A Search for Authentic Chinese Cuisine

I just finished Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China by Fuschia Dunlop and, though some of the cuisine that she describes seems revolting (A hot pot of goose intestines?! Stir fried rabbit heads?!), the majority of the crispy, spicy, smelly, and tangy Chinese food that Donlop presents in the book sounds deliciously tempting. I recommend checking out this quick read - Dunlop artfully and entertainingly intertwines her amazing experiences eating in China with recipes, techniques, and glossaries.

Rather serendipitously, it seems that Chinese cuisine is also on the minds of my fellow New Yorkers, as it has been the subject of some recent articles. I can't wait to head to Flushing (I know, I know, it's not Brooklyn, but, hey, I'm not cooking there am I?) to eat some butter cookies with seaweed at Sun Mary Bakery and to Brooklyn's China town to slurp up some noodles from Lan Zhou.

Read more about these local Chinese food adventures here:

Let the Meals Begin: Finding Beijing in Flushing
Grocery Guy Field Trip: Brooklyn’s Chinatown

Bon apetit! Rather, 慢慢吃!

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Daddy on the Spot: The Recipes

Bill Piersol's Adobo Chicken
1 cup soy sauce (2 year brewed, high quality)
1 cup water
½ cup white or rice vinegar
1 bay leaf
4-5 garlic cloves, minced
Pepper to taste
8-10 chicken thighs or breasts, skin on, bone in

Garnish
2 cups cilantro, chopped
lemon/lime wedges

Bring soy sauce, water, vinegar, bay leaf, garlic and pepper to a boil over high heat in a large dutch oven or other heavy pot. Carefully place chicken in the pot and bring to a boil, and then reduce heat to low. Cover and poach for 1/2 hour, turning the chicken after 15 minutes.

If grilling, start the grill as soon as you begin poaching the chicken. While chicken poaches, reduce the sauce until it is about half of it's original volume, then pass the sauce through a sieve. Let sit and then spoon off excess chicken fat, or pass through a fat separator to remove the excess fat.

Using tongs, remove chicken from poaching medium and place on a large platter. Lightly pat the chicken dry with a paper towel. Place chicken on barbecue and grill for five minutes. Turn the chicken and grill for 4-5 more minutes, or until the meat and skin are crisp. Serve hot garnished with cilantro, lime wedges, and the reduced poaching liquid.

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Daddy on the Spot: The Conclusion

This is the conclusion of "Daddy on the Spot." For the previous post, click here.

While we waited for the chicken to poach, the conversation eventually turned to talking about the Patinkin family. Felicia and I had only seen each other a few times in the past twenty years – she moved to New York to go to Syracuse University when I was nine, and we never had the chance to establish a relationship; now that we are both adults and living within a mile of each other, we have begun to see each other with some regularity. When we had that first cup of coffee after I moved to New York, I was really surprised to find how similar we are (sarcastic, smart, curious, fro-headed). Can't escape genes, I suppose.

Felicia and I got so caught up in our conversation about cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, dads, the Midwest, the North Shore (meaning the northern suburbs of Chicago for you non-natives), etc. that when Bill escaped to the kitchen, he did so unnoticed. When I heard the sound of a knife against a cutting board, I realized that he had continued to cook without me! I ran over to him and asked what he was doing. “Oh, just chopping up some cilantro, which we’ll use as garnish.”


He then removed the chicken from the pots...


... and patted them dry, so that they would crisp up more quickly on the grill.


We took our conversation outside with the chicken. The patio was spattered with large, slimy slugs. "These mother fuckers are huge!” I exclaimed and took my camera out to take a picture. “Don’t take pictures of the slugs,” Bill reprimanded me. Apparently, he didn’t want nasty bugs associated with his cooking. When his back was turned, I did it anyway. Here it is:


One by one, Bill placed the thighs on the grill.


“Do you eat the skins?” I asked. “I know you’re reentering carnivorism, but you’re a self-proclaimed foodie – of course you do! But you can totally pull it off - I won’t make you eat it." After a few minutes, Bill turned the chicken and let it grill for another five minutes.


He placed the chicken on a large platter and took them inside.


Bill went over to the stove, picked up the large pots that he had left on the burners, and poured the leftover poaching liquid into a fat separator. Then, after skimming the fat, he poured the sauce into a serving dish.


With a spoon, he took a quick taste, and frowning said, "Well this is a little saltier than I'd want it to be... sometimes I'll put a little honey into it to reduce the saltiness." Felicia and I sat down to eat and Bill set the table with rice, the remaining sauce, a bowl of cilantro, and another filled with limes. He filled our wine glasses, and we gave a cheers to family and chicken.

I asked Bill and Felicia to pose for the camera, and, of course, they acted like goofs. After I took their picture Bill said, "Wait! Can you take a regular picture now, so that we don't look like complete assholes?" I complied, but, uh, I prefer this one:


Finally, we dug in and piled food high onto our plates. I doused my chicken in the salty reduction and with an improbable amount of cilantro, and then squeezed a mess of lime juice over the mass. I took a large, juicy bite. Wow. The chicken was incredibly moist and the skin crisp and deliciously savory. The flavor of the meat was deep - salty and garlicky with a hint of smoke from the grill. Totally, totally NOT sucky. Somehow, I managed to fit three whole whole chicken thighs in my belly.

"You know, for all your excusing, this is really, really good." I told Bill. He smiled, clearly proud of himself. "Well, it's just a little one pot peasant dish. Nothing special." I asked Bill what his food history was like. Did he eat a lot of meat growing up in South Dakota? Was he exposed to a variety of foods while stuck in the Midwest?

"Well," Bill said, "I'll tell you something - I was a very spoiled little child. My mother is a very good cook... She loves food and lives for food... It was literally like some deliciously cooked meat, fish, fowl, or vegetable every night, two sides, a starch and often times dessert, and this is when my mother was working fulltime! She cooked her way through Julia Child and trained herself to become a very good cook. So anyway, this is a horrible little story, but I was at a friend of mine's place when I was a kid and his mother serves meat - a beef - that even he knew was really kind of gross, and he said 'Ew. This is bad!' and I said, 'Why don't you just add a bearnaise sauce?' I was seven years old! Because that's what my mother did - she'd serve steak and there'd be bearnaise sauce... As one does, of course."

Clearly, a food snob from birth.

We hungrily and silently ate our food for a few minutes. Then, Felicia - quite out of nowhere and with a mouth full of tender chicken - asked, “So, let us live vicariously through you – who are you dating?”

“No one really," I vaguely responded. Something about her tone reminded me of my mom and I tensed up. I looked down at my plate, hoping that lack of direct eye contact and tightened shoulders would dissuade her from continuing this conversation thread, but it wasn't.

"Well - what happened to that guy you were going out with awhile ago?"

"Oh you know, he pulled the typical too soon 'let's be serious' bullshit... and I just can't be bothered with that sort of thing."

"Wait a couple of years - it'll get even worse. You won't be able to escape it!"

I responded with a barfing noise and Felicia laughed. Changing the subject, I turned to Bill and asked, "Do you shop at the farmers market often?" The focus turned off me as Bill immediately started to wax eloquent about farm fresh mushrooms - naming the varieties that he loved most along with his favorite fungal preparations in a way that reminded me of that scene in Forrest Gump. You know the one.

We talked more, ate more, and drank more and finished the meal with my famous homemade chocolate chip cookies. After one last glass of wine, it was time to go home. I walked out into the balmy Park Slope night sated and content. The humid air clung to my clothes and a dense mist made the neighborhood seem dreamlike and inviting. A wave of happiness washed over me - I felt one with the world, with the adobo chicken, with the rats hiding in the piles of filled garbage bags along 7th Avenue, with the man screaming "get out of the fucking road!" at me as I crossed the street against the light. In an ecstatic craze, I looked up to the sky and had an overwhelming urge to yell, "Brooklyn - I love you!" And then, with a belch, I realized that I was drunk.

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Daddy on the Spot: The Poaching

While Bill removed various ingredients and placed them on the counter, he explained how he became interested in food. Turns out that before he was Couric’s Senior Producer and before he was a producer for Good Morning America and before a stint with Now with Bill Moyers and even before he was a freelance journalist and writer he worked for Simon & Schuster and Random House. There he had the opportunity to work for an “excellent” editor who also happened to be a Cordon Bleu-trained chef who could work her way through any recipe, and know immediately whether or not it was well-written enough for publication.

With a thud, Bill placed two large pots on the oven burners and removed the baby protectors that were covering the knobs. As he did this he told me about the various cookbooks he had the opportunity to work on – by chefs as varied as Pierre Franey, Bradley Ogden, and Larry Forgione (whatever happened to him?) – and that that was the beginning of his interest in food. “Of course, at that time,” Bill said, “I didn’t cook. I just ate.”

"You guys!” Felicia interrupted as she excitedly returned from putting Maren to bed, “ I might be wrong, but I think Maren was just singing Band on the Run to me!” As she wondered aloud how Maren could have picked up that song (and be so cool), Bill minced a handful of garlic cloves.

“So,” Bill began as he expertly chopped, using the tip of his knife as a pivot, “having talked with my friend who is Filipino, there are a few liberties I take with this dish. The addition of water is atypical, but I like the sauce to be a little thinner. Oh, and I crisp it up on the grill. That’s different. [My friend] also told me that this is this dish – with pork or chicken – is like the one pot dish that everybody eats all the time there.” He finished chopping the garlic and began opening and closing the doors to the cabinets in the kitchen – looking without success for a bottle of vinegar. Finally, after looking through each kitchen cabinet, he found it in the refrigerator, and mumbled, “Who puts vinegar in the fridge!” and “There’s no reason to refrigerate vinegar.” As soon as he added 1/2 cup of the pungent liquid to each of the large pots, he returned the bottle back to the ice box. I imagine that he goes through this little ritual of looking and finding each time he needs to use the stuff.

To the pots he added one cup of high quality soy sauce (like Kimlan brand), then the chopped garlic, a bay leaf, and a little pepper. He turned the heat to high to bring the mixture to a boil.


“Could anything in the world be fucking simpler than this?!” Bill declared as we waited for the mixture to heat thoroughly. “Guess I should watch my language on tape.” I told him that expletives would spice up the interview and that nothing could compare to my lesson with Tara Broughel – by the time I had removed all the four-letter words from the transcription, there was very little actual dialogue to work with. It was like some sort of a common man’s Anthony Bourdain experience.

“Is Tara the girl who did the ‘Slut Walk’ [click on the link for an explanation] video?” Bill asked me. I explained that, no, that the video – in which I participated as an extra – was the brainchild of the brilliant comedienne, Shayna Ferm (who I hope will cook with me when I get to Queens). “It’s called the ‘Walk of Shame,’ Bill.” Felicia added, “Slut walk! Ha! Bill’s so old he never had the walk of shame.” Bill shot Felicia a look, “Believe me, honey, I shame walked many a time in my life. Beee-leeeve me.” Felicia and I shot disbelieving glances at one another while Bill checked on his poaching medium.

Bill began to prep the free-range, bone-in, skin-on, chicken thighs – removing them from their plastic casing, washing them in the sink, and then laying them out on a platter – while Felicia started making basmati rice to accompany the dish.


The liquid in the large pots began to boil and Bill carefully added the thighs, one-by-one, into the pot with a pair of thongs. “Why poach the chicken first?” I asked Bill.


“Well,” he said, “The soy sauce poaching really adds a sort of depth of flavor that I really like, and, traditionally, the dish is just poached and that’s it. I grill it because I like the texture, it adds sort of a smokiness to it, which is good.”


We had thirty minutes before the chicken would be done poaching, so we sat on the couch, ate cornichon, and drank wine. Bill regaled us with his massive amount of knowledge on everything from cooking to music to books and we gossiped about our extended family, shared stories about growing up in the Midwest, talked about goofy children's performances that they had taken Maren to (animal theaters, barge-based circuses, etc.), perused Facebook, and drank more wine. Soon we would eat...

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Daddy on the Spot: The Epilogue

Bill Piersol originally asked me to come over on a Thursday evening to learn how to make his famous Adobo chicken. The Monday before our lesson, Bill’s wife, Felicia Patinkin (full disclosure, my first cousin), emailed and – amongst a litany of apologies like “I know you’re young and probably have already have really fun plans,” and “We’ll end early enough so that you can go out with your friends” – asked if we could switch to a Friday instruction instead. Bill (Senior Producer for the Katie Couric show) and she (currently a freelance TV producer) had had a busy week, and a weeknight lesson was going to be rough. Despite their worries that they were ruining my social life, I agreed to come over at the start of the weekend. Seemingly unbeknownst to them, they are both fun to be around.

When I arrived, Maren, their 2 and ½ year old daughter sheepishly answered the door with a “Hi cousin Ewin.” She then ran screaming inside into her dad’s arms.


Felicia and Bill welcomed me with hugs and then Bill immediately started disclaiming the dish he was about to make with comments like:

• “This is just a boring dish, I mean, I just thought I’d do something quick.”
• “You’re not going to like this – everything else that you’ve made has been delicious-sounding. This is the first time you’ll eat something that sucks.”
• “This is just a quick, Dad just came home from work meal. It’s really not that good.”

I tried to calm Bill’s fears and promised I wouldn’t be too harsh on him in the blogging world. Even if I was, only four people read this thing anyway, so he really had nothing to worry about.

While Bill continued his self-deprecating soliloquy, Maren used the “potty” and came running out screaming and giggling with her dress over her head, and then began to show me her toys. Bill poured us wine and we gave a cheers to cooking and good health.

As the three adults drank, Felicia inquired as to whether anything new and exciting was going on in my life. I mean, duh, of course there was – principally I was moving to a new, fabulous apartment in Clinton Hill. As I described the place – the original details, the marble fireplaces, the backyard, the two floors, the bathrooms (yes plural) – Felicia chimed in with remarks like “nice” and “oooh” and “wow.” Bill sort of just stared at me blankly while I talked; when I got to the part about the size of the kitchen, Bill interrupted me and said to his wife, “Wait. Wait! How come she rents and she has these beautiful places and we own and have this grotty little hovel?” “Don’t call this place – our home – a grotty little hovel. Thank you,” Felicia chimed.

Maren interrupted a possible marital dispute by yelling, “I saw the waterfall today! I want to go up in the air, daddy!” Perfect timing, little Maren.

A timer bell went off, and Felicia produced a tray of toasted goat cheese-stuffed dates wrapped in prosciutto and garnished with basil (yum) – a recipe of Leslie Patinkin, Felicia’s sister and my other cousin. While we ate, we lounged around the kitchen counter talking about our favorite Brooklyn restaurants. Namely, our affinity for Franny’s and Maren’s love of olives. Olives! At 2 and 1/2, no less. A burgeoning gourmand…

Bill sat on the couch and in between giving Maren raspberries, again began to disclaim the food he was about to cook. “You have all these great cooks on this site, and I totally have performance anxiety because I’ve read all this stuff [Imitating a woman’s voice] ‘I learned how to cook all this stuff because I lived in Spay-yane for three years, blah, blah, blah.’” I denied that supposition – many people that I had been cooking with had only perfected one or two dishes. Very few have been seasoned chefs.

He continued, “Ok, well, then here’s the deal. I am a lousy cook...”

Felicia interrupted, saying, “this is where I’m supposed to pipe in and say ‘no you’re not honey! You’re a GREAT cook.” Bill – ignoring the teasing – added, “...a lot of times I have to cook on the fly - very quickly - so I think my entry should be called the ‘domesticity dish.’” “What about 'Dad on a Dime?'” I inquired. Bill responded with “How about, ‘Dad with No Time’ or, even better, ‘Daddy on the Spot.’” Another raspberry - Maren squeeled.

Bill was being modest. He has read Jacques Pepin’s Complete Techniques. He knows who Jonathan Waxman is. He owns a fat separator. When he drinks wine, he swirls it in the glass and smells it before taking a sip. He likes truffles and caper berries. He talks proudly of the deal he got on his massive Le Creuset Dutch oven. Despite the insecure monologue, there was no denying it - dude is gourmet.

Finishing up his appetizer and wine, Bill told me that he was going to be making me a “stupid” and “decidedly un-grand” chicken dish that he and Felicia rely on often during their busy weeks. Felicia told me that the dish wasn’t as easy as Bill was letting on, and in all seriousness said, “It’s really not that simple – there’s boiling that has to happen you know.” Boiling: the most complicated of kitchen techniques.

Bill, eating a date, said, “I actually have composed this whole epilogue in my mind before we started to night... I come with a challenge, I have a handicap - I’m a father, I work 13 hours a day, and so I have to maximize my cooking time.” An ever-important thing when you’re a busy New Yorker. Bill took another swig of wine.

I downed an appetizer and told Felicia that the date and basil was an interesting duo. The combination of sweet and salty is one of my favorites, and the combined textures of the date, crispy proscuitto, and creamy cheese was very satisfying. She took a swig of wine and told us it was time to start the bedtime ritual and headed down the hall with Maren to her bedroom.

“So Bill,” I said, “I asked you what you were going to make me and you gave me a very long diatribe, but you actually didn’t tell me what you were going to make.”

“Oh, that’s funny. Wait I did tell you – I’m making a stupid, stupid dish. It’s called Adobo chicken and it’s a Filipino dish. So, despite the name, it’s not like Mexican at all. It’s poached in soy sauce and a few other things and then crisped up on the grill.”

“Did you make it up?”

“Oh no, I heard about it, and searched out recipes and then found one. So there’s no real sense of authenticity. It’s a very very simple dish. It’s your one stop shopping summer silly dish. It’s really stupid.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had Filipino food.”

“Who has?”

“Filipinos, I assume.”

Bill laughed and said, “I’m guessing your right. They’ve probably had a lot of it.” He ate one last date, wiped his hands together, and produced a large quantity of chicken thighs from the refrigerator and placed them on the counter.


Finally, it was time to cook.

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The Whole Story

Since I've done several posts about white bread lately, a friend of mine thought it important to send me a video that clearly spells out the benefits of whole grains. The video is just so right on the money that I could not resist sharing it with my faithful readers out there.

You can check out the video here.

End of post.

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Pizza Pro-ism: The Recipes

These are the recipes from the Pizza Pro-ism series. For Part I, click here and for Part II, click here.

Jeremy’s Tomato Sauce
(adapted from Mario Batali’s “Simple Tomato Sauce Recipe”)

2 28 oz can of San Marzano tomatoes
4 cloves garlic thinly-sliced
1/2 medium carrot shredded
1 Spanish onion finely diced

Heat 1/4 cup olive oil in large sauce pan over medium heat. Add onion and garlic and cook until soft and light golden brown...keep stirring occasionally to avoid burning.

Add the carrot and cook until the carrot is soft--about 5 minutes

Add the tomatoes with their juice and bring to a boil, stirring often. Lower the heat and simmer until as thick as hot cereal – about 30 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

A note from Jeremy: “I think the carrots make give it the nice sweetness, and the San Marzano tomatoes are key for flavor.”

Pizza Dough
(from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Italian Cooking)

3 1/4 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast dissolved in 1 cup water
1 T olive oil for dough and 1 tsp for a for the bowl
1/2 T salt (Jeremy notes that he uses less than this amount)

Once the yeast has fully proofed (about 10 minutes after adding it to the water), mix together all the ingredients in a standing mixer fitted with a hook attachment until it forms a uniform ball – about 4-5 minutes.

Place the dough in an oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise for 1 – 1.5 hours, or until the dough has doubled in size.

Preheat oven as high as it will go before it hits broil, usually about 500 degrees. If you have one, place your pizza stone in the oven.

Punch down the dough and reform it into a ball. Cut dough in half and, on a flour surface, shape each half into 6” in discs and let stand for 10 minutes.

Using the heal of your hand and starting from the middle of the dough, press the dough outwards until it reaches 8-10” in diameter. Pick the dough up and using a hand-over-hand motion with the back of your fists, stretch the dough to 12”. Repeat the process with the other disc.

If using a pizza stone, place dough on a paddle and dress it with desire toppings, then slide onto the stone. If you don't have a pizza stone or a paddle, place the dough on a cookie sheet and then dress. Cook for 10-12 minutes.

*Note: dough can last for up to 3 days in a refrigerator before using.

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Pizza Pro-ism, Part II: Rolling, Baking, and Eating

This is Part II of Pizza Pro-ism. For Part I, click here.

While Jeremy and I waited for the oven to heat, he put me to work doing my all time favorite activity - grating cheese (um, did he not read this story?). As I worked my way through some whole milk mozzarella, Jeremy explained the pizza baking process.

"In your home oven, you want to set the oven as high as it can go. You'd like it to be 7, 800, 900 degrees, but that's not going to happen.... It takes Lucali only two minutes to cook a pizza because the oven is so hot. It's, like, such direct heat because of the flame in it." Jeremy really enjoyed telling me about his pizza experience, and it was fun to hear about the complicated process of making the dough. "It's such a weird science," I told Jeremy. His eyes lit up, "I know! That thing is like - those ovens are alive almost!"

Jeremy removed some sliced portabellas and onions from the refrigerator. He explained that he learned to roast the vegetables first because that way the pizzas did not get soggy. He placed the veggies in a baking pan, coated them with oil, and placed them in the hot oven.

While Jeremy was preparing the veggies, I asked him what he thought was the best pizza in Brookln. "Totonno's - it's in Coney Island. It was him and Lombardi back in the day that were like the first two. It's really bare bones... the crust is great, super thin, it has that great charred bottom. The saurce is good, a little sweet. I like Grimaldi's, too, but I can't deal with the line. It's insane!" We continued to talk about Brooklyn pizza's - Fornino's pretentiousness, Baci and Abbracci's tasty, but under-appreciated pies, the quality of Franny's ingredients - while I finished the mozzarella and began shredding some Fontina.

At this point, Tova - who teaches high school in the South Bronx and, like Tara and Becky, got her Masters in Education through the New York Teaching Fellows program - entered into the kitchen to check on our process. I asked Tova is she was a cook. "I'm more of a baker, " she responded, "my specialties are cookies and Rugelach." A girl after my own heart and sweet tooth.

The three of us chatted about life, teaching, work, commutes, and plans for the future while Jeremy floured his counter and while the vegetables cooked. After about ten minutes in the oven, Jeremy removed the vegetables, and then layered them with paper towels on a plate.

"So, the other thing that I sort of realized in retrospect that I was doing wrong was that I was kind of afraid of the flour," Jeremy said as he set aside the roasted vegetables and began to spread the flour over the surface of his countertop. “I didn’t want to use too much – which you don’t want to do – but I was always using too little, so the dough would always stick. Going to that class and having to make so much dough in repetition was good because I just made a bunch of dough while I was there and I realized that it wasn’t the end of the world if you could see some flour."

While Jeremy talked he removed one of the balls of raw crust from under its protective plastic sheath, and placed it on the center of his work surface. He walked to the oven and turned it as high as it could go. “Tova baked earlier today and I had her put the baking stone in then. You want to make sure that it’s really heated through."

Jeremy picked up the ball of dough and pulled it together so that it looked like a little mushroom cap and the bottom like a punched-in ball.

With his hands, Jeremy then flattened the ball into about a 6 inch disc and then let it sit for about 10 minutes. I told Jeremy that this was exactly like working with sweet dough, but he didn’t get the reference. “Jeremy doesn’t like to bake, but he sure likes to eat that stuff,” Tova chimed in.

Once a sixth of an hour had passed, Jeremy got to work and, starting from the center, pushed the dough with the heal of his hand into a larger circle.

Once the disc was about 8 inches in diameter, Jeremy picked it up and with the back of his fists and using a “hand-over-hand” process, he stretched the dough until it reached about 12 inches.

Jeremy removed a large wooden paddle from his wall, and spread cornmeal on it. Then he placed the dough on its surface and began dressing the pizza. “Do you just slide the pizza onto the stone using the paddle?” I asked Jeremy. His response was affirmative. “You should have seen it when I tried to do it,” Tova said, “the whole thing ended up in the garbage.” Jeremy chuckled and added, “Well that was back in the day-“ Tova interrupted, “-That’s what motivated him to take the class.”

With a spoon, Jeremy spread some of his homemade, chunky, and delicious-looking sauce over the top of the pizza.


“I’ll make about a gallon of this stuff and freeze some of it,” Jeremy told me as he picked up the shredded mozzarella and spread it on top of the almost-made pizza.

Picking up the paddle with two hands, Jeremy said “Ok, now here comes the photo op,” opened the oven, and slid the pizza onto the stone.

“Always try to keep the pizza moving a little as you’re pulling the paddle out from underneath it, otherwise it will stick. Oh, and I forgot to say – don’t be shy with your ingredients…. I’ll put the basil on after it comes out and some parmesan, too.”

Jeremy told me of the benefits of the paddle and that before he had it, it was difficult to get the pizza on the stone with other kitchen utensils (he had experimented with two knives, spatulas, plates, and more). While the pizza cooked, Jeremy rolled out the second lump of pizza dough.

“Oh what I forgot to do was throw in a cup of water into the broiler,” Jeremy told me as he removed the first pizza from the oven and covered it with foil to keep it warm. “Why do you do that? It doesn’t make it soggy?” I asked. “Apparently, it does the opposite – and makes the crust crispy,” Jeremy responded as he removed the first pizza from the oven...

... and then slid it off the paddle onto the counter. He covered the red pie with foil, then rolled out and dressed the second pizza, drizzled it with olive oil, and spread the vegetables and cheese on top of it.

The second lump of dough spread much quicker because it had sat out longer and the gluten had, according to Jeremy, “loosened up.” While the white pie cooked, he topped the margherita with basil and parmesan. Twelve more minutes until we could dig in. I couldn’t wait.

The science of pizza dough making reminded me of Alton Brown and I asked Jeremy if he had ever watched the TV star's Good Eats. Tova answered the question by saying, “Yes he has – and guess who’s learned from Mr. Brown how to slow cook everything,” she said pointing to Jeremy who immediately denied any comparison to the nerdy chef.

“This is looking great!” I proclaimed, picking up the foil covering the first pizza. “Good, I don’t want this blog besmirching my name,” Jeremy responded as he checked on the pizza. During the wait, we talked about Chicago style pizza and our collective dislike of the stuffed pie (I know, I know, how un-Chicagoan of me).

After the pizza had baked for about six minutes, Tova noticed that Jeremy had not added the water to the oven, and did it for him. “What would you do without me?” she asked and then headed out of the kitchen to set the dining room table.

Finally, the second pie was ready. We sat down at the table and popped open some beers – my favorite pizza accompaniment – and gave a cheers to pizza and Brooklyn. Jeremy sliced the pies and gave each of us a piece of the red and the white (which Jeremy had drizzled with truffle oil and topped with parmesan after removing it from the oven).

Both pies were great – the red was slightly sweet from Jeremy’s homemade sauce, the cheese ooey and gooey, and the basil fresh and spicy, but the white – oh the white – now that had a punch. The vegetables had a great roasted flavor and the cheese provided a pungent kick. The truffle oil was deep and earthy tasting and brought out the flavor of the roasted mushrooms and onions. Jeremy and I agreed that the crust of the white pizza was less spongy and more flavorful than the red. Probably due to the fact, Jeremy indicated, that that crust had sat out longer and added, “…the first one was a little weird… yea I’m sure there’s some sort of equilibrium point that’s perfect, but I’m not sure what it is yet.” However, the difference was slight and, honestly, both crusts were really tasty. They were thin, slightly salty, and crisp - just the way I like my ‘za.

While we ate we talked about everything from Oprah to jobs to graduate school to hot chips to kids’ diets to the cost of living in New York to our fear of growing old and moving to the suburbs to our disdain for the craze over ethanol. After stuffing our faces with pizza, Jeremy asked, “Dessert? Who’s up for it?” Tova and I both raised our hands and Jeremy served up the smooth and delicious rhubarb pudding cake that Tova had made for us and Tova brewed some iced espressos. It was the royal treatment.

When I finished, I leaned back in my chair and thought about heading home and sleeping off my food coma, but then Jeremy reminded me that we had to finish making the crust that we started when I first came over.

A little begrudgingly, I headed back into the kitchen with Jeremy – I was so stuffed I just wanted to sit in the cool and comfortable dining room, and mused about being socially inept enough to take over Tova and Jeremy’s couch and unbutton my way-too-tight jeans.

Back in the sweltering kitchen, Jeremy showed me the dough, which had risen to twice its size...

...and then, aking off the plastic wrap from the oiled bowl of the standing mixer, Jeremy told me “all we do is punch it down.” He formed a fist and did just that.

As Jeremy reformed the dough into a ball, he said “Usually, I’d just put this in the fridge, but I’m going to try to roll it out and freeze it. We’ll see if it works.” He left it on the counter to deal with later. We returned to the dining room and finished our iced coffees.

On my way out I thanked Jeremy and Tova for the delicious meal. When I got home, I threw myself on the couch, and, with a sigh, unbuttoned the booty pants. Sated, I fell asleep.

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