Is it possible to make such a statement?

As many readers know, Saturday is Pizza-and-Movie Night in our house, and it has been for many years. If we suffer under the burden of a social or cultural obligation on Saturday, we can switch Pizza-and-Movie Night to Sunday, but it feels weird. Occasionally, LL and I joke about how many pizzas I have made, and the closest approximation we can calculate is somewhere between 500 and 600, which is pretty damned approximate. Trying to ascertain, from that number of pizzas, which is the best would seem fruitless folly.

Of course some pizzas are better than others. Once we situate ourselves to watch the movie and the wine is poured and the first bites of pizza taken, LL will usually say something like “Great pizza” or “Wonderful” or, occasionally, “Brilliant.” And sometimes a silence ensues, and I, suddenly worried, will sort of clear my throat and hem and haw a bit, and she will say, “Not one of your best efforts.” Well, come on, we can’t be perfect all the time.

In late Summer and early Fall this year, I went through a Golden Age of pizza-making, where it seemed as if I could do no wrong. Then I went into a bit of a slump. Usually the flaw with a pizza is not in the toppings, though sometimes there can be a Clash of Ingredients; no, the flaw — or the perfection — of a pizza is in the crust. Having created as many pizzas as I have, the making of the dough long ago became routine, yet there must be minute variations of which I am unaware that affect the outcome, an ounce more water one week, a smidgeon less olive oil another week, an extra minute spent kneading the dough while I’m distracted by other matters. Who knows?

Last Saturday, though, by whatever conjunction of physical, philosophical and spiritual elements aligned in utter harmony, the crust on the pizza was perfect. I mean, it was perfect. Thin but not too thin. Toothsome and almost flaky, but not “short,” as a pie crust would be. Around the edges, it was light and puffy, making little air pockets that crunched gracefully in the mouth. The toppings were a handful of shiitaki mushrooms, sliced thin; little red and green peppers, sliced thin; chopped yellow onion; diced salami, medium hot; one sliced Roma tomato; mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses; a scattering of thyme, rosemary and oregano. Scrumptious.

I opened a bottle of the Murphy-Goode “Liar’s Dice” Zinfandel 2007, Sonoma County, a wine that I have not tasted in five or six years. The winery was founded in 1985 by veteran vineyard developers and managers Tim Murphy and Dale Goode and their friend David Ready; in 2006, the estate was acquired by Kendall-Jackson. Murphy-Goode perpetually displayed a marked fondness for assertively ripe and fruity red wines; a predilection for sumptuous, voluptuous textures in red and white wines; and, in chardonnay and sauvignon blanc, an addiction to new oak so severe that a 12-step intervention — “Hi, I’m Bob, and I’m an oakaholic” — would have improved things greatly. I blew hot and cold about Murphy-Goode wines throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, generally cottoning to the reds better than to the over-manipulated, syrupy whites, so it was with some interest that I recently received a trio of reds (samples for review) from the winery, or, I should say, from Jackson Family Wines.

True to form, the Murphy-Goode “Liar’s Dice” Zinfandel 2007, Sonoma County, is rich and ripe, sleek and exotic. At 15.4 percent alcohol, it packs a heady hit as well as the sweetness that a high alcohol level often conveys. Black currant and blueberry flavors, with a hint of fleshy boysenberry, are threaded with briers and brambles, polished tannins and dusty granite, and sweet, spiced plums. The wine slides through your mouth like plush velvet woven with iron filings. This is a blend, with three percent each carignane and petite sirah grapes. Winemaker David Ready Jr. calls the “Liar’s Dice” ‘07 “our most passionate wine.” It could use less emotion and more thoughtfulness, though, I’ll admit, its unabashed nature managed nicely with the hearty, earthy, slightly spicy pizza. Drink now through 2011 or ‘12 with cumin-and-chili-rubbed pork roast, barbecue brisket and the like. Very Good+. About $21.

Curious about my reaction to previous vintages of the “Liar’s Dice” Zinfandel, I checked the archives of the newspaper for which I wrote a weekly print column for 20 years, and found a few references:

<>Exquisitely ripe and flavorful, the Murphy-Goode “Liar’s Dice” Zinfandel 2000, Alexander Valley, is a crowd-pleaser of sensual appeal that manages to be almost sophisticated. Very Good+. About $19.50.

<> Like mainlining blackberry jam and brandied plums – that’s about all you need to say about the extraordinarily vivid and vibrant Murphy-Goode Liar’s Dice Zinfandel 1999, Sonoma County. Fortunately, this wild thing has a full complement of minerals, oak and plush tannins to rein it in (sort of). Excellent. About $19.

<> … the Murphy-Goode “Liar’s Dice” Zinfandel 1998, Sonoma County, [is] a bit lighter than the previous vintage but delicious for its bright, ripe currant-cherry-plum flavors and touches of smoke, minerals and spice. Very good+. About $17.

In other words, the owner may be different, but the philosophy is the same.

Last night, of course, was Pizza & Movie Night around here, and by six p.m. I was fretting a bit about the wine. “We have tons of cabernets and zinfandels and merlots,” I said to LL, “but I want something a little lighter, a little more approachable, a little less alcoholic.”

“Like what?” she said.

“Oh, a carefree Dolcetto or Barbera, a Italian red with good acid and fruit, not too serious but not frivolous either.”

“You know,” she said, “you can always go out and buy a bottle of wine.”

Drum-roll. The earth stands still. Time stops.

Readers, you understand that I do not buy a lot of wine. I mean as a writer about wine and a reviewer of wine most of the wine I (and we) drink, taste, sip, comes to the house by UPS or FedEx. When I wrote a weekly national newspaper column (1984-2004), an ungodly amount of wine came to the building every day, I mean, cases of wine. I don’t get nearly as much wine now, but it’s a goodly number of bottles that can be handled very nicely, thank you very much.

Now, I’ll confess that for three years — 2005, ‘06 and ‘07 — I bought heaps of wine. I had my now-defunct website then and in December of ‘06 started this blog, and I was always buying wines to “fill in the gaps,” and a couple of times a year I would host a blind tasting here at the house and I would buy wine, expensive wine, for those occasions. And Champagne, I mean, friends, you gotta have Champagne in the fridge! Finally, LL, said, “F.K., you’re outta control. We can’t afford this.” And she was right. You may say, “Wasn’t the wine you bought tax-deductible?” Well, sure, however the accountant could use the tax deduction to help out, but still, every month the old credit card statements come around, and they have to be paid.

So, the point is that I rarely buy wine nowadays, but when LL said, “You can buy a bottle of wine. What you’ll looking for should be pretty inexpensive,” it was like a revelation. Anyway, I got into the car and hied my way to The Wine Market, a retail store that’s about a 10-minute drive from our place. I’ve known the owner for years — he worked at another store for a long time, nursing his dreams — but since it was about 6:15 when I got there, he wasn’t around. I approached the counter and explained to the young people there what I was looking for. I did not say, “Hi, I’m Fredric Koeppel, world-famous wine-writer and blogger, blah blah blah.” What I did say was, “Hey, I need a wine for my pizza tonight, not a cabernet or zinfandel, nothing so big. The pizza is mainly marinated tomatoes and basil with a little pancetta. Maybe if you have a lighthearted Dolcetto or Barbera … ?”

A rather serious, even scholarly-looking young man detached himself from the others and said, “I think I can help you. Let’s go over here. We should be able to find something that will do. How much do you want to spend?”

“Oh, $15 to $20.”

I followed him to a section where a variety of fairly inexpensive Italian wines were displayed, and he pointed to a bottle of Colognole Chianti Rufina 2003. I am, I’ll admit, a bit leery of Chianti, a wine that too often turns out to be dried out and austere. Also, this was a 2003, almost six years old. In fact, I said, “This is a 2003, it’s almost six years old.”

“Right,” he said, “but the tannins have settled down really nicely and mellowed out. This is pretty smooth, and it’s got the fruit.” And it cost $17.

“O.K.,” I said, “I’ll try it.”

How was the wine? Let me put it this way: Basically, today’s post is in the form of a Thank You to the young man whose name I do not know for steering me completely in the right direction and, even more, for being courteous and accommodating.

Chianti Rufina is a region of Chianti production northeast of the city of Florence. Rufina was recognized as long ago as the mid-18th Century, before it became associated with the name Chianti, as an area capable of producing superior wines, because of the soil in the foothills of the Apennines and because the geography allows for cool temperatures at night. (Chianti was originally further south in Tuscany, around Siena.) Colognole, one of the best (and most picturesque) estates of Rufina, has been in the Spalletti family since the 1890s and is today operated by Contessa Gabriella Spalletti.

Colognole 2003 was exactly what I was looking for. Last night’s pizza was simple. I marinated three chopped tomatoes, red onion and basil in olive oil and a touch of balsamic vinegar for an hour, then drained the mixture carefully; we don’t want no stinkin’ soggy pizzas! I had a bit of guanciale — the pancetta I bought last month had turned so moldy that it looked like a science project gone horribly wrong — so I chopped that (I mean the guanciale, which is cured hog-jowl) and fried it. A few dots of fresh mozzarella and some grated Parmesan, and that was it.

The wine sported a lovely, warm medium brick-red color; aromas of dried red cherries and red currants with dried baking spices wafted from the glass. After a few moments, heady scents of lilac and rose petal began to weave their seductive way, followed, yet again, by elements of earthy minerals, moss and black tea. Those qualities, in a spare and lithe manner, make up the flavors too. Colognole typically ages 12 months in 660-gallon Slavonian and French oak casks, far larger than the standard 59-gallon French barrique, and then ages additionally in stainless steel tanks and concrete vats. The wine is indeed smooth and mellow, but it’s animated by a keen edge of acidity that keeps the package lively and taut (and that helped the wine work beautifully with the tomato-dominated pizza). What a treat! This is what old-fashioned Chianti is all about. Excellent for drinking through 2011 or ‘12, and a Bargain at $15 to $17. Worth a Search.

Imported by Vin Divino, Chicago.

All right, readers, Part 1 of this two-part series got your pizza dough to the point where it’s rising in a bowl in a warm, nurturing spot (like Mom, back in the day), and now it’s all high and light and puffy (like me, back in the ’70s), and it’s time to take that dough, make it flat, put some toppings on it and get it into the oven! Yes!

First, a word about ovens and temperatures. Now most regular people who live in regular houses in regular cities don’t have wood-fired brick ovens at their disposal. They’re expensive to build, they take up space on the patio, and they require city permits to construct and use. Of course people are always saying that you cannot make good (or “adequate”) pizza without a wood- or coal-fired brick oven that maintains 800 or 900 degrees, that without that blast of heat you’ll never get a truly great crust with “blackened blisters” on it. Well, it’s correct that without 800 or 900 degrees of heat, you will not get the charred effect on the bottom of the crust — though you can finish the pizza on a charcoal grill — but at the 500 degrees that domestic ovens provide you will get a lovely, brown crusty crust, as the images further along in this post will prove.

So, turn your oven on to 500 degrees an hour before you’re going to slide the pizza onto the stone. Oh, yes, you absolutely must have a pizza stone in the oven, or at least some flat, unglazed tiles. I have been using the same stone for at least 15 years; the surface is completely black now, but it does its job of conducting heat exactly as it should; I like knowing that when the pizza touches the heated stone, it starts cooking instantly.

For our pizza tonight (well, Saturday night) I am avoiding tomatoes, not that there’s anything wrong with tomatoes, but I’m a little weary of pizzas dominated by their influence. So the principal toppings of this pizza will only be items that LL bought at the Farmer’s Market Saturday morning: arugula, spring onions, shiitake mushrooms and Italian sausage. In addition, there will be rosemary and thyme, mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses. I do not, by the way, make pizza with a sauce; tried it once, years ago, didn’t like it. In the case of this pizza, of course, the first thing I did was cook the sausage.
______________________________________________________________________________________

Now, generously sprinkle cornmeal on the paddle, or, as these devices are called in professional circles, when they’re more likely to be metal instead of wood, the “peel.” In addition to cornmeal, I use a little flour, just to ensure slippy-slidy action when the time comes. We’re going to be using a rolling pin to flatten and spread the dough — none of these tossing the dough into the air theatrics — so put a little flour on the rolling pin and on your hands too.

Whoa, there’s the risen dough, all light and soft and puffy. With both hands, plunge into the dough, pick it up, knead it a few times, and plunk it down on the paddle. Flatten it with your hands for a minute, spreading it out a little. Then start to work with the rolling pin, going at the dough from different angles. If it gets a little sticky, sprinkle on some flour. When the dough seems as if it has gone as far as it wants to, or if it wants to contract, let it rest for five or six minutes. Remember that the gluten in flour makes dough elastic, so if you go back to it after letting it alone — you can be slicing and dicing while it rests — you can roll it the rest of the way and it will be fine. The amount of dough you have should produce a 16-inch pizza, or something in that range.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Pour a small amount of olive oil on the flattened dough and spread it around with your hand.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Now we start to build the pizza itself with the toppings. First the arugula and the sliced shiitake mushrooms.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Next, the sausage and the spring onions.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Mozzarella and grated Parmesan.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Once the toppings have been assembled — including fresh or dried herbs, salt and pepper — dribble a little olive oil across the top of the pizza. Remember that when you’re putting the toppings on the dough to leave an inch around the rim free, so it will rise and make a crusty edge.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Now, carefully, run a spatula all the way around the edge of the pizza, checking for places where it might stick to the paddle. If necessary, shove a little cornmeal back under the pizza at the appropriate places.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

When the pizza is ready to go into the oven, open the over door, pull out the shelf with the stone, and carefully, using the spatula and all the finesse and “English” of which you are capable, slide the pizza onto the stone. It never gets easier; it never gets less nerve-wracking.Just get it over with. In a 500-degree oven, the pizza should take about eight minutes to cook. Visual checks every two minutes are important; when you see the risen areas begin to turn brown, take the pizza out and tap on the bottom; if it sounds solid and hollow at the same time, it’s done. If not, give it another minute.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

In the meantime, while the pizza is cooking, you might clean up the kitchen a bit. Lord have mercy, this place is a wreck!
______________________________________________________________________________________

Whoa, here it is, the pizza!
______________________________________________________________________________________

And a close-up.
______________________________________________________________________________________

And look here: The inside of one of the puffy, crusty places. That’s yeast and gluten and heat at work!
______________________________________________________________________________________

Any questions? You know where to find me.

Writing about wine and pizza on his blog The Pour, Eric Asimov expressed hope that someday I would record my recipe or method for making pizza, a food, an issue, a concept that I mention frequently on BTYH.

Whatever Eric wants, Eric gets!

Yesterday, as I traditionally do on Saturday, I made pizza, in anticipation of pizza and movie night (Frozen River). LL was right there with the camera, photographing the process step-by-step, and in this post, we present “Making Pizza, Part 1,” devoted to the making of the dough. Just as great wine begins in the vineyard, great pizza begins with the fashioning of the dough that become the all-important crust, the vehicle for everything else. The ideal is a crust that’s thin without being crisp; that’s slightly chewy; that holds up under the weight of the toppings; that puffs up nicely around the edges.

Here’s what you need:

EQUIPMENT

2 bowls, one medium-size for mixing the dough, one smaller for letting the dough rise.
A 1-cup measuring cup for flour.
A 1-cup measuring cup for liquid.
Measuring spoons.
A wooden spoon, preferably flat, with a rounded edge.
A whisk, to dissolve the yeast in water.
A cutting board or other surface on which to knead the dough.

INGREDIENTS

Bread flour (preferably) or all-purpose flour. (Bread flour really is better, and the best is King Arthur.)
Rye flour (optional).
1/2 tsp of active dry yeast. (Could be more; see note below.)
Olive oil.
Salt.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
1. Let the tap run until the water is hot enough to feel it but not too hot. Pour 1/2 cup warm water into the mixing bowl, scatter 1/2 teaspoon of yeast onto the water and stir with the whisk to dissolve the yeast. Let stand for 8 to ten minutes.

Note on yeast: I like a long, slow rising for the dough, hence the small amount of yeast, 1/2 teaspoon; the dough will rise for six or seven hours. If you use 1 1/2 tsps of yeast, the dough will rise in two or three hours.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

2. When the yeast has thoroughly dissolved, pour 1 cup of flour (plus 2 tbsp of rye flour if you wish) into the water and mix with the wooden spoon to form a rough ball. Ultimately, you’re aiming at a dough that comprises 2 1/2 to 3 cups of flour for one pizza crust that’s about 16 inches across. The rye flour adds a little texture to the crust and a hint of rustic flavor.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

3. Add another cup of flour, several pinches of salt and about 1 tbsp of olive oil. Pour onto the flour another 1/2 cup of warm water (about) and mix until the water is absorbed and the dough forms a larger ball.

Note on water: You want a dough that’s slightly wet without being sticky. The wetter the dough is, the stickier it will be and the more difficult it will be to shape and knead it. On the other hand, you don’t want a dough that’s too dry. A slightly wet dough, as long as it can be handled, really makes a better crust.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
4. So, add a little more flour if necessary or a little more warm water if necessary to get the right balance of “wetness” in the dough, and to get 2 1/2 to 3 cups of flour going, but do so carefully, testing the dough’s consistency with your fingers.
____________________________________________________________________________________

5. Lightly scatter flour on the cutting board or whatever surface you’ll be using, and turn the dough out onto the floured surface. Shape the dough into a ball with your hands. Keep a measuring cup with flour close by, because you’ll need to use a little flour on the dough if it starts getting too sticky to knead. You can scatter the flour on the dough or on the cutting board, but don’t use too much.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

6. Press down on the dough with the heels of your palms, pushing the dough away from you. Scoop up the dough, give it a quarter-turn and fold it over, slap it down and repeat the process. Yay, you’re kneading the dough! This takes a little practice if you have never kneaded dough, but once you get it, the whole thing feels quite easy and natural. Knead the dough for six to eight minutes, flouring if necessary, until the dough is smooth.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

7. Pour a little olive oil into a smallish bowl and swirl it around; this will keep the dough moist as it rises. Put the dough in the bowl and turn it over a few times to get olive oil all over it. Cover the bowl with a dish-towel or tea-towel and set it in a warm spot. When I start kneading the dough, I turn the oven to 200 degrees. I set the bowl on the back of the stove, near the vent. Every hour or so, I turn the bowl so that it gets even warmth. Remember, you don’t want the dough to get too hot and start cooking. In the summer, you can set the bowl outside — not in direct sunlight and out of the reach of dogs — and if the temperature is in the 80s or 90s, the dough will rise very nicely and even pick up a slight tang from wild yeasts drifting around.

______________________________________________________________________________________

8. If there’s time, about an hour and a half before you’re going to roll out the dough, squash the risen dough in the bowl, knead it a couple of times, and return to the warm spot. The dough will quickly rise again, lighter and puffier than before.

So, there you are. You made the pizza dough; it’s gently rising in the warmth. Next post: Rolling the dough out and making the pizza.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Photographs by LL.

My linkedin profile.

You’re saying, “FK, what’s the big deal about another pizza? You make a pizza about every Saturday of your life. Pizza, two movies and so on.”

Well, several things happened with this pizza that were interesting.

First, I took a minimalist approach to the ingredients. Often I can be an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink kind of cook, and I’ll pile on the toppings for a pizza, but under the inspiration of LL, who cooks in a much more spare fashion, I tried to keep the ingredients on this pizza to four or five. My model was a chicken soup she made recently.

We had been back from Mexico for a few days and I was feeling a bit puny, and LL said, “What you need is some chicken soup.” Now I make chicken soup pretty frequently, especially in the fall and winter, and besides chicken broth and chicken I tend to fill the soup with green beans, zucchini, green onions, celery and carrots, maybe some diced potatoes or turnips, some kind of pasta or noodles, maybe some chopped chard and usually a big can of diced tomatoes. In other words, it’s vegetable soup with chicken.

The soup LL made had these ingredients: chicken and chicken broth, of course; a little celery, sliced very thin; a shallot, sliced very thin; a handful of linguine; some spinach that she put in the bowl and ladled the soup over. That was it. It was fabulous. Pure. Intense. Rather Asian.

So, under this inspiration — less is more — the pizza pictured here has heirloom tomatoes (yellow, red and slightly purple), roasted cipollini onions, pancetta, heaps of basil and a few black olives. A little grated Parmesan cheese. For me, that’s really minimal.

The other interesting aspect of this pizza was that I made a mistake with the crust. For years I have used Gold Medal Bread Flour to make pizza dough, but on this Saturday morning, I reached in the drawer and hauled out a bag of flour and started making the dough, and then realized that I had begun with a cup of regular flour, not bread flour. Now this was White Lily, the flour preferred by many Southern cooks for biscuits, but not what I use for pizza dough. “Rats,” I said, thinking how I didn’t want to start the process all over again, so I just got out the bread flour and continued. So this pizza dough was about half bread flour and half regular flour.

The result was a crust that was as thin as usual but a little denser, a little chewier. The next time I made a pizza, I used about half a cup of the White Lily, and we liked the crust so much that I think I’ll continue to do that.

For wine that movie and pizza night, I opened a bottle of Plungerhead Old Vines Zinfandel 2005, Lodi, a label from The Other Guys division of Don Sebastiani and Sons. Now if I remember correctly, the 11th Commandment (or maybe the 12th) goes, “Thou shalt not name a wine Plungerhead.” I mean, really, the whole cute-daffy wine name thing (including cute-daffy back-stories to justify the cute-daffy name) is getting out of hand, and Don & Sons is responsible for many of them: Screw Kappa Napa, Mia’s Playground, Smoking Loon, Hey Mambo, Gino Da Pinot. Like, ha-ha, dude. Though I concede that these are primarily well-made and tasty wines, and none is expensive.

That was the case with the Plungerhead we had with this pizza on movie night. At about $14, this zinfandel delivered a whole personality-packed wallop of plummy-jammy blackberry, blueberry and boysenberry flavors permeated by smoke and spice, by lavender and violets and minerals, by earthy touches of briers and brambles and black pepper. I know that my friends with Euro-centric palates are saying, “Gack, FK, that sounds awful!” (Are you reading this, TH?) But they must remember that we’re talking about a California red wine here and moreover a California zinfandel made in the good old-fashioned slightly (but not too much) over-the-top style. Sometimes exuberance trumps elegance, and that’s OK. Anyway, the Plungerhead Lodi ‘05 rates a solid Very Good with a Good Value addendum.

The Plungerhead line-up includes two other zinfandel wines.

Plungerhead Old Vines Zinfandel 2004, Sierra Foothills, turbos the alcohol to 15.3 percent, and you definitely feel that element in the wine’s funky super-ripeness. It’s very deep, very dark, very spicy and boldly, profoundly tannic, and its vibrant blackberry, boysenberry and blueberry flavors are roasted and smoky and imbued with hints of cloves and sassafras. This is a zinfandel that takes balance way out to the edge and then doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. 618 cases. About $16, and I’ll give it Very Good+.

Third in this trio is Plungerhead Old Vines Zinfandel 2005, Dry Creek Valley, a classically proportioned zinfandel from Sonoma County’s best region for the grape. This is clean and fresh yet quite roasted, smoky and meaty, like a grilled steak. The flavors are blackberry and blueberry but without the over-ripeness of sweetish boysenberry that often comes into high alcohol zinfandels; this is “only” 14.9 percent. The whole shelf of dried baking spices is here, as well as the sharp pungency of freshly ground black pepper, all of this bolstered by a texture so supple and thick that it’s almost viscous and might be overwhelming if it weren’t for the serious tannins, dense and chewy, that linger through the finish. Excellent. About $19.

Plungerhead wines are closed with the bizarre Zork, a plastic stopper that’s opened by loosening and unwinding a plastic strip that curls several times around the bottle neck.

There it was, emblazoned on the cover of the Food & Wine magazine for March: “Perfecting Homemade Pizza.”

Well, that’s something I’m interested in. As readers of http://www.koeppelonwine.com know, I make pizza regularly, as many as, oh, 35 to 40 a year, because our ritual is two movies and a pizza on Saturday night or, if duty calls us elsewhere that night — “What, the president wants to see us again?” — on Sunday. We’ve been engaging in this ritual for 12 years or more, so, Buddy, that’s a lot of pizza, and I have worked incessantly to perfect the method myself.
The one-page article by Grace Parisi includes a box of specific products that the magazine recommends for making pizza: The wooden peel from Williams-Sonoma ($27); Bufalus Buffalo Mozzarella from Whole Foods ($NA); a Fibrament cement baking stone ($53); La Valle San Marzano canned tomatoes ($NA); Tutto Calabria oregano on a branch ($4); and a Typhoon “mezzaluna-style” pizza cutter ($18). None of which has anything to do with perfecting your pizza, but Food & Wine always wants to appear to be on top of things when it comes to food prep. I’m still using my ceramic stone and rotary wheel-type pizza cutter from years ago, and you know what? They work just fine. And I always use fresh tomatoes.
Anyway, the secret to great pizza, as anyone knows who wasn’t raised on a diet of Pizza Hut or Domino’s, is a slightly chewy, crisp but not cracker-like crust, and the real secret of the crust is water. Now Parisi, whose grandfather had a pizzeria in Brooklyn, achieves the crust she wants — “a chewy crust with a slight tang” — by leaving the pizza dough in the refrigerator overnight or for up to three days. That’s a pretty radical step, but I’ll try it sometime (maybe not this weekend).

The trick for me is not using a standard amount of water to make the dough, as in “pour four cups of water in the bowl,” but adjusting the amount carefully so that the dough remains moist, even a bit sticky. It can’t be too sticky; that makes kneading impossible and messy to boot, but if the dough is too dry the pizza crust will end up stiff and chewy at the expense of crispness. Keep the dough as moist as you can, flour the board and the dough sparingly and knead it until you have a ball of dough that’s smooth and silky.

While we’re on the subject of pizza, my new favorite meat to us as a topping is guanciale (“gwant-chi-AH-lay”), a dry cured pork jowl that’s a specialty of Latium, the province around Rome, and an essential ingredient in the pasta sauce called amatriciana. Now we know something about pork jowl in the South, a region in which all parts of the pig are consumed. Smoked hog jowl is an essential ingredient in the New Year’s Day blackeyed pea-hog jowl-turnip green soup; simmer a pot of that stuff on the stove for three or four hours and the jowl turns to luscious velvet.

As you can see from the photograph of guanciale here, the jowl is mainly fat, so basically, after frying it at low heat for 10 minutes or so, you have a plateful of pork cracklings. Yeah, they’re not “good” for you, but you can’t always be “good,” can you? I mean, lordy, what fat this is! Anyway, we use pizza night to make up for all the fish we eat.

We ordered this guanciale from Niman Ranch online. The jowl is cured in salt, maple syrup, pepper, rosemary, coriander and bay. Niman Ranch, located in Marin County, California, employs humane and sustainable practices. The pigs run free, eat natural feed and are given no antibiotics. That certainly makes me feel better about eating pure fat.
Now we couldn’t eat pizza without wine to go with it, preferably a bold, flavorful but not too complicated red wine. Here are two we’ve had with pizza recently:

*Vertex Just Red Blend No. 609, California. This nonvintage blend of cabernet sauvignon from Lake County, syrah and petite sirah from Lodi, cabernet franc from Napa Valley and merlot and malbec from Sonoma County is a product of The Gabrielle Collection of Wines. Robert Pepi and Jeff Booth are the winemakers for Vertex, a robust and full-bodied red wine bursting with hearty, spicy black currant, blackberry and black cherry flavors nestled in a cushion of dusty, chewy tannins. Great with pizza, red meat pastas and burgers. Very good. About $11.

*Artezin Zinfandel 2005, Mendocino County 39%, Amador County 36%, Sonoma County 25%. Artezin is a label of The Hess Collection. This is a super-attractive, almost sophisticated zinfandel, solid and firm, very spicy and flavorful, with no ashy edges or over-ripe exaggerations. Notes of clean earth and leather bolster currant, cherry and plum fruit permeated by licorice and lavender, grainy tannins and polished oak; the finish is a bit austere and could use a year or two to flesh out, but this is primarily a terrific zinfandel that went perfectly with pizza. Excellent. About $18.