Column for Kristen Marie Winter
Letters to the Editor/Be Our Guest
Everywhere I go I find a pal
Peter Weinschenk
Editor, The Record-Review
email: pweinschenk@tpprinting.com
I drive my wife, Susan, crazy.
I swear I can’t help it.
I’m one of those people who must talk about food as it is being eaten.
She thinks food only should be eaten, not discussed.
Things get really bad when I start make and serve pizza, a personal obsession.
I try to be restrained, but, you know, I cannot fail to comment.
I talk about the crust, the sauce, the cheese. It’s all so important.
Susan just rolls her eyes.
Understand that it has been my personal Holy Grail to develop a homemade pizza with a crust that is light, bubbly, and chewy, like you’d get at a commercial pizzeria.
And understand that in my personal quest I have recently dedicated Saturday mornings to experimenting with flours, yeasts, chilled doughs, refrigerated doughs, added gluten, doughs wrapped in Saran Wrap, and on and on.
I now consider myself the Thomas Edison of pizza, constantly experimenting to edge closer and closer to that perfect, authentic, all-natural pizza crust.
I think I am making progress, refining my strategy each and every week. Not only am I dreaming the Impossible Dream, I am edging closer towards achieving that dream one pizza at a time.
Each week I review various web sites or book articles that suggest various ways of making pizza dough. There is quite a collection of these recipes on youtube. It’s a fascinating journey.
So, what happens is that when one of my pizzas emerge from the smoking cauldron of our kitchen oven cranked to 500 degrees, I am not only hungry to devour the thing, but hungry to play food critic.
I desperately want to talk about the food.
I will put pizza on my wife’s plate, wait for her to take a first bite and, breathlessly, wait for either her approval or disapproval. I am full of questions. Is this pizza better than last week’s? Or is it worst? What if I tried this? Or that? What if I tried both this and that?
My wife is always happy with the pizza. For her, there is nothing to talk about. The pizza is good. End of story.
And, of course, she is right.
No one should be subjected to a dinner that turns into a science experiment.
So, knowing this, I try to change the subject away from the pizza pie staring us in the face.
The problem is that I can never get very far.
This past weekend, my attempt at not talking about pizza was to suggest that, maybe, we should construct a wood-fired pizza oven in our backyard.
She rolled her eyes.
“But we could get heat up to 1200 degrees,” I said.
She just stared.
“Just think of the crust,” I said. “The crust.”
I know actually very little about Thomas Edison, his personal and family life, et cetera.
But my guess is that light bulbs were not a favorite topic of Mrs. Edison.
There's no place like home
Kristen Marie Winter
Reporter, The Record-Review
email: ktetzner@tpprinting.com
