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Okay, so I just finished making another batch of 4 pizzas using the long, slow risen dough I mixed up yesterday. I have to say that it does yield a much better crust than I am used to getting. The crusts on this batch of pizzas are beautiful and they taste terrific. I took the dough out of the refrigerator early this morning to let it come to room temperature. Three hours later, however, the dough was still quite cool to the touch but, being an instant gratification kinda guy, I couldn't wait any longer and so I made the pizzas. Two things: my crust rose much more than it usually does, and I found that the dough was no more easily patted out by hand than my other doughs were. I suspect that the extra rise I got is related to the fact that the dough was still cool when I rolled it out, topped it and stuck the pie in the oven, which gave the yeast a little more time to act before the heat murdered them. Why I cannot seem to pat out or throw the dough to form the pizza crust I have no clue. Yes, I did let it rest for 10 minutes and tried again, but it was still a no-go.

The food network is today (sunday, 9-1-02) running a Good Eats marathon. Alton Brown is my idea of what Emeril should have been - he's an intelligent star. The key thing is that Alton's cooking is solidly based in food science. Anyway, I just watched the pizza episode. Contrary to some of the recommendations on this thread, Alton says that good pizza begins and ends with good bread, and because of this, one needs to use bread flour rather than the low protein flour that the Italians use and that has been recommended here many times. He also recommends a 24 hour slow rise (in the refrigerator), which I've never tried. So I decided to whip up another batch of dough and give it a long, slow rise to see how different my pizza crust will be. I will report back tomorrow. I have never been able to adequately form the crust without using a rolling pin, so I am also eager to see if the overnight in the fridge has the effect that some posters to this thread claim. I have done a lot of experimentation with different flours for my pizza doughs. In the past two weeks I have sort of settled on 1 1/2 cups of AP to 2 1/2 cups of bread flour as my basic recipe because it yields a pizza crust that is very close to my ideal. So maybe Alton is on to something.

As a home sausage maker I am always looking for fatback. However, every supermarket in my area doesn't carry it and I am forced to used trimmings for my fat. I'm told (tho I don't believe it) that all the fatback is reserved for commercial producers and is generally not available to the public. So who do I need to sleep with to get a supply of fatback?

Ultimately, the choice of sauce comes down to personal preference. I have also sometimes used thinly sliced fresh garden tomatoes in place of a tomato puree of some kind. I've also used hand-mashed canned plum tomatoes. You will get a different kind of pizza, but in each case the pizzas have been quite good. I have come to like the fresh taste of a "raw" tomato sauce, so that is what I use regularly now. I say "raw" because the sauce does cook while the pie is in the oven. I think that making a cooked sauce is a little bit of a waste of time because the complexity of such a sauce can be overpowered by the other toppings, not to mention that it takes a lot of time. But you're right Tommy...there's nothing "wrong" with using a cooked sauce. Your confusion appears to be self-imposed.

Contrary to many of the instructions on this thread, the key to getting thin crust for most of us thick-fingered folks is the rolling pin. If you roll out your crust to 1/4-inch thick or less, top it immediately and don't let the pizza sit for long before you cook it, you will get a very nice thin crust pie. Another tip: leave an untopped border of an inch to an inch and a half around the pie. Here is the fruit of my labors of this afternoon. Homemade hot Italian sausage and kalamata olives.

I too use a no-cook sauce for pizza, derived from the recipe appearing in Best Recipes, form the Cook's Illustrated folks. For a 4-cup of flour bread recipe - to make 4 personal-sized pizzas, I use a 14-oz can of whole plum tomatoes, tomatoes only, throw away the liquid, two cloves of garlic, three or more (depending) chopped chile de Arbol and a drizzle of olive oil. Drop garlic and chiles into food processor and process until they are finely minced. Add tomatoes, oil, salt and pepper and whizz until smooth. Voila: sauce! I make 4 pizzas at a time with the above recipe, and I usually eat one pizza from the batch and freeze the others for later in the week. I form and top the pizzas on a sheet of parchment paper, and I slide the whole shebang, parchment and all, onto my pizza stone that's been preheating at 500 F for about an hour. The parchment makes it simple to assembly line the pizzas, and there's no net loss on the texture of the crust for baking it on the parchment. Good homemade pizza rules!

Did he hand back his stars because he realized and accepted the fact that he was (is?) an insufferable pompous twit?

Maybe so, but in principle, it's not that different.

My sister still lives in the western NY area, and she frequently shops at Wegman's. I emailed her to ask if she's tried the irradiated ground beef there and here is her reply:

Russ: Now that I'm home from work I am able to consult your book to see what you wrote on the topic. I am well prepared to accept that nothing is ever very simple in a scientific sense, and that juicyness itself is a complex issue: base juicyness versus perceived juicyness, for example, and how fat content contributes to perceived juicyness, and etc. But what I initially took issue with was your assertion that most of the juicyness is supplied by our saliva. I have a hard time accepting the truth of this statement. I would indeed appreciate it if you could point me to the original sources for this proposition.

I would guess that the "juicyness" of a piece of meat is related to its moisture content. I would further guess that the moisture content of a piece of meat is redistributed during cooking (released from it's location either inside cells or in the cellular interstices) away from the source of heat. And that the instruction to let a piece of meat rest after cooking is to allow that moisture, the juices, to be reabsorbed. Saliva doesn't enter the picture until I put the meat into my mouth. Or is all this a myth too?

I have not heard this one before. Good one! Erm...you mean you weren't joking? A well seared piece of meat that is over cooked will be like shoe leather, but I suppose if you spit on it enough times one could consider it to be "juicy", couldn't one? But seriously folks... I still think excusing myths like this by saying the offender is only using inexact language, or that it is simply too difficult to explain the real reason one would want to sear misses the point. The point of Chefs-as-educators, which most TV cooking show hosts or food columnists aspire to be, is to educate. It does not serve this purpose to further incorrect ideas.

Huh? My non sequiter detector is bleeping like crazy!

The way I see it, a myth is a myth and the perpetuation of it by people who should know better is fundamentally wrong. And I would strongly disagree that the act of cooking myth perpetuation is a deliberate attempt to get people to do the "right thing" in their cooking where the correct reasoning is too difficult to explain. One doesn't need a Ph.D to be able to understand that the crust produced by searing a piece of meat produces great flavor, both in the meat and in the resulting pan sauce. That's the easily explainable reason why one sears. But here is the key question: do chefs really know that searing does not seal in the juices? Do they really know that dropping a potato into a too-salty pot of soup will do nothing to reduce the saltyness? Or are they themselves tremendously uninformed? My understanding of modern culinary education is that basic food science is an integral part of the curriculum. Am I wrong?

It just gets me. Nearly every chef who's cooked on TV perpetuates the myth that searing locks in the juices or some such formulation. Harold McGhee (sp?) argued that any cook, home- or professional, who is observant can satisfy him/herself that this is patently untrue (sear a steak on one side, turn it and continue cooking -- where are those beads of bloody juice that begin to appear on the seared surface coming from? Inside the meat and through the seared surface, that's where. Crash goes the theory that the puprose of searing a piece of meat is to lock in the juices! Like Alton Brown says in the chapter on searing in his new book- if you want to lock in the juices, get a laminator. So why do chefs continue to perpetuate this myth? What other myths do chefs perpetuate?

Looks like we're both right then.

Ohmygod...this is THE SINGLE WORST burger I've ever heard about!!

Now that more facts about the case have surfaced, I believe I share DRREVENUE's upset at the way he was treated by Rockenwagner. I am intrigued by the personalized hurt being expressed. Why is it that DRREVENUE appears to be personally hurt while Rockenwagner appears to be so indifferent? While I could not even imagine dropping the amount of money DRREVENUE does on restaurants, I believe that people who do deserve better. People who not only drop tons of money but also actively promote their favorite restaurants deserve a whole lot more consideration from the patron/chef. If the facts are as they have been represented here are correct, then Rockenwagner's repsonse is mindblowingly arrogant and he deserves whatever negative hit his business takes from this kind of publicity. If I were DRREVENUE, I would save my money for dining in Europe [Note to DRREVENUE: do you need anyone to carry your bags?] and forget about Rockenwagner. Sometimes you just have to let go and move on.

Speaking as one of those "Average Joes" out there, here're my two cents: 1. There may be an explanation for the way the chef/owner reacted to the criticism of one of his good customers, but there is no excuse. The chef is clearly, stoopidly, in the wrong here and it's up to him to come to his senses and make amends. Is he running a vanity operation or a business? Does he expect people will forever come, worshipfully, to his place even if the food is terrible? Does he think he is Daniel Boulud or something? 2. Given the facts as outlined, I agree with Fat Guy to the extent that there seems to be a level of kneejerk hurtfulness on both sides that is getting in the way of what was formerly a mutually agreeable relationship. 3. The customer is always right, the customer is always right.

After reading Jeffrey Steingarten's account of making a sourdough starter, followed close on by reading John Thorne's account of making a sourdough starter, I was compelled to give it a go. It took several attempts, but I finally got a starter started. I didn't use additives like your black organic grapes, instead I attempted to get the natural airborn yeast cells to take root, so to speak. I succeeded after a couple of failed attempts. I succeeded after I stopped using tap water and began using natural spring water. More recently, however, I've found Amy Scherber's (of Amy's Bread fame) procedure to reliably give me a strong starter. Her secret is to use a bit of rye flour to get the starter started. Then it is progressively diluted with white flour until the starter is essentially all white flour-based. What I really need is more instruction regarding turning the starter into a dough. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't for me.

refer to another thread your started, asking somewhat the same question...Is Wilfrid Right? (shoot me now).

Nick - thanks for your description of how you manage your menus and how you come up with new dishes. I may be only a home cook, but it's still very informative and useful for me. To what extent, in your menu development, do you feel constrained to cater to your captive audience's taste. Are there culinary places you dare not go for fear of being rejected by your patrons? Or do you feel free to be as experimental as you like?

As an avid fan of Iron Chef, the impression I got was that in Japan perhaps they rate Itailian cuisine lower than French, Chinese and Japonese cuisines, and subsequently added an Italian chef to the original lineup. I know, I know...I'm surmising. Surely it can't be that they don't want to spend the money to design a set to accomodate one more Iron Chef!?!

What I want to know is: why is the Iron Chef Italian set apart from the other Iron Chefs during introduction time?

DR is actually a pompous, pedantic twit (IMHO).