit of a myth that a 700 degree oven is required. Most commercial pizza ovens get opened and closed so often that they never really maintain that temperature. A good pizza stone that you preheat for 45 minutes can get you a long way to a crisp crust. |
Anonymous
+1 And how can you be sure you're getting authentic "Baltimore" and "New Haven" pizza and not Papa John style? Do you have to make sure the joint says "baltimore-style" pizza? I know Cleveland pizza is square and doughy. Not my thing but I would like to try it! |
Anonymous
Maybe go to the “little Italy” neighborhood in Baltimore? I used to get the best cannolis there! |