Homemade Pizza Powers Creativity
Pizza is the essence of simplicity.
Pizza is the greatest food on the earth. If we had to send one thing into space to represent humankind, so that “energy-forms” from other galaxies could better understand us, it would be a pizza: the classic Margarita pie.
It’s Friday again
In my home that means pizza night. Soon after imagining this story, I will don my apron and begin the process of ordering my need to create. An edible canvas allowing for virtually limitless variations, pizza has proven in my life to be not just something I love to eat; but also, a taming of emotions, an expression of desires, a predictor of moods, a compass for my needs and an articulation of my inner voice at a given moment in time. It is a culinary Polaroid.
After gently mixing the flour, yeast, salt and warm water together and once having formed a solitary clump, I pour the mixture out onto a time-tested cutting board. Guiding my hands through the wet and sticky mess prodding it toward uniformity, subtly urging it to become uniform, smooth and obedient, thought frees from the distractions of small screens and chirping apps. I ruminate — this is prime rumination time.
With my forearms feeling just the slightest hints of a pleasant burn from the kneading, I set the dough into a favorite bowl and lay a kitchen towel gently across the top — lovingly — and place the bowl to the side, out of the way, out of sight.
Time will now do what it has been doing for thousands of years, in millions of kitchens prodded on by tens of millions of hands, souls and aspirations: the dough will rise. I converse with it, with them — we wait together.
Being Creative is Simple Pizza is an exercise in creativity.
It is the manifestation of humankind’s ability to take the rawest of ingredients and in very nuanced ways evolve them into more refined, more articulate and even exquisite representations of the former self.
Pick up a shaft of wheat and look at it closely. It took thousands of years to get us to the point that our inner vision could bring that weed-like plant to flour. The moment flour was realized, however, the brain began to search, imbued with curiosity: what else could we make out of the stuff around us?
The growing and harvesting of flour settled us, ending our journeys; stopping us from chasing the latest migrating herd of wild beasts and it prodded our brains to ask: if I am cold, what can I do to stay warm? If I have hunger, how can I make this “flour” tastier?
A handful of flour is solitude and in it lies so much more, so much really of anything. I will often put a dash or two of olive oil into my dough while kneading it — but not always. This is what is so wonderful about the pizza-making process, there are no rules set in stone for creating the ultimate pie. The oil, when used rather liberally, however, does add a more marshmallowy texture while at the same time maintaining structure and quirky confidence in the dough — it doesn’t lose life and become like a slice of mass produced loafed bread.
The oil, for my creation, is most important at the end, when all of the toppings have been laid across the expanse of mozzarella cheese. Holding the bottle at just the right height, I wave it once over the pie with the precision and delicacy of a surgeon or a diamond-cutter or someone defusing a bomb — again, depends on my mood.
No oil escapes until it seems the rotating motion is fully under control — aligned with my thoughts. Too fast, too jerky, too carelessly and too much oil escapes, saturating one spot, forming a puddle — then it is necessary to move it about with the fingers or a spoon. Sloppiness, pure and simple.
Waving and rotating slowly, the drops fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, fall and fall. The oil has assumed its place and it is doing what it is supposed to do now — caressing, coating, stabilizing and nurturing the layers beneath it.
Contentment sets in.
Every single time I make a pizza at home, four or five a week for the past 23 years, I cut or grate the cheese differently. I lay it out across the top of the dough, which is now covered with a thin blanket of tomato paste, from left to right, from right to left, clockwise or counterclockwise. There is no order but there is order in that I know yet again, these exact movements are unique. No two pizzas are ever the same — ever.
On some occasions, I choose to use less cheese and more vegetables like zucchinis, jalapenos and a few green olives and then to break up the growing monotony of varying shades of green with brilliantly red cherry tomatoes.
Sometimes, I make a Fibonacci pizza: one big slice of tomato, two pieces of green pepper, three pieces of orange pepper, five yellow cherry tomatoes and then eight capers carelessly, and almost even haphazardly, strewn about the circumference of the pie.
The simple truth of a pizza: there is no such thing as right one and there is no such thing as a wrong one. It can be whatever you want it to be, whatever you prefer and no one can tell you its wrong.
I would be apt to say pizza has to have tomato paste and cheese in order to be labeled a pizza; and, I would even be willing to argue in favor of this orthodoxy but this would be a miscalculation on my part — a sign of my getting older, perhaps. The pizza is in the mind of the creator. Just like I will never put pineapple on my pie; others will never put an egg and cauliflower which I have been known to do.
The ritual of readying the board, opening a new package of flower, placing the apron around my waist and then slowly pouring the yeast, salt and water into the dough soothes me. It is something I need to do at least once a week in order to stay tethered to my inner, creative source.
The strictures of my template, the small baking pan on which I will set my creation, reminds that pizza, like an idea, must be tethered to reality; grounded in something real — see your idea, like your pizza, to the end result.
My creation is sized up one last time before the rather rude send off to be baked. This moment is oddly unlike the preceding ones, which all seemed so gentle and meticulous. Opening the door to a well-preheated oven, the pizza is just tossed in with little or no fanfare. It’s sort of like, “okay, I invented you, birthed you even, now it’s up to you to be great. My role is over.”
Honestly, almost a tinge of regret sets in.
Once baked, cut up and eaten, this pizza is no more — that creation, the energy applied to pull it together, is expended and nothing remains of it but a past…so soon to be forgotten.
To be replaced by next week’s pizza.