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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, when I dropped out of college after my sophomore year it took me nearly 20 years to go back and complete it, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share the story of how I nearly burned down my kitchen by making pizza.
Today’s Fun Fact of the Day is: Did you know that today is No Housework Day? No Housework Day is your chance to do anything, except housework…OR…have someone else do the chores for a day. There are two ways to celebrate this day:
- If you normally do the housework around the house, stop for the day. Instead, kick back and enjoy the day. Relax and do anything, except housework.
- If you are a spouse or significant other, do the housework for your mate. It gives her or him a break from the housework. And, you just might get an appreciation of how much work it takes to keep up the house.
Friday Forum
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What I Learned Yesterday:
Remember a few weeks ago when I tried my hand at making deep-dish Chicago style stuffed pizza? That was a fantastically delicious experiment. However, it definitely did not go as planned.
I don’t cook much, and I’ve never baked anything, so the idea of making pizza from scratch was a little bit daunting and a little bit exciting. The only tricky part seemed to be making the dough. I wasn’t worried about making the sauce or finding the right ingredients. So before I embarked on my pizza making journey, I did some research.
First I got on YouTube and began watching videos of how to make dough, specifically, pizza dough. There were a lot of variations, but none of them seemed hard. But it still worried me a bit. Some said to use olive oil, while others said to use butter. Some said to mix the yeast with warm water before adding it to the dry ingredients, while others didn’t mention that. Some said to bake the pizza at 425 degrees, while others said 475 degrees. I know that it’s the details that matter in things like this, and I wanted to make sure I got it right.
So I called up my friend Chip. Chip is not only a beer connoisseur (check out his podcast Tales From the Cask), but he is a pizza connoisseur. I knew that Chip is known for making pizza so I asked him if he had a recipe for Chicago deep dish. He did. Not only that, but a couple of days later a mysterious envelope showed up at my house that had a pizza cookbook inside. Chip claims he doesn’t know anything about it, but I don’t believe him.
Chip and I spent some time chatting about pizza and he gave me some great tips. I know knew which details I would go with, and headed off to the store to get all the ingredients.
Chip suggested that I let my dough rise overnight instead of an hour like most recipes call for. I thought that it sounded like good advice since one of the YouTube videos I watched said the same thing. That YouTube video was from one of Chicago’s most famous pizzerias.
I mixed the yeast with warm water and let the chemistry take over. I mixed the dry ingredients together and then added in the water/yeast mixture. At this point I thought I might run into some difficulty. You see, in all the videos I watched, they used an electric mixer to make the dough. Since we don’t bake much in our house, we don’t have a mixer. I figured that dough has been made by hand long before mixers were invented so I’d just do it by hand.
Needless to say, this process was much harder than I thought. It took a really long time and my arms wore out. I even tried mixing it with a spoon handle but all that did was give me blisters.
I have no idea how long it took, but I eventually worked the ingredients into something that looked like the pizza dough I’d seen on the YouTube videos. I put the dough into a couple of bowls, covered it, and left it to sit overnight.
The next morning the dough looked great. It was much bigger, just like it was supposed to be. I let it rise the rest of the day and most of the afternoon.
The other thing that concerned me was rolling out and shaping the dough. I needed the lower crust to be about 15-16 inches in diameter and I needed the top crust to be about 11-12 inches in diameter. Since my rolling pin is only about 8 inches long, this proved to be a challenge. Maybe it wasn’t the rolling pin. Maybe it was me. Either way, it was a challenge.
After some practice I got the hang of rolling the dough out into a circle instead of a rectangle. I eventually got the dough into the size I needed and pulled it off the counter. Unfortunately, I hadn’t put enough flour on the counter and the dough stuck to it and ripped into chunks. I had to start over.
I was now a bit faster and was able to get the desired shape more quickly. Since I had properly floured the counter, I didn’t have any problems with it sticking. No, this time my problem was that I stretched it too much. When I tried to transfer it to the pan, the middle of it stretched and ripped in half.
So it was back to a ball of dough and back to rolling it out again. They say the third time’s the charm, but I’m not even sure I got it right on the third try. However, I did eventually get the dough rolled out and wrangled into the pan. Once that was done I added a layer of mozzarella, Italian sausage, pepperoni, onion, green peppers, and canadian bacon. I added the top layer of crust, and the sauce I’d made from scratch. I even hand-crushed the tomatoes.
By this time, I was almost out of time. The pizza was supposed to bake for 40 minutes, and I had a meeting that started in 40 minutes. It had taken quite a bit longer than I thought it would to prepare everything.
The instructions said to put the pizza on the lowest rack in the oven for 10 minutes and then move it up to the third rack and bake for an additional 30 minutes. I put the pizza in the oven, set the timer for 10 minutes and sat down to catch a breather.
10 minutes later the timer went off and I quickly went into the kitchen to move the pizza. I then quickly found my place back on the couch to watch some TV. A few minutes later I noticed something odd. Something didn’t smell right. At first I thought that maybe it was the smell of the olive oil burning off the pan. The smell kept getting stronger so after about 10 minutes I decided to go into the kitchen to check on the pizza.
I came around the corner into the kitchen and I immediately knew the smell had nothing to do with the actual pizza…smoke was billowing out of one of the kitchen drawers.
I rushed into action and pulled the offending drawer out. There was nothing on fire! I pulled another drawer out, but it was just fine. I pulled a third drawer out and a huge plume of smoke came out…but not signs of fire. Then I found it. The problem was in the drawer that has the potholders and oven mitts in it.
Apparently when I’d reached into the oven to move the pizza, one of the mitts touched the heating element. I didn’t know it, but that mitt was smoldering when I put it in the drawer. That mitt then ignited another oven mitt when ignited a kitchen towel and that kitchen towel ignited another kitchen towel.
Fortunately, none of them had erupted into flame, but they were close. REALLY close. It was a festering, smoking, ball of embers just waiting to ignite. I ran them outside and put them on the concrete patio. A minute later, they were a flaming mess.
Here’s what I learned.
I learned that it’s not a good idea to put a smoldering oven mitt into a closed space with other flammable objects. I learned that when there’s smoke, there really is fire. I learned that it takes days to get that nasty burned smell out of your house. I learned that I should invest in a bigger rolling pin and an electric mixer.
However, I also learned that even though the dough didn’t look professional, it tasted pretty good. Overall, the pizza was amazing. I can’t wait to make it again soon.
The whole experience reminded me why it’s fun to try new things. I mean, sure, things will probably not go as smoothly as we hope, even when we do our homework and plan ahead. You may almost burn your kitchen down, but that shouldn’t discourage you.
In the process of trying new things, we learn new things. I believe that everything we do is a chance to learn and when we learn, we demonstrate what it is to be alive.
So what is it that you want to do? Is there something that you’ve always want to learn how to make or do? What’s stopping you? And what if you do burn down the kitchen? At least you have a great story for a future episode of the Friday Forum!
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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