The Dinner Files

I’ve been playing around with salmon. Lots of salmon. I returned from Cordova, Alaska with smoked salmon in jars and smoked salmon in vacuum-sealed bags. I was, for a brief moment in time, smoked salmon rich. We ate some straight-up, flaked some and put it on bagels as if it were gravlax. Then I made pizza. Salmon pizza. Two of them.

The top one is a crust cooked by itself (just a brush of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt), allowed to cool just a bit, slathered with cream cheese (I used that crazy delicious Sierra Nevada cream cheese – I wear a blindfold when I buy it to avoid the sticker shock), and covered with bits of flaked hot-smoked sockeye Copper River salmon, sliced ultra-ripe tomatoes, and minced green onion. I imagined it would be a lot like a bagel and it was.

The bottom one. Oh, that pizza. It was inspired by one I had in Cordova at Harborside Pizza that had smoked salmon and onion and bacon. The problem with that one – despite their awesome wood-burning oven in the back of a trailer – is that the crust was pretty thick and chewy in not a fabulous way and it had a lot of that very American tomato sauce that is, to my palate, quite sweet and then it also had a butt-load of melty cheese that isn’t quite stringy and stretchy but instead just greasy. In the world of typical American-style pizza, theirs was dandy. The problem is that I don’t really like those kind of pizzas. In fact, I thought I hated pizza until I was a teenager and had a different kind of pizza.

So I made a thinner crust, crumbled cooked bacon on it, spread around some onions that I had slivered and then cooked in the bacon fat from the just-mentioned cooked bacon, some flaked smoked salmon, and a grating of mozzarella to coat the whole thing and hold it together with a bit of parmesan grated over that for more salty flavor.

OMG. There is nothing else to say. Make this pizza! That would be something else to say, I suppose. This pizza, it was like crack. That’s another thing to say. Make your favorite pizza dough recipe (mine is below), buy your favorite pizza dough, or buy a Boboli and top it with the stuff I mentioned above.

A few tips for a good result:

1. Use good bacon – a meaty, porky bacon and cook it almost crisp before draining ti thoroughly.
2. Save the bacon fat and cook the onions in it. Don’t caramelize them, however. Cook them over medium-high heat until they wilt and look soft and yummy with a bit of browning just starting to happen along the edges (remember, they are going back in the oven). If you caramelize them the whole pizza will become too sweet – you need that tiny sulfuric kick cooked but not caramelized onions still have at their core.
3. Use good hot-smoked salmon – the kind that seems cooked. No lox or gravlax here (although, quite frankly, they would probably be delicious, but they’re not what I used).
4. Best case, scenario, you make your own pizza dough and then stretch it (don’t pull it, don’t roll it) into a thin, beautiful crust.

You may well have a pizza dough recipe you like. Please, use that! I bet it’s great. (To quote Elizabeth Zimmerman in Knitting Without Tears, “Mittens. Aha! Many people’s sole activity in the realm of knitting. To them I say skip this section. You are making the very best mittens, keep right on.” Of course, I’m talking about cooking and pizza, not knitting and mittens, but I’m pretty sure my clever readers figured that out all by themselves.) If, however, you don’t have a pizza dough recipe you love, you could use this one.

Pizza Dough

In a large bowl, combine 3 1/2 cups flour (bread is great, but all purpose works fine; also you can substitute up to 1/2 cup of the flour with whole wheat or rye flour for texture and flavor), 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon yeast, 2 tablespoons olive oil, and 1 1/2 cups warm water. Stir together, cover, and let sit overnight in the fridge. (Don’t have that kind of time? Use 2 teaspoons yeast and let sit 1 1/2 to 2 hours at room temperature.)

Divide into 3 balls and let them sit about 30 minutes while you heat your oven to 500. A pizza stone in your oven will help ensure a crispy crust.

Work with one ball of dough at a time. With lightly floured hands on a lightly floured surface, stretch the dough into a very thin disk anywhere from 9 to 12 inches across. Put on a pan or a well-floured peel or back of a baking sheet if you’re using a pizza stone.

Quickly put the toppings on and slide into the oven/onto the pizza stone. Cook until bubbly and crispy and melted and how you like your pizza, anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes depending on your oven, equipment, and taste.

I ate pizza at The Lab last night. The Lab is a museum, a public space, a place that puts together some thought-provoking discussion panels, and a place that, for reasons only it can divine, invited me to talk about the history of pizza and Mark Dym to demonstrate the making of the pizza last night. Mark, of Marco’s Coal-Fired Pizzeria (the pizzas are actually wood-fired, everything else if coal-fired, which goes to show you a name is often just a name) in Denver, also brought a whole slew of pizzas for everyone to tuck into while he demoed the shaping of the crust. So as soon as I was done with my talk (“The Cheese Stands Alone, An Autobiographical History of Pizza”), I got to sit down with a cold one and a hot slice. Perfection.

Word on the street is that The Lab will post an edited video of the talk online. I’ll let you know when/if that happens. I don’t want to ruin anything, but did your mother, father, or other nutrient-provider ever serve you an English muffin pizza? Did you know they date from the 1940s? The 1940s!

The city of Denver completely freaked out. Everything shut down. I guess, from what I heard and have seen in pictures, some areas really were slammed with snow, but in the city itself things didn’t seem so very bad. After my talk was postponed (I head back on Tuesday – that powerpoint presentation will be shown!), a friend and I decided to enjoy our Snow Day and go to the movies. That plan came to naught since the theaters – even the multiplex at the giant fancy mall – were closed. Luckily Domo, where I sipped hot brown rice tea

and chowed down on a tofu and vegetable soupy casserole dish called nabemono

was open for lunch. And Marco’s Coal-Fired Pizza was open for dinner. Marco is a madman, turning out the kind of delicious Napoletana pizza that makes me angry with its deliciousness and then having the gall to take that same mind-numbingly good dough and stuff it with nutella for a dessert pizza.

Yes, it sounds horribly horribly wrong. And yet it tastes so very very right. Insider tip: the man also concocts his own not-sweet limoncello. Ask for a glass if you get a chance.

Sadly, I did not make it out to the Grizzly Rose.

We don’t go in for Valentine’s Day much at our house. (See further thoughts on the subject over at sfgirlbybay: Friday Food Files With Molly Watson: Valentine’s Supper.) We used to not “celebrate” it at all, but Ernest is in kindergarten and part of his “homework” this week was to make Valentine’s cards for his classmates and then, of course, he came home yesterday with mostly store-bought cards and a mess of candy. So he now thinks Valentine’s Day is the bomb and there is lots of talk about it in our house in a way there never used to be.

But yesterday I had to go to the DMV, a place, I think we can all agree, that is not in any way romantic. I was there for approximately forever. To add insult to injury my car had been broken into and I was going to have to deal with that. I left the DMV, ready to go to the glass place, with a headache and an empty stomach feeling very sorry for myself indeed. I sat down, put the keys in the ignition, and jumped in my seat: There was something on the passenger seat. I thought of all places where an already-broken-into car might be safe it was the DMV parking lot. And why had someone left something? Before all these thoughts had really even run their course through my brain and turn into any kind of panic I noticed what the object was: a pizza box with my dashing husband’s writing on it. He had bought me some lunch, driven to the DMV, and left it for me. 

I’ll take surprise DMV pizza over a dozen roses any day.  

(Same said dashing husband had a business dinner last night. Ernest ate leftover sushi; I ate the remaining pre-Valentine’s pizza.)

How can I explain it? Why did my meals yesterday bring forth such rage? I kid, of course, but only slightly. I grabbed a bowl of curry soup (light fresh coconut milk broth, thin and tangled egg noodles, legs of succulent meltingly tender chicken, crispy “yellow noodles,” pickled mustard greens, shallots, cilantro, lime, mystery curry base) at Pok Pok that was so delicious I am convinced it was made with the essence of identical twin human babies or fairy wings or some other such delicacy because the ingredients to which mere mortals have access cannot possibly create such mind-blowing flavors. I finished a bowl and thought, “I am completely full and yet perhaps I should order another and spend my afternoon sitting here gorging on soup instead of working. Perhaps, in fact, I should move in and devote myself full-time to soup-eating.” Sure, my dashing husband and Ernest would be disappointed to have me never return, but if they tasted the soup they would understand. They would, I have no doubt, join me in my new soup-oriented lifestyle.

Of course I didn’t spend the day eating more soup. I’m a sensible gal, I got back to work. There is, after all, a recession depression on that is putting the fear of Voldemort in us all (that’s the guy whose name you’re not supposed to say, right? I’m not as up on my Harry Potter as I’m sure I’ll be in a few years when Ernest joins the cult).

And then came dinner. We headed to Ken’s Pizzeria. And I got mad all over again. What kind of crack is he putting in that crust and where can I buy it? Honestly, I don’t know why they bother putting things on that pizza. The crust is so good people would flock there just to eat slices of crust. But they do bother, and the tomato sauce is balanced and sparingly used and we had some chiles thrown on ours and with the cheese the whole thing turned into an addictive smoldering unctuous chewy yeasty delight. Oh, and the guanciale-wrapped grilled radichhio wasn’t too shabby either. I’ll be making that soon but if you want to get a jump-start on me take very thinly cut bacon or pancetta or other salty pig part and wrap in around a wedge of radicchio or one of those radicchio-colored belgian endives you see around at fancy stores these days, secure it with a skewer if needed, and grill it or broiling it would work for those of you sequestered indoors until May. For fancy times reduce some balsamic vinegar until syrupy and pour that over each little grilled bit.

Well, it worked at dogpatch pizza. But even though I used Meyer lemons, and sliced them very thinly, they were as bitter as bitter can be. I still rather liked them against the golden beet greens and manchego cheese, but I acknowledge that it was, perhaps, an acquired taste. I’m thinking the masters at Piccino salted the sliced lemons and let them sit for a few hours or overnight to de-bitterize them. My dashing husband happily ate a few slices without removing the lemon, though, so it can’t have been that bad. And you must admit, it does look lovely.

I’ve been thinking a lot about work lately. Not just my own, but the concept of it. I have a friend with an intriguing retirement plan. When she’s ready to stop working, she plans to buy a small farm. Not a working farm, but a piece of land with a few animals and maybe a small garden. Reasons, in short, to get up and move around every day.

As a culture I think we’ve lost the connection between pleasure and work, that there is pleasure to be experienced in work. And not just good works or meaningful work, but hard or even monotonous work. Accomplishment feels good. It can be finishing a book, winning an award, or marvelling at the stack of boxes you folded.

That’s what I did last night. Friends had a “wrap party” to pack up art projects for The Thing (a super cool, nay brilliant, quarterly subscription art program). We ate Little Star pizza (I’m sorry, I just don’t get the whole deep-dish pizza thing; never have and looks like I never will), drank beer, and stamped, folded, packed, and taped boxes. Chatting and laughing all the way.

So I’m thinking of other work parties to have. What I’d like to do is have a group come over, cuddle around the monster needlepoint and work it, but that seems somehow more maniacal and less fun. A key element is the ability for people to drop in and out of the work. Tamale making is always an option. I’m open to food and non-food ideas.

Last night I learned a dear friend (dear enough so I bothered to make pizza for him–even show him how to stretch the dough, which means I let him in my kitchen) was, for a brief time, a professional jazz & modern dancer. So that was pretty damn awesome.

I also thought awesome when he took the tiny pitcher of caramel sauce and poured its contents into his empty ice cream dish and spooned plain sauce into his smiling face. It made the troubles and travails associated with the sauce worthwhile. (I started with less-then-fully-refined sugar, so it looked sort of caramel-ly from the start and then it crystallized about two seconds later. Eventually I just added the cream anyway, threw in some cinnamon sticks, and let it slowly simmer into a sort of dulce de leche-type concoction. Worked with the sweet corn ice cream with sliced almonds on top. Sort of like caramel corn, get it?)

Molly’s Pizza Dough

2 tsp. yeast

1 1/2 cups warm water

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

2 Tbsp. olive oil

1 1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper (optional)

3 cups all-purpose flour

Dissolve yeast and water in the bowl of a standing mixer. Use the dough hook to combine everything else in. Eventually the dough will pull away from the sides of the bowl. Do not add more flour, since you want the dough quite wet to be able to stretch it cracker-thin as my dashing husband likes it. Cover bowl with a towel (did I have to tell you to use a clean one? I hope that’s obvious) and let it sit to rise and double and whatever for about an hour.

Punch it down (so satisfying!) and divide into quarters. Put the four pieces of dough on a counter or large cutting board. Cover them and let them sit another half hour or so.

Work each one into a foot-wide circle or whatever shape it will allow itself to be stretched into. Top with some yummy stuff (sauteed garlic slices, prosciutto slices, and cooked eggplant topped with grated slices of parmesan is pictured above) and bake it as hot an oven as you can find until brown and crispy.

“Dogpatch pizza” is our family’s name for Piccino. It is not an insult. It is a geographic descriptor. Dogpatch, for those outside of San Francisco, is a neighborhood between Potrero Hill and the Bay. We have an inexplicable fondness for the Dogpatch, and even looked for a house there before finding our current digs. When Piccino first opened we could never remember the name, so we started calling it “that pizza place in Dogpatch” and you can see how that might get shortened.

So, anyway, last night my dashing husband and I spent an hour sitting in a circle on a rug singing “Buenas Dias” with other parents of kindergarteners in his class at Parent Night. Since we already had the sitter sitting at the house, we took advantage and headed out for dinner. One antipasto plate, a bowl of tomato-beet gazpacho, and a mushroom pizza* later we were pretty pleased with ourselves and Piccino. “This place just does everything right, don’t they?” my dashing husband asked. I had to concur.

* I will be attempting a re-creation of this pizza. It had a “mushroom-tomato pesto” spread on in with a bit of cheese and a few sauteed wild mushrooms. Brilliant idea. Tons of mushroom flavor from the pureed cooked mushrooms blended with a bit of tomato paste (that’s my guess, anyway) that was the “pesto.”

My Mile-High adventure ended with a bang. A Grizzly Rose Bang!

I escaped the press trip (well, it came to a civilized end) and spent the evening with friends who find themselves living and loving in Denver. Adhering to my new restaurant practice (if I don’t know what something is, I order it without explanation; barring that option, I order whatever I’ve never had before) and with a nod to my desperation default-order strategy, I had a BLT pizza (a bit of white sauce, crispy bacon, slices of fresh tomato on a thin, yeasty crust, and a handful or two of mixed green salad thrown on top—not bad at all) at The Oven following a scintillating talk (“Mixed Taste”) at The Lab at Belmar—where brothers Jake Adam York and Joe York entertainingly covered Sun Ra and Southern Family Restaurants, respectively.

My friends were not only sympathetic to my interest in the Grizzly Rose Saloon & Dance Emporium, they go there for two-step lessons on Sunday afternoons. So to the country bar off the highway we went!

Was it everything I thought it would be? Internets, it was more. Much, much more. Let me break it down:

1. Thursday is Ladies Night. Ladies Night! At the Grizzly Rose this doesn’t just mean the ladies, like myself, get in free, it means we also get free draft beer. (Finally, sexism pays off!)

2. I can only imagine that because of this generous policy, there were two (as if one wouldn’t have been delightful enough) bachelorette parties happening. Sadly, my vision of a bride dance-off never happened. (As a horrible consolation prize, however, I overheard one bachelorette friend ask another: “Does my mouth look ready to put a cock in?” To which the friend answered: “Yeah, it’s porn shiny!”)

3. Country dancing is super fun to watch. The house band played, the center of the dance floor was filled with line dancers, the two-steppers worked their stuff along the sides, expertly making their way around the perimeter a couple times each song. (One question remains: how do the line dancers know which dance to do? Can anyone help me with this one? Does one of them just start one and they all follow? Does each and every country song have a designated line dance attached to it? Help!)

4. Grizzly Rose is a hang out—from what I could tell—for all ages (well, all ages over 21). There were college kids there, older couples who clearly like breaking out their dance moves, couples of all ages and dance abilities on dates, and there were even some groups that clearly included parents and their pretty-much-grown kids.

Joe York presented snippets from documentaries he’s made with the Southern Foodways Alliance during his talk. Bits about Willie Mae’s Scotch House in New Orleans and Hot Chicken in Nashville. The unique deserves to be treasured, but more importantly it deserves to be experienced. There aren’t too many Grizzly Rose’s out there—at least not outside of the region. Things like that make a city worth traveling to instead of through. Mark my words: I’m going back someday.