I went out to dinner last week, to a restaurant that specializes in wood-fired brick oven pizzas. I like pizza, especially thin-crusted pizza. If it’s cooked in a wood-fired brick oven, even better, for the flavour of the wood is something you can’t achieve at home. There’s a lot to like about pizza; not just eating it, but making it too.
My experience with pizza started years ago, when I worked at Zuni Café in San Francisco. The brick oven was my favourite station, despite the fact that when I first started working there, every thin-crusted pizza I made was any shape but round. It took me about three weeks (with a very patient chef) to realize that the shape you end up with after stretching the dough is directly related to the shape of the dough that you start out with. Therefore, always start shaping your pizza from a round ball of dough if it is a round pizza you’re hoping for.
My brick oven pizza experience continued at the New England Culinary Institute , where it was my assignment to develop the menu for the brick oven at their new restaurant in Burlington, Vermont, The Commons. I became fascinated, and somewhat obsessed with developing the perfect dough recipe. I learned so much then about how the environment (humidity, altitude, natural air-borne yeasts) affects the dough-making process. By adjusting the salt, yeast and water, I came up with a winner (or a “weener”, as my French chef and boss said).
The pizza that I had last week combined sweetness and acidity perfectly. It was topped with pesto, halved roasted Roma tomatoes, lemon-thyme grilled chicken, and feta cheese and was drizzled with honey. Yes, honey. It was the combination of the honey and the tomatoes that was so spectacular. Delicious. I even had a pizza for dessert – a variation on apple crumble. The pizza crust was topped with roasted apples, which were in turn topped with a crumble topping and the whole thing was drizzled with caramel sauce. It was a little over the top, but tasty.
That food experience started my mind wandering on the subject, and I realized that one of the nicest things about pizza is that anything goes. Then, I stopped dead in the tracks of my own thoughts, and remembered Grannie.
I had two grandmothers who couldn’t have been more different from each other. I suppose that is reflected in my mother and father, who also really couldn’t be more different from each other. I’ve written about my maternal grandmother before. Close your eyes and imagine a “real old English grandmother” and you’ve just imagined my Nana. She was sweet and round with pure white hair (at least when I knew her). She sewed curtains, made dresses and knit sweaters for everyone. She cooked as little as possible, making the same tried and true recipes over and over again, excelling in the dessert category, especially with her trifle.
Grannie was a whole different bag of worms! This was the grandmother whose favourite clothing colour combination was red and purple. Grannie was a fireball. She only stood four feet eleven inches high and weighed no more than one hundred pounds. She would not only throw her head back, but drop her chin down to the ground as well to let out a wildly infectious laugh – a laugh which I, growing up in the company of cruel outspoken children, had the ill fortune to inherit. Grannie’s hair was not white – no, Grannie’s hair was blue, from perhaps too much of the bluing popular with ladies of her age and generation. I could go on talking for hours about Grannie, but let me get to the point. Grannie was a good cook. She lived her entire life in Trinidad and was not afraid to attempt any recipe. She was an excellent baker, throwing her whole little body into the kneading of the dough. Grannie cooked for people – to nourish and love people – and she enjoyed it.
My brother was Grannie’s first grandchild, and as such earned a special place in her heart. They would read Winnie-the-Pooh stories together when he was a small boy. When Winnie no longer held much interest, Grannie would find other ways to make their relationship special. Sometimes, this involved cooking.
For my grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary, my whole family went to Trinidad for two weeks. I have many memories of this trip – the anniversary party in Port-of-Spain (at the time, the biggest gathering I had attended); waking up to my brother yelling and seeing a half clad robber in our room; the Hari Chrishna’s who partied down the road every night; the gecko that lived behind my uncle’s speaker; my grandmother’s cooking. The memories don’t always flow together or make sense, but they are vivid.
On this trip, Grannie decided to cook something special for her favourite grandson. He was a teenager at the time and was visiting from Canada. Grannie must have heard that growing Canadian boys love pizza, for that is what she decided to do. Grannie would make Kevin a pizza – it would be the first pizza she had ever made. It was at the memory of this particular pie that my thoughts about pizza froze in their tracks last week. Grannie made a pizza for my brother that will be forever remembered and never replicated.