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My recent pizza articles generated mail from readers with questions about the mechanics of pizza-making. (Most of the following tips and tools apply to bread-making too.)

There are deep pizza-industry secrets employed by successful pizzarias across the planet. I won’t share those with you because they’re all about cutting costs, e.g. reusing yesterday’s leftover cheese. You can make better pizza in your own kitchen.

First you’ll need a great dough recipe. Pizza toppings are important, but if the crust is below par, the best toppings in the world won’t rescue your finished pie from mediocrity.

The best pizza-dough recipe I’ve ever made is Peter Reinhart’s delayed-fermentation recipe, which appears in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I’ve used that recipe since the book came out, and it has never let me down. As an alternative, you can use any dough recipe that calls for nothing more than flour, water, yeast, salt, and (optionally) olive oil, but I’d recommend you cut the specificed yeast amount in half, double the rise time, and make the dough the day before (leaving it to spend the night in the refrigerator).

To make Reinhart’s dough recipe, you won’t need to knead, but you will need a mixer. I use and recommend a 325-watt, 5-quart KitchenAid “Artisan Series” mixer. KitchenAid makes smaller models but they’re not suited to bread-making; in fact this model is actually a bit undersized if you plan to entertain. At a recent pizza dinner for six, I made two batches of dough; given a bigger mixer I could have simply doubled the recipe and saved half the time.

The mixer I lust for is the 525-watt, 6-quart KitchenAid “Professional Series” model. It’s big enough to handle about 90% of my needs in a single batch.

Quick mixer-mishap story: I found the limits of my mixer when making a batch of focaccia. The dough was a bit too stiff. The resistance against the dough hook must have been huge, for the torque ripped the welded metal tab off the side of the mixing bowl. I had to take the bowl to a local machine shop to have the tab welded back on.

Now that you have dough, you’ll need to bake it. There are three essential tools for this stage.

The first is inexpensive but no less critical for its low cost: kitchen parchment. I build pizzas directly on (unbleached) parchment paper. The paper makes it easy to transfer pizzas into the oven, because it’s easy to lift an edge and slide the raw pizza onto a peel or sheetpan. Parchment paper is coated with silicon, which will release the dough after reaching a certain temperature.

I use parchment for bread-baking, too; in fact I wouldn’t want to bake bread or pizza without it. The only alternative I know is to use mounds of semolina or cornmeal, which like tiny ball-bearings can prevent dough from sticking to whatever surface you want it not to stick to. But this makes a mess on the floor and in the oven. Parchment is superior.

Moving one step closer to the oven, you’ll need a pizza peel. If you have a sheetpan with no edges, you can use it instead, but you’ll find the peel easier because of the handle.

Finally, inside the oven you’ll need a pizza stone. I use and recommend Old Stone Oven brand because the stones are thicker than others. Thicker stones retain more heat, which is entirely the point of using stones at all. Old Stone makes a 16-inch round pizza stone and a rectangular 14x16 inch stone. The rectangular is great for baking multiple loaves of bread at once. Either shape is suitable for pizza.

The last essential tool for successful pizza making: a suitable cutter. Cook’s Illustrated recently conducted a 5-way test and concluded (as I recall) that big wheels and handles are the two critical elements to a useful cutter. Amazon offers a wide selection of pizza cutters.

Conspicuously absent: I don’t recommend any sort of pan because I don’t use them. Bake the pizzas directly on the stone (using parchment to ease handling).

Then, when the pizza comes out of the oven, set it on a wire rack for a minute or two. This helps prevent the crust from becoming soggy. I use and recommend Calphalon nonstick cooling racks because they’re sturdy, they’re large enough for a 12''-13'' pizza, and they don’t have clumsy collapsible legs that require two hands to operate.

In a poorly-considered move that is sure to follow him like a cloud of BO to the end of his career, Georgia Republican Bill Heath sponsored an amendment that would ban genital piercing for consenting adult women. Consenting. Adult. Women. Heath is neither consenting nor female, so why the hell does he care?

An apparently unsympathetic reporter from Associated Press sent out the following, which — to my great surprise — even appeared on the Christian Right’s news site:

Amendment sponsor Rep. Bill Heath, R-Bremen, was slack-jawed when told after the vote that some adults seek the piercings.

“What? I’ve never seen such a thing,” Heath said. “I, uh, I wouldn’t approve of anyone doing it. I don’t think that’s an appropriate thing to be doing.”

From way out here on the progressive edge of the left coast, it’s easy to laugh at Biblical, repressed, Kentucky-fried perceptions of morality. The attitude in California seems to be “live and let live.” As far as I can tell, significant parts of the Midwest and South feel it necessary to legislate behaviors in order to “protect” society. I don’t understand it.

Well worth reading is Shannon Larratt’s editorial, Bill Heath: American Traitor. Larratt is the editor and publisher of a “full-spectrum body modification publication,” a website that Bill Heath will also try to ban, assuming the Internet isn’t already illegal in Bremen, GA.

Townshend on Entwistle (seen in Pete Townshend’s diary):

“OLD RED WINE” [is a song] I wrote right here in the hotel I now sit in (in NY) about the late John Entwistle. He loved expensive claret, and often drank it past its prime. There is an irony there somehow: John never seemed to realize how perfectly MATURE he had really become as rock musician. He didn’t need the trappings he thought essential, and that — in my opinion — led directly to his premature death.

Another story from the archives… written in April 2002 about a house I no longer own (although it is back on the market for 20% more than I got when I sold it).

I was up in the “crawlspace,” which is Californian for attic, doing something wholly unethical — I was setting out fresh boxes of mouse poison, having lost too many nights’ sleep when the little rodents would fall down between the studs of our bedroom wall and spend the next 48 hours thumping and scratching (eight inches from our heads as we lay in bed) until they finally died or crawled out.

I assume they can crawl out. If not, there are at least four dessicated mouse husks, and all manner of tiny mouse graffiti, I’m sure, on the back side of the sheetrock.

Anyway, it was raining hard, and because the roof is one of the few things we have not had to repair since we moved in, I crawled around with my flashlight on the theory that if we had a leak, this was the time to find it. And of course, I did; one of the rafters was wet, although not dripping, which would have been worse as the dripping water would eventually eat through the ceiling somewhere. You don’t really have to ask me how I know this.

I called a few roofers. Most chortled derisively. Calling a roofer during a rainstorm is like trying to take a dump during halftime. Roofers were working double shifts just to respond to emergency calls, and my moistened roof beam simply did not qualify.

We finally got it fixed… just in time for the skies to dry up for the year.

A Time Magazine article on the presidential election contains a revealing inside look at the dynamics of the campaign.

[T]he war rooms of the two campaigns are organizing to quickly seize any opportunity for attack. On the first floor of the brick-and-glass office building where Bush forces are housed in Arlington, Va., a bank of TiVos captures Kerry’s every word. A team arrives at 4:30 a.m. to sift through the papers and prepare responses before the sun rises. When Kerry unleashes even the mildest broadside, the young staff members go almost giddy, and a call issues: “Attack!” Comments from Kerry in the morning papers are incorporated into Bush’s noon speeches.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just debate? Oh, that’s right; Kerry suggested the same thing already.

The Time article also contains this stunning revelation:

[E]mployees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration’s efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.

As Ezra Klein writes,

It’s one thing to use 9/11 in an ad or talk about your role in keeping the country safe; it’s a wholly different beast to direct a busy agency that isn’t yet fulfilling its mandate to divert resources to helping you campaign. It’s disgusting.

(Seen at AntiPixel: Dept. of Homeland Photo Ops)