Showing posts with label pizza. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pizza. Show all posts
Sunday, November 06, 2011
PIZZA: THE SECRET INGREDIENT
I don't know why anyone would make pizza from scratch at home when great pies can be had cheap almost anywhere in America. Hmmm...well, wait a minute, maybe I can imagine why. You go to all that trouble because you have an idea for an improvement that could beat what the pros do.
Okay, here's my idea and I'm dying to test it. It's something you add to the sauce.
That ingredient is...(drum roll)..stock! That's right, stock, just like you find in French cooking. I'm no expert, but I know from the internet that it's possible to make both cheese and mushroom stock (stock = a condensed essence of a food's flavor that's much more intense than the real thing). Has anyone ever tried using stock in pizza? We'll never know because professionals don't share their secrets. Anyway, I'm dying to try it.
I'm also dying to try aromatic stock. That's a stock whose purpose is to make the food smell good.
Making aromatic stock might be more complicated than it sounds. My only knowledge of aromas comes from a movie called "Perfume." According to the film a great aroma is a combination of three scents: the first is a the "grabber" smell. It's immediately intriguing and delightful, but doesn't last very long. The second aroma is the long lasting body of the smell, the one that everyone associates with your product. The last smell is the aroma's soul...the unexpected scent that gives a unique character to the product.
The film explains that the initial smell requires a tiny amount of alcohol for fast delivery to the nose, but that quickly evaporates. The second smell requires fat because the smell of fat stays on the nose for a long time. The third smell...well that's the tough one. I wonder what unexpected smell could give an ordinary slice of cheese pizza...a soul.
Friday, May 23, 2008
MY DINNER (LUNCH) WITH ANDRE (JOHN K) #9
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The frame grab above is from a Popeye cartoon that Bob Jacques put up. I include it here because the ugly Bluto is where I got the notion to draw people the way I did...not in drag, but just in really extreme poses. John commiserated. Caricature can be a dirty business!
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Then there was the Phantom ...I think the Phantom was the first hero to dress in tights. He was pre-Superman so he didn't have any super powers, just a gun like The Shadow used to have. John said that was perfectly respectable; even Mighty Mouse had a gun in the early days. He used to shoot cats.
My childhood recollection of The Phantom was that he started as a white slave in Arabia and somehow managed to escape from his cruel slave owners. He dedicated the rest of his life to being a nemesis to the slave trade. That's not the story that's on the net but I could swear that that's what I read. He found a cave and a horse who would live in the cave with him, and he just sat around all day on a skull throne waiting for the phone to ring with news of the next slave caravan.
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The woman's method of walking was to slowly slide her feet across the rug. She never lifted her feet, she just slid, and her attendant held her with great difficulty around the waist. This worked OK until she came to a tiny, little, insignificant wrinkle in the rug. A normal person would have walked on it without noticing it, or have just stepped over it. Not this poor woman. When she reached the crease she had to stop, just as if she'd hit a brick wall. She tried and tried to get past but couldn't. She was like a Flatlander who could be stopped by a single line!
I'm ashamed to say that while this was going on I was just sitting dumbfounded, watching it all. I can't believe I was so dense as to watch without offering to help. Fortunately some other men leaped up and managed to smooth out the wrinkle in the rug. The woman was too frail to risk lifting her. I can't help repeating what I said before...imagine being so frail as to be stopped by a single line on a carpet!
Well, that's it...No, wait! I forgot to mention the picture above...I found it on the net when I was looking for a picture of Mandrake. It's the living room of the creator of the old newspaper strip, "Mark Trail." It's a nifty room, huh? He actually did live in the outback, just like his comic strip character!
Labels:
john,
john k,
my dinner with andre,
pizza
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