I used to cook pizza for a living. Part time. Neapolitan style, wood-burning oven. Paid something like fourteen bucks an hour. They had me working Friday nights for my last few months there. We’d have six pies at a time going in the oven. Three guys crammed onto the line. One stretching, one topping, one working the oven. We’d sell hundreds over the course of one night. I find I think about that job often.
I work in an office now. It’s full time and pays far better. My back, feet, and shoulders are all less sore than they were when I was cooking pizza for a living. My schedule is far more predictable and that may be best of all. I no longer need to guess in advance what time is mine and what is my employer’s. My own time is neatly divided from company time. Recently, in my own time, I’ve been cooking pizza.
Oh God, Is This Actually Gonna be a Recipe?
The average home oven is not really meant to make pizza from scratch. It doesn’t get hot enough and lacks the flat, heavy cooking surface you will find in commercial ovens. Internet cooking personalities will circumvent this problem with the kind of unwieldy paraphernalia you can justify owning when home cooking is a for-profit endeavor. This is, to be blunt, nerd shit. No human being needs a pizza peel at home. A very small minority of human beings need a bread stone or steel. All you actually need to make good pizza at home is a cast iron pan.
Every couple months, I get a craving for garbage and order a Domino's pan pizza. I no longer have to do that since it’s cheaper to just make one at home. The effort is satisfying. I find as I get a little older I appreciate having the time to myself to make something with my hands. People will cede you time and space you’d otherwise not be entitled to when you’re cooking. The return of that same soreness in my shoulders and back after time spent in the kitchen feels like a sign that I’ve earned whatever food I will enjoy with my friends and partner. They used to have to pay me to subject myself to that feeling.
Against New York Slice Hegemony
Over the last year or so I’ve become a Detroit style pizza guy. My favorite local shop serves this square, pan-bourne midwest permutation of pie. Delightfull airy and chewy, with crunchy baked-on edges. More akin to an Americanized focaccia than a New York slice or wood-charred neapolitan. Detroit style pizza rewards excess. A thicker crust and the extra structural support afforded by the square oil pans they bake in means a higher tolerance for toppings. It’s perfect comfort food. The kind of thing best ordered at 10 PM on a weekend night while blind drunk and deciding which movie would be best to fall asleep to.
I’m a child of the American Northeast and therefore a subject of the New York Slice Imperium. I’ve enjoyed many good ones and equally enjoyed many less good cheap ones. I have them often and rarely regret the decision when I do. I’ll never understand how territorial some people get about it. Perhaps it’s a function of my own little corner of America having its own “famous” variety of local pizza (deeply mid, I’m afraid) but I never quite caught that syndrome that makes New Yorkers (and associated wannabees) break out in hives when they see a Chicago deep dish. With respect to John Stewart, if you are a grown adult howling about some regional interpretation of one of the world’s most popular foodstuffs being “not a pizza,” you are a weenie and need to get real problems. It’s lazy criticism that misunderstands the point of cooking as a means of cultural and personal expression. The point of cooking food with no profit motive is not to do it the right way. It’s to do it in the way which pleases you and your community. Whether that community is contained within the four walls of a studio apartment or sprawls far and wide across a city, state, or nation is up to you.
Soul Kitchen
My household goes through a lot of flour. I cook, my partner bakes. It’s cheaper than eating out or ordering in. We both work and so there’s a constant demand for reheatable lunches. But quietly we’ve moved past the territory of mere practicality. There’s an economic component to buying whole chickens and butchering them at home. There’s an ecological component as well. I can virtually guarantee you that neither of these are driving our discussion as to the logistics of making our own chicken stock. We cook because we like to eat good things, but we also cook because we enjoy the act of cooking. My partner has thrown herself wholly into her baking over the past few weeks because she finds it therapeutic. The fact that she is quite a good baker is secondary.
When I cooked for money it was never therapeutic. It was satisfying, on occasion, the way hard work is. But now the feelings that used to scan negatively; creaking joints, aching muscles, sore feet, are all therapeutic. Outside of the expectations of a professional kitchen, cooking becomes something other than a job. It is a full body endeavor when so much of modern work is bloodless, sedentary spreadsheets and stimulants. It is a tactile medium of feeling in a world of cold and uncharitable facts. It is a discipline that prizes process, repetition and refinement, over results, which soon disappear or fall prey to mold. In a modernity of completionist consumption, checklists and back-logs, cooking is comforting in its refusal to ever truly end. When the oven is off, the dishes are cleared away, and the last morsel has been claimed, you are not really finished. You are merely contemplating the next project.
I used to cook pizza for a living. Now I cook pizza as a vacation from life.