Cheese pizza

The most simple of all pizzas. This took me back, all the way back to my first awareness of cooking in kitchens and pizza came out of a box like magical food, a wonderment to a child, the box contains a packet of powder, a tin of sauce, and a packet of dried cheese. All those packets! It was an amazing thing to do from my point of view, fun too for people who can read directions and operate an oven, and it had its frustrations, like the dough, particularly the way the dough resisted stretching on an oiled pan until finally it seemed to give up and allow itself to be stretched.

A child does not understand the dough needn't make  a complete mess of one's hands and that relaxed dough will stretch without snapping back, but even if they did know that, twenty minutes is intolerable for something like that. A pop-open refrigerator dough would be better for children because it is instant and it is dramatic.

This is sourdough starter. It's what I have. Otherwise it would be dough made with commercial yeast. The dough also has semolina flour to toughen it up. 

You should see what I passed up to keep this simple. At the moment I'm fully stocked with great pizza ingredients, they are right there with these ingredients crying out to be used, but I'm leaving them out for now. 

This is where my mind was distracted from pizzas with no small degree of urgency attempting to process ramifications stemming from two phone calls filled with conflicting helpfulness and unhelpfulness about something very important to me and my mind sank, deeply, to a mood far away from pizzas and unconducive to creativity and even to eating, and though I was in the room assembling a pizza, my mind was nowhere to be found near the room and then I snapped back to the kitchen. But not before grating the cheese, adding it to the pizza, neglecting to photograph it and placing the pizza into the oven. It's as if somebody else did that.

Too bad.

So there's that.

There is more dough than needed for one small pizza so four pizzas are stretched and frozen.

A tin of tomato paste is opened but only one tablespoon used so that too is spread out and frozen, the remainder frozen in buttons and used later in sauces.

Through the éclat of simple demonstration the delicate notion is shattered, that good aged pizza dough, anything beyond calling for home delivery or the desolation of frozen pizza, is a wistful aesthetic for the hobbyist cook unsuitable for busy contemporary families, no, now it is shown as a practical matter.

The advantage beyond speed and convenience is that with commercial yeast the aging that is missing  from fast doughs and required for great pizzas is inherent in the extended process of preproduction, storage, thawing and proofing.