Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

I used to think you had to do crazy work to get a great pizza.

I did most of the stuff on this page (short of breaking my self-cleaning lock). It is all great advice, and if you follow it and practice a lot, you can make great pizzas and wow your guests.

BUT! After you have done that, you can also violate all the rules and still get great pizzas. Once, I was in Waipio Valley in Hawaii, with just Pillsbury white flour, bread yeast, a block of cheddar cheese, Wesson oil, tomato paste, fresh oregano, and spring water. To bake I had a gas oven with the rack out, a tall soup pot, inverted with a big skillet also inverted over it, close under the broiler. The pizzas came out fantastic! I could only make them 9" across, so I ended up making 30+ of them.

I had no peel. My dough was very, very wet; I scooped enough for each pizza with a big kitchen spoon, spread it out on parchment, drizzled Wesson, smeared tomato, sprinkled oregano, salt, and cheddar, slid it onto the skillet, and started on the next one.

The one thing you mustn't ever neglect is letting the flour and water proof for 40+ minutes before you work it.

To get decent pizza at almost any American restaurant, you have to insist "burn it!" or they will be afraid you will get mad about a little charring, and so undercook it the way Americans demand. You have to tell them that if it bends, it's not done enough.

Regardless of the recipe, technique and setup thin crust pizzas are still incredibly hard to do well at home.

Thicker foccacia-style pizzas are very easy and come out right on the first try, but thin crust pizzas at the very least require an oven that can go above 300c and that's very rare.

> letting the flour and water proof

Autolyse.

Get an electrical pizza oven that can go to 350c works pretty well.

I have a ceramic bbq thing that can do 500c :)

When my oven broke I tried to make a pizza napoletana / margherita in the pan, and it worked better than expected!

The trick is to roll the dough out very thin, fold it and then unfold it in the pan (this way it doesn't break on the way), frie it from both sides before you add the tomato paste and cheese. Then just bake it with the lid closed until the mozarella is run.

That's why the pros use brick ovens.

Aren't the pros using special-purpose electrically-heated conveyor belts?

I could be wrong, but I believe those are more for efficient production of pizza. at least in my area, I only see those in the crappiest takeout places.

Correct. In principle, a conveyer belt oven could produce good results by adjusting temperature and speed correctly, using quality ingredients prepared right, but almost all Americans do not want good pizza, and will be angry if they get it. They want bad pizza just like the last bad pizza they had.

It is practically impossible to teach people to want good quality when they are used to bad, and a reliably losing business strategy.

There was a movie about this: "Big Night" (1996, Isabella Rosselini, Stanley Tucci).

> almost all Americans do not want good pizza, and will be angry if they get it. They want bad pizza just like the last bad pizza they had.

You might consider that if this is your observation, you may not be using a normal sense of the word "good".

I can tell you don't have kids.

You can now buy relative cheaper portable pizza ovens (such as the ooni), which make this pretty easy.

> and so undercook it the way Americans demand

Yup. We had a great pizza chain called Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza, that would cook the pizza "well done". Apparently, they had enough complaints that they now under-cook it by default, unless you explicitly ask them to "burn it". Unfortunately, the new ownership that made that change (that Anthony refused to make for years), also made some other changes that took them from "great" to just "good".

Palo Alto has (had?) a place called Amicis that would make pizzas right, and my sister in law knew how to order. My mother in law complained about it for months afterward.

I wonder how these techniques reconcile with the 24h dough method. He suggests that the warm rise method is more difficult to do effectively, but seems to bank it on a 6h timeline, and this is what he's comparing to a 1-2 day cold-rise. I expect this uses a particularly warm environment for rapid rise.

I just leave dough on the counter for 22-24 hours, room temperature, i.e. the Jim Lahey method. In rabid pizza forums the prevailing wisdom seems to be that cold-rise is inferior to that. However I'm not taking into account the other aspects of the technique.

Since I oven-bake at 550F my dough isn't nearly as wet. Still comes out quite flavorful. I don't autolyse before kneading however, and might endeavor to start doing so.

> My dough was very, very wet;

This is the secret, combined with stretching the gluten without tearing the dough, and giving the dough enough time to slowly rise (e.g in a fridge overnight).

(Basically make Pan Cristal dough for your pizza )

Very wet dough was the right thing for that time and place.

As noted below, cooking is much more like music than engineering. There isn't one right way, yet there is no upper limit on the quality of the result. A business depends on repeatable results, but that's business. True mastery includes creativity and adaptability to circumstances.

Once I had a pot of lentils that was almost done. I tasted it and it needed something... I spotted a bowl of fresh black cherries, and thought "that's it!". I quartered and added some, and it was exactly the right thing, right then. I later found a Martha Steward lentils recipe that called for cherries.

> cooking is much more like music than engineering. There isn't one right way, yet there is no upper limit on the quality of the result.

Absolutely agree, I didn’t mean to imply that this was some kind of patentable solution; more like me discovering the intricacies of a new musical genre, and in my excitement, desperately trying to communicate what I (probably wrongly) think is the essential parts (to be mixed at your discretion)

That was the first time I made it that way. I have no idea why it seemed right; it just did. But that sort of thing seems to happen, cooking.

The name "Pan de Cristal" is new to me. A new pleasure!

(Pan de Cristal pizza can be very, very good.)

I stopped reading this when I read cheddar.

Downvoted for truth basically. When it comes to bread and cheese, trust the US to get it wrong :P

Downvoted for missing the point, that the OP was EXPLICITLY ACKNOWLEDGING that every single component is suboptimal or "wrong" but that they still liked the result. So a response that an ingredient is wrong is not particularly useful.

I am obliged to admit that eating a pizza made in Waipio Valley makes it intrinsically more enjoyable.

My son, a harsh critic, agreed: he ate five of them.

Not making the pizzas because the ingredients at hand seemed to portend doom would have been a grave mistake. The pizzas were memorable, the lesson moreso.

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