[Sca-cooks] Pizza was Re; Philly Cheese Steak

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Pixel, Goddess and Queen:
>  >
>>  Re pizza, I'm reminded of Robert B. Parker's fictional sentiments on
>>  beer ("the worst beer I ever had was wonderful"; I forget which
>>  Spenser book it's in). It's extremely likely that the worst pizza in
>>  New York is as good as, or better than, much of what is out there in
>>  the rest of the country, with the exception of deep dish pizza,
>>  which, of course, you would get in Chicago. See, deep dish pizza is
>>  probably our local equivalent of other types of pizza elsewhere: it's
>>  almost invariably made by large corporate chains, not hand-stretched,
>>  and generally treated with disrespect even as it is being made; it
>>  loses out both in the recipe (the Stouffer recipe kitchen concept, I
>>  mean) and the technique (mostly made by more or less unskilled labor).
>>
>>  Conversely, the majority of other pizza around here is still more or
>>  less the result of artisan baking, even if many industrialized
>>  shortcuts have been introduced into the process.
>>
>>  Adamantius
>
>*Properly made* Chicago deep-dish pizza is divine. Poorly made Chicago
>deep-dish is bread with tomato sauce on it. I get my deep-dish pizza fix
>when I visit the parental homestead.

Jeff Smith did a show on deep-dish pizza; his recipe seemed pretty
good to me, and I've been told by Chicagoans that it was pretty
respectable. The only really memorable aspect (to me) was that the
dough called for a small percentage of cornmeal, and was otherwise a
shorter, richer, less glutinous dough than that of the thinner pizza
styles. It didn't require the kind of stretching hand-thrown pizza
needs, and it needs a good, heavy, seasoned pan, like an old
sheet-iron cake pan.

>  The Brooklyn-born husband claims to
>have found real NY pizza in St. Paul, on the skyway somewhere, made by
>real honest-to-odin transplanted Brooklyn Eye-talians, but apparently
>they're only open for lunch.
>
>The style of pizza that is done well here by the local places is a thin
>crispy crust without any real edge to it that I tend to refer to as
>cracker pizza--and it must be cut in squares. You can't eat proper cracker
>pizza in wedges, it just doesn't work.

Some of the brick-oven pizzerias around here make what sounds pretty
similar; a little like matzoh in appearance and flavor, but different
texturally.

>Bleu cheese? On *pizza*? <shudder>
>
>Oh, and as for Papa John's--don't bother.

Who, me??? I'm not sure it's even an issue for me; I think the only
big chains that exist in New York City are Pizza Hut and Dominoes,
but neither is anywhere near as good, or significantly
price-competitive,  as any of the billion street-corner places with
old men in stained white T-shirts.

Adamantius