Photo Image: Dennis M. Kirschbaum
Pizza is one of the most popular and ubiquitous foods in the world, and as I write this it has been named by The New York Times as a hero of 2020. Pizza – so simple. At its most essential, it’s just three ingredients: Bread, tomato sauce, and cheese. Toppings other than cheese are strictly optional and to some, anathema. In Israel you can get a pizza with corn and tuna fish. It seems everyone enjoys some kind of pizza. I have a friend who says she doesn’t like pizza but she still eats it because as is said, “even when pizza’s bad, it’s good!” But like many things that seems so simple, the process of getting it right is a descent into a rabbit hole of complexity.
I became a bit obsessed making my own pizza during the pandemic. During times of disruption and disquiet, it is natural to gravitate toward the familiar and the comforting. For me, there is nothing more comforting than the perfect slice, and I have been trying to make one at home in my ordinary oven. I have spent hours tinkering with the dough for the crust, refining the sauce, and finding just the right cheese to create what I perceive to be the platonic ideal of the form, the New York slice. Thin, crispy, and with bubbling cheese hot enough to remove skin from the roof of your mouth.
Toward this goal, I invested in a 16-pound slab of steel, 54 W/m2K of thermal energy, to try to replicate the intense heat of an industrial oven, and I sought out the finest, organic San Marzano tomatoes (imported from Italy), carefully blending them with selected spices to try to recreate in my kitchen something that is readily available on nearly every street corner in Manhattan.
I watched dozens of YouTube videos including one where Alex the French Guy hacks his home oven to allow him to cook his pizza while running a 900F degree cleaning cycle! I wanted to link the video but he seems to have taken it down. For good reason! Don’t try this at home! You will invalidate the manufacturer’s warranty and, more concerning, probably burn down your house. I’ve had to make due with 550F, the highest my oven goes. Still pretty hot. A single drop of water on the oven door glass at this temperature, will cause it to shatter. Trust me, I know this from experience.
Did I create the perfect pizza? Well, if I can ever have you over for dinner, you’ll decide for yourself. But if it were solely up to me, I’d eat this pizza for every meal for the rest of my life.
I learned how to make a pretty good pizza (and how to replace the glass in my oven door) but was also reminded that the simplest things are often complex beyond our initial assessment.
Yes, pizza, but also how our bodies turn pizza into energy that powers our muscles. The way our breath provides oxygen for metabolism. The blood that delivers energy to our cells. Also, the love we feel for a child or a parent or a spouse. Identity, the story we tell ourselves about who we are. The work that beckons and sometimes repels us. The things we want to believe and the things we believe we want. The way all living things have adapted to the slant angle at which the earth turns as it falls toward and away from that distant star we presumptuously call our sun. The relationship of matter, energy, and time.
Every complexity is the solution to a particular problem or set of problems. Whether you are trying to make the perfect pizza, compose a photograph, or develop a budget for the coming year, the skill is making it as complex as it needs to be and no more. Often, simpler is better.