The Poor Mouth

Pizza Time Players

S SHAMEFUL as it is to admit, the song most frequently stuck in my head is that old McDonald’s “McPizza” jingle set to the Tarantella. This is way worse than just having the Tarantella stuck in your head, because a) you’re singing It’s a pizza Happy Meal, pepperoni and cheese over and over again, and b) you can’t stop wishing you had a personal pan pizza. But where can you get one now that McPizza has been retired? Why not your own kitchen, pizza enthusiasts?

My older brother makes some balls-to-the-wall pizza pies, and several months ago at a family function I took a spycam picture of an index card bearing his secret recipe. Herewith, the text of said index card:

• 2 cups water

• 5 heaping cups flour

• 2 packages yeast

• 3 tablespoons olive oil

• 2 teaspoons kosher salt

Sprinkle yeast over water. Wait five minutes, add sugar, and stir. Add flour, salt, oil, and stir with large spoons until it comes together. Knead on counter. Oil ball, put in bowl, cover with plastic wrap. Let rise one hour.

It seemed simple enough, but what about “add sugar”? Add what sugar? How much? Impatient for a delicious pizza Happy Meal with pepperoni and cheese, and unable to get my brother on the horn, I took a wild guess: a not-even-heaping teaspoon. By the time I got a hold of him, and found out I was off by two or three teaspoons, it was too late. The dough was already entombed in Saran Wrap. It seemed to be rising—somewhat.

While waiting for that to do its thing, I whipped up a simple sauce à la The New Best Recipe, which I will paraphrase: Dump a 28-ounce can of tomatoes (whole, diced, whatever) in a food processor, and pulse it very slightly (unless you want a perfectly smooth sauce, which obviously you don’t). Heat a little olive oil and two minced garlic cloves in a saucepan. Add tomatoes and simmer for about fifteen minutes. Salt and pepper to taste.

Above, a pizza that came out pretty okay. The dough was a little dense, of course, not having risen as much as it should have. (The sugar, in case you’re like me and no good at science, is to feed the yeast. The less food the yeast gets, the less the yeast cooperates with your endeavor.) I don’t own a pizza stone or peel—I used a bunch of tiles from Home Depot for the former, and the back of a cookie sheet sprinkled with corn meal for the latter.

My second pizza (see below) got totaled. Usually you screw up on the first try, but I was so excited to eat my first pizza that I forgot several steps on my second go-round. The proper technique, if I remember correctly: Preheat your oven to 450°. Brush the dough with oil, slide it onto your tiles or stone, and bake for four or five minutes. Then take it out and add mozzarella, sauce, and toppings. Return to oven, bake until the crust because to look right—probably ten to fifteen minutes.

I don’t quite remember what I did to wreck this. It looks like I forgot the olive oil, and I’m pretty sure I forgot the cornmeal, because the dough stuck to the tiles—burned to them, in some spots—and ripped the pizza apart when I tried to take it out. I ate it anyway, naturally. Those black spots are anchovies.

For the record, since I did promise southern Connecticut recommendations, of which many more are coming soon, this is what a personal pan pizza ought to look like:

Hibernation Sickness

HERE IN THE CHRIST have you been for the past month? asked nobody. Except Rollo. And my mom. But the stats don’t lie—I know for a fact that upwards of 22 people per day have been tuning in, hoping to learn some new postapocalyptic cooking skill, like how to catch squirrels and what to do with them afterward. Well, the sad fact is that I haven’t been doing much cooking lately. I blame the Winter Madness.

During my two-year stint in Santa Clara County, California, I completely forgot how much I despise New England winters. It’s all coming back to me now. A concerned friend donated this Verilux Natural Spectrum HappyLite Mini Ultra, which is supposed to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder by flooding your eyeballs with HappyLite. (The gin is so that nothing will be left to chance.) She forgot to include the instruction booklet. It should be difficult to overdose on HappyLite, but it isn’t. After two hours of staring into this glowing idol, my eyes felt like they’d been flash fried by a nuke test and I wanted to weep.

It turns out you are meant to keep it sort of somewhere above and behind you for a half hour at a time, and only in the morning. I have never grasped this “moderation” concept. Now I’m afraid of the HappyLite and don’t want to try it again. I’m back to my old technique, sitting in a hot bath all day long with an aromatherapy candle.

So that’s my excuse. But I’ve still been eating all kinds of crazy crap, steeped in the culinary folkways of southern Connecticut. Come back soon for new recs and pics, dear readers!

C.R.E.A.M.

T LEAST A HALF-DOZEN readers have asked me if the green substance depicted below is spinach. It’s actually collard greens stewed with smoked turkey necks. I was too busy over the holidays to post the recipe, though, truth be told, it’s not too much more complicated than chiffonade, add necks, add water, and heat for a long, long time. Since greens are an old New Year’s Day tradition (they “are believed to bring prosperity,” in other words $TRAIGHT CA$H), here’s a far superior recipe substituting smoked pork hocks for turkey necks, and a mix of collards and mustard greens instead of plain old collards. It comes, thanks to the indispensable Google Books, from the January 1985 issue of Ebony.

For the untutored, the hock “is the joint between the tibia/fibula and the metatarsals of the foot, where the foot was attached to the hog’s leg. . . . This piece generally consists of too much skin and gristle to be palatable on its own, so it is usually cooked with greens and other vegetables in order to give them additional flavor (generally that of pork fat and smoke), although the meat from particularly meaty hocks may be removed and served.” (Thanks, Wikipedians.)

The other, perhaps better-known, New Year’s soul food tradition is black-eyed peas, which are supposed to bring good luck. This year I’d take money over luck, but since having both is just a matter of gorging yourself on two different buffet sides, why choose? Let’s begin with the recipe for mixed greens. You’ll need about two pounds of curly mustard greens (see below) and one decent-sized bunch of collards. After thoroughly cleaning off the grit and aphids that are doubtless calling your vegetables home, chiffonade the collards and roughly chop the mustard greens. Then toss them together.

Next, bring eight cups of water to a boil with three smoked hocks inside. (Helpful hint for the grocery store: Regular hocks are pink like a piglet; smoked ones are brown like a delicious chocolate bar.) Turn the heat down about halfway and simmer for an hour. Then add the greens and whatever combination you like of chopped celery, onion, and green pepper. I despise celery except in beverages and green pepper except in fajitas, but I added them anyway for texture. Seasoning is tricky. The recipe calls for a tablespoon of sugar and a half-teaspoon of crushed red pepper. Make that 1.5 T of brown sugar, substitute cayenne to taste for crushed red pepper, and add a considerable amount of salt throughout cooking, which should take just over an hour. Whether or not you keep the pot covered the whole time depends on how much potlikker you like in your greens.

The peas must be soaked overnight before cooking, but after that they’re simple. Fill a big pot with eight cups of water, two hocks, sliced onion, chopped celery, two cloves minced garlic, and a half-teaspoon each of salt and cayenne pepper. DO NOT ADD THE PEAS YET. If you’re bad at following directions, you’ll end up having to remove all the peas (and much of the seasoning) with a slotted spoon. This mixture has to simmer for an hour before the peas are added. After the hour’s up, add the peas and cook for an additional hour and a half.

Ka-ching! Now you’re ready to bring your newfound luck and money to the casino, the dog track, or, ahem, the PayPal donation box. Happy New Year!

Wishing You a Green Christmas

[Insert Phở Pun Here]

NLY MY REALLY LONGTIME readers know this, but I got my start in soup. My very first non-Ramen foray into cooking, in a cockroach-terrorized Philadelphia micro-kitchen, was something called cock-a-leekie soup. Before that, when I lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown, I ate a particular variety of beef phở almost every day at a particular restaurant in my neighborhood. I told everyone it was the best—their meatballs didn’t have those kernels of gristle or hoof or whatever it is that you sometimes find in phở meatballs—but nobody listened. What made me the expert?

Well, whaddayah know, skeptics, contrarians, and haters? New York Magazine has pronounced the phở at Pho Bang the finest phở in New York: “The national soup of Vietnam isn’t hard to come by in Chinatown, but this one stands out for its rich, mellow flavor and beautiful balance. The #1 combination rice-noodle beef soup is heavy on the pinkish eye of round and light on the brisket, with just a sliver of tendon and whisper of omosa, or cow stomach, which, for some, is plenty ($5.50; 157 Mott St., nr. Grand St.; 212-966-3797).” I can’t plead superb judgment, though; I liked Pho Bang mainly because it was in lurching distance. 

[Phở ga: the one that got away.]

Despite dining at Pho Bang dozens of times, I never got around to sampling the phở ga, or chicken phở. I couldn’t imagine how, in a phở contest, chicken could compete with beef, or how, in a chicken soup contest, phở could compete with, say, the purity and goodness of Campbell’s. So, overcome by curiosity, I gave this recipe a try. “Rich, mellow flavor” is putting it too mildly. This broth is liquid gold, and has made star anise my favorite spice by a wide margin. (If you’re wondering why anyone need have a favorite spice: This was an actual question on a Penzey’s application I came dangerously close to filling out.)

The secret to beef phở is cow parts. Look at this guide: You’ve got flank, crunchy flank, fatty flank, brisket, tendon, tripe, and meatballs. The secret to chicken phở is the broth, plain and simple. Chicken is chicken, and this goes double for chicken that cooked off a stewing bird for hours. The meat isn’t really the point, which is why most of it—along with a hundred tiny bones—ends up in the trash.

All credible phở recipes call for charred onion and ginger, and I’m in no position to argue, but I have to admit that I didn’t taste much ginger in the finished product. I did taste excellence, however, so I’m not going to advise you to deviate from Steamy Kitchen’s procedure: “Place ginger and onion on a small baking sheet. The top of the onion should be about 4″ from the oven’s heating element. Set to broil on high for 15 minutes. Turn the onion and ginger occasionally, to get an even char. . . . After cooling, rub to get the charred skin off the onion and use a butter knife to scrape the skin off the ginger.” Perhaps my oven sucks, but I needed about twice as long to get the vaguest intimations of an “even char.”

Once you’ve prepared your onion, ginger, bouquet garni (two tablespoons of coriander seeds, four cloves, two star anise pods), and “small bunch of cilantro stems,” it’s time for the fun part: mangling your stewing bird. Part of your broth’s chicken flavor comes from chicken meat, but most of it comes from marrow. The more thoroughly you score or break the chicken’s bones, the more delicious, super-healthy marrow leaches out into your broth. Don’t be shy! Those bones will give a surprising amount of resistance, but if you persevere, you will show that nasty, beady-eyed little bastard who’s boss.

I’m tired, and it’s Christmas Eve, so I will now refer you back to the recipe. DO parboil your chicken and change its water! DO simmer your broth for as long as you can stand (the fragrance will make this extremely difficult). And DO strain the finished product with at minimum a fine-mesh strainer and preferably a cheesecloth. The satisfaction of making perfectly fine, particle-free broth from a nasty mess of chicken carcass is well worth the trouble. It’d make a fine meal even without the chicken, noodles, mung beans, cilantro, sliced jalapeño peppers, hot sauce, and, in this case, “bonus shrimp.”