Ethan and Katie's Adventures in Living…Together

OK, so I’ve been talking about trying my hand at homemade pizza for months now, so much so that my mother even cuts out every article she sees re: pizza cooking. This weekend, Katie and I made a fateful (and unplanned) stop at Surfas just to show her what the store was like, and ended up with both a brand new cooking stone, AND a fabulous pizza peel! (the crazy tool REAL pizza makers use to take their pizzas from the oven)

Mozzarella and Tomato Pizza

First a bit on Surfas – if you live in LA and have any interest in food or cooking, you owe it to yourself to go. I hadn’t been to Surfas in about 5 years, and the last time I went they were focused on commercial and high-end cooking. Not any more – now Surfas has things for EVERY type of cooking imaginable, from baking to pizza to candy making. Not only that, they’ve got a gourmet meat and cheese counter, as well as every staple ingredient you can think of (the butters looked amazing). I wanted to share the site, but right now it looks like all they’ve got is this: http://www.culinarydistrict.com/. I’ll keep looking though, apparently they do weekly cooking classes every Saturday (this Saturday was Asian Street Food).

As for the pizza, I made the first attempt Saturday night. It offered a number of pluses in my book: 1) I got to utilize our new KitchenAid mixer for the dough 2) I got the try out using yeast (which is weird, terrifying, and fascinating at the same time – just watch your dough double in size in 2 hrs, it’s weird) 3) I got to make pizza, which I love.

Learnings:

1) Pizza dough is extremely sticky. It stayed together well, but at the same time it took serious work to get it to actually leave anything it was in contact with (bowls, paper, my hands).

2) I was told at Surfas that getting the pizza from the “peel” to the pizza stone in the over was all in the wrist – similar to a magician whipping a tablecloth off of a table. Well, first try didn’t work. It may be in the wrist, but it’s also in applying a BOATLOAD of flour under the pizza so that it feels like moving. It took one near catastrophe to learn that (which resulted in mozzarella burning all over the oven interior – waiting for Katie to clean that…)

3) Homemade pizza is way better than anything I’ve bought. Seriously. In the end, totally easy and way worth it.

NEXT STEP: Figuring out how to make pizza less than a half-inch thick. I honestly rolled out one tonight that was maybe 2 milimeters thick, still was almost 1/2″ by the time I pulled it out…oh well, good to have goals!