On the few occasions per year that all the siblings are once again under our parents’ roof, there are a few recurring activities in the kitchen. When my brother is returning home, there’s going to be lasagna in the oven and sorrel in the freezer. He’ll make statements about how nobody making brownies - real fudgy chewy brownies, not cakey ones, no experimenting, you hear? I’ll get charged at some point with the job of making a pelau, Lilandra will get the urge to bake cookies that no one says they want, but everybody eats. Mom will make a biriyani, or two. And much lamb. Sister-the-elder likes to encourage roasting a turkey, and if no takers, she’ll settle for a chicken, complete with stuffing. She’s not always successful though; it helps to be the youngest. Mom uses the opportunity of additional people and helpers to make things she’s ignored for a while and Dad makes not-so-subtle comments during mealtimes about how happy he is when we visit…
One thing all 4 of us always plan on making when we’re home - pizza. We’ve learned a long time ago that nothing beats a homemade pizza (once we passed the early years of ketchupy sauces and overbaked cheese). We used to make minced beef and sausage pizzas all the time, especially since we couldn’t buy those (not halaal generally) but we lean towards veggie pizzas at home - it tastes better and allows you to really taste the sauce, cheese and crust. We’ve also experimented with lots of cheese-less pizzas (Dad is one of those unfathomable beings who does not like melted/cooked cheese. Seriously. ???), topping them with pesto/soy cheese combos (definitely no gooey there!) or just sauce and toppings, with varied success (and much frustration). At some point, Dad helpfully realised he didn’t hate pizza, in face he liked veggie pizzas, as long as it wasn’t too cheesy. Sigh. Now THAT we could work with.
I was home for Eid ul Adha (fortunately, it was celebrated on the 20th, which was a holiday in Guyana, so I went home from then to Boxing Day) and the house was filled with the 4 of us, parents, 1 sister-in-law, 2 newborns and a toddler. Joy 
So, the sorrel was already being enjoyed, with more being bought and cleaned (since the brother was actually home during December, when it’s in season). Lasagna, lamb, turkey were all being planned and some executed. We knew we had to make pizza. And with my brother being a recent convert to the Alton Brown methodologies, we knew it was time to make pizza the Good Eats way. Lilandra had always wanted to try this, which involved making the pizza dough, letting it rise for 24 hours in the refrigerator, then baking it quickly at high heat. The problem with that in previous times, was the pre-planning element. You needed to know 24 hours in advance you wanted to make pizza, and not ketch a vaps at 4 pm and want to make pizza for dinner. Plus, pizza is always a production when you’re making for at least 6 people, half of whom need to have leftover pizza the next day for breakfast, even for lunch if possible. For once, we planned.
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Letting a yeast dough rise overnight in the fridge is not a concept created by Alton Brown. There are numerous bakers and breadmakers who have talked and written about the virtues of taking it slow with yeast and dough, citing vastly superior results for crust and texture. While I have done quite a bit of reading in the past couple weeks on bread and yeast and treatment of dough, starting with Dan Lepard’s posts on The Guardian’s Word of Mouth food site, I am not in a mental position to explain any of it - there’s a reason I begged to drop Chemistry in Form 4! My forays into the baking world have been few and far-between and while I intend to work on that, because nothing beats having fresh bread, this post isn’t going to do that 
Trinifood has declared her resolution to work on becoming a better baker for 2008 and she might share some more informed knowledge along the way. In the meantime, if you are not already a baker and want to know more, I suggest you start with this post from Mr Lepard. It’s really a question and answer segment, but he gives great tips, information and links.
But back to the pizza. Since it wasn’t an Alton Brown innovation, we did look at other recipes from reputable sources. But in the end, we decided that if we really wanted to accept Alton Brown’s wisdom, we needed to follow his recipe and then move forward from there. This is the recipe as taken from the Food Network website, complete with update:
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Now, of course, we don’t have a pizza peel, nor do we have a baking stone. Sigh. We thought about trying to buy at least the clay tile, but we were a bit busy. So, we didn’t completely follow his wisdom, but we did our best. If you haven’t seen the episode Flat is Beautiful, have a look at the transcript on the Good Eats Fan Page.
Findings:
The dough needed more flour in order to handle it properly, both before and after refrigeration. It might be my inexperience with handling a wetter looser dough, or that it’s really humid this time of year in the tropics.
I really need to practise the art of stretching out pizza dough… I think I actually WATCHED this episode, so I kinda knew vaguely, what movements I was supposed to do, but I couldn’t mimic them in practice. Hence 2 oval pizzas and one almost round one.
At 500 degrees, these bake QUICKLY. You better have an assembly line of ingredients and sauce and cheese to maximise the hot oven. At some point we were only managing one pizza at a time in the big oven. Not good for energy usage. We were somewhat hampered by the fact that the toddler wandered downstairs with her bear and needed to be kept busy and away from knives and graters. She got a ball of dough to make roti with and seemed happy enough, but you HAVE TO WATCH children in the kitchen, especially intensely curious-about-cooking ones who insist they need to see inside pots and ovens, even though they know about HOT and danger. Sigh.
This recipe makes about 3 medium sized, thin crust pizzas (not paper thin) - those are the 3 pictured on this page. We needed to supplement with a pizza dough from the Naparima Girls High School cookbook.
The crust was wonderful. Wonderful. A crust that has actual flavour, without adding anything to it. Who knew? Who knew that slow rise would result in flavour? I was just hoping for texture. Texture was great too - chewy, but crispy on the exposed parts. But the overall taste was just so good - you can see why there’s no need to overload a pizza with toppings or sauce. Making the 2nd Naps dough was good in retrospect for comparitive purposes, as while it was a decent crust, it had no taste to it apart from the toppings.
I have no pictures of cross-sections of the pizza for you to see the crust and the little holes and the texture. With 7 adults and 1 toddler, when we sat down to eat, by the time we looked around, there was no more Good Eats pizza left!
We made 1 plain cheese pizza - bottled Barilla sauce, with a mixture of mozzarella and cheddar cheeses - and 2 veggie with onions, tomatoes, pineapple and mushrooms. The plain cheese in my opinion, especially with an arabiatta sauce, was the very best.
As for Alton Brown, his not-quite-guru status (we tend to lean away from the notion) has been maintained in our household. We’ve done the burger, the chewy and the thin chocolate chip cookie, and the brining of the turkey (more about that later), Lilandra’s tried the french toast…which leads to the obvious question - which fundamental recipe do we need to try next?
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