Pizza

This recipe is from Jim Lahey, the owner of Sullivan Street Bakery and Co. Pizza in NYC.  In addition to the success he enjoys as a baker and restaurateur, Jim became an internet sensation a few years back when his "no knead" bread recipe tore through food blogs like a wild-fire.  Those of you who have been with us a while may recall our experience with his awesome homemade loaf which has become my go-to scratch bread recipe.

Well….Jim has taken his no-knead approach to bread and applied it to the realm of make-at-home pizza, and has recently released a cookbook with all the gory details entitled My Pizza: The Easy No-Knead Way to Make Spectacular Pizza at Home .  With so many great pie recipes in the book I struggled for a bit to decide which to try first, and ultimately chose the one shown on the cover of the cookbook, his Ham and Peas pizza.  I figure that if it's good enough for the cover, it's good enough for me!

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Yeast farts.  

Yeah, yeast farts.  That’s how I hooked ‘em.  

It will come as no surprise to most parents reading this post, that when I asked my kids for a volunteer to assist me in our first cooking lesson, you would have thought that I had asked one of them to join me in the kitchen to get an arm amputated.  I must say that I found their general lack of enthusiasm for what I had hoped to be a pretty fun and easy launch to our "Oui, Chef" experience, a little disheartening.  It seemed that I needed a hook to capture their imaginations and get them engaged. I'm not ashamed to tell you that dishing some potty-talk and extolling the virtues of yeast farts as a means of leavening dough seemed to work quite nicely, thank you.  Just these two words got my kids so enthralled with the idea of making their own homemade pizza dough, that any hesitation they felt about their first cooking lesson with dad, fairly quickly dissipated. 

To be honest, the boys seemed a tad more intrigued than the girls by the idea of the little yeasts consuming sugars from the dough and “farting” out carbon dioxide gas, thus causing the dough to rise.  I could see their slightly twisted minds picturing the whole scene, the yeasts all rolling around inside the dough, turning toward each other, slapping high-fives, dropping their shorts and letting ‘em rip.

FART…… “oh that was sweet man, ball’s in your court”

FART……”gasp….. your killing me dude.  Hey can anyone find a window in this place, I’m dying in here!”

I am just a bigger version of them….I totally get this line of thinking.

The girl’s take on the topic was a bit more questioning, and was accompanied by a look of mock horror.  “You’re kidding right…. that’s just plain gross.”

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