Hello Friends,
Welcome back to my newsletter where I share short, poorly edited notes about stuff I find interesting.
I made pizza from scratch for the first time in my entire life last week. Oh, I’ve watched other people make pizza, even topped the pre-made dough myself a few times, but I’ve never guided the whole production myself from dry ingredients to oven.
Why? I guess you could say I’ve had a lifelong distrust of baking with yeast. I’m not totally certain where it comes from. I’m pretty handy with a pie crust, which is, I now realize, a heck of a lot harder than pizza dough. Maybe it’s because my grandma was so good at it. She could throw together loaves of fluffy white bread without a recipe. She moved through the phases by muscle memory but she never wrote them down and she couldn’t explain them to me. The whole production looked too complicated, like a choreographed dance I’d never remember the steps to.
But this weekend, I decided to cross the yeast barrier and give it a try. I even bought a pizza stone for maximum crust crunchiness. As I worked, I realized that it wasn’t really that difficult. Just a matter of timing and patience, like any other kind of baking. I got it all the way to this tidy state. Round-ish, all things considered, with evenly distributed toppings (spicy Calabrese salami with lots of mushrooms and black olives, which is basically a perfect flavour combo as far as I’m concerned).
Then came the final phase, transferring the pizza to the pizza stone, and here is where it all went awry. I had heated the pizza stone to 500 degrees, just as the internet instructed. I had dusted the wooden cutting board with cornmeal, but not nearly enough. So when I went to slide it onto the waiting surface, the damned thing wouldn’t move. I tried guiding it onto the waiting stone in the hot oven with a spatula but it the dough twisted and bent, spilling sauce onto the hot surface.
I won’t bore you with the details, but after some manoeuvring and my partner’s help, I managed to get the whole thing in the oven without either burning myself or splattering the bottom of my oven with spicy tomato sauce. Of course, it didn’t look much like my original plan. The toppings had slid into a wet clump in the middle and the edge was curled into an elephantine mass.
It doesn’t look that bad, you may say, but I see all the mistakes. I know the distance between what I intended and what came out. Still, it tasted exactly like pizza, and that was the whole point of the experiment right? Delicious, hot, made from scratch pizza.
So what am I getting at here? This whole process, to me, feels a lot like writing. I know, it’s a leap, but hear me out.
Anyone who has sat down to transfer words from their brain to the page knows that the finished work never looks as good as it did in your head. The genius outline becomes a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster when all the sentences are crudely cobbled together. The perfect rhetorical argument becomes a litany of warmed over cliches. And so on.
I have never met a writer who looks back at their published work and says, yes, that’s exactly what I intended. No matter how well-regarded the final product. No matter how beautifully the ingredients come together for the reader, it will always be less than you’d hoped. And that’s fine. It’s beautiful actually.
When we set out to create anything, our ambitions should outstrip our skills. The errors, the omissions, the less than perfectly articulated ideas are remnants of the process of reaching for something more. Without that, we lose the drive. We stick to the easy stuff.
And the thing I keep reminding myself is, that will not be my last pizza. I’ll apply what I learned to the next one, and maybe it’ll be closer to the ideal. But then my ambition might grow, and I’ll try something new, something more complex. Maybe. I tend to be less ambitious in baking than I am in writing.
Thanks for following me down this pizza hole. If you liked what you read, comment below. Or drop me a line via Twitter. If you'd like to read more or subscribe, you can do so here.
~Erika
Issue 11: On Pizza, Ambition, and the Creative Process
I think it looks great! If you have a cast iron pan, I highly recommend this recipe too, known as “pandemic pan pizza” in our household: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/crispy-cheesy-pan-pizza-recipe