Day 12: Pizza

Either the night or the morning before we make pizza, Chelsea mixes together the dough, which sits on either the counter or in our fridge for at least seven hours. Eventually, I take it out of its bowl, divide it into however many pies we're going to have that night, and start to knead it. One of us, usually Chelsea, starts a simple tomato sauce, and most nights she also, as she did last night, takes care of sweating the onions, if we're going to have them, which we almost always do. I usually fry up some bacon, slightly under-cooking it so it won't burn in the oven. And then we grate cheese--fontina or mozzarella (if we're not using fresh, as we did last night). Once I'm done kneading, stretching, and -- if I'm feeling snazzy -- tossing the dough, we place it on a pizza peel dusted with corn meal (what the great Christopher Bakken would call "ball bearings"), and then shuffle it all into the hot oven.

I'm not sure how or why we divided our pizza-making into roles, but I'm glad we did, not just because cooking together cuts the workload in half, but because there's also something nice about the collaboration, especially when -- as it almost always is -- it's successful.



Last night we made three pies: a fresh mozzarella and basil pizza; then a bacon and onion with fontina cheese pizza; and then our signature dish: a prosciutto, fig jam, and blue cheese pizza. Though we've been making pizza for as long as we've been together, we were a little rusty last night since our pizza stone broke last summer and we had to endure six pizza-less months. Luckily, though, Chelsea's mother gave us a bigger and better stone for Christmas, ushering in what we hope will be a pizza renaissance. Overall, the pies were good--maybe not quite as crispy as we like, but we're still trying to get back into shape and figure out this new stone.