Every region in this country has its own style of pizza. Loyalty to your own regional pizza is cemented in early childhood, during time spent communing with the dough. Have you ever watched a 4 year-old eat a piece of pizza? It's like a scientific exploration. She's lifting cheese, inspecting, licking sauce, chewing it fast, chewing it slow, running her tongue along the dips and hills of the crust. No matter how much your taste buds have since come to learn about authentic sicilian or neopolitan pie, they never forget the taste and texture of your childhood pizza.
I was raised on classic Midwestern pizza. (Yes, there is such a thing.) Big, round pizzas that were cut into a small grid of equal squares (with teeny triangle corners that we used to fight over), with crusts so thin and crispy and lacking leavening that it was almost like a cracker-crust.
These pizza shops, the locus of most birthday parties I threw or attended before age 10, were always named after some uninspired-sounding guy, maybe someone who had tried out a few other jobs before finding this one: Gary’s Pizza, Dave’s Pizza, Sammy’s Pizza. Most shared worn, thin carpeting and bright lighting and a towering chainsaw sculpture of a rotund pizza-chef guarding the door--thickly, garishly painted, usually with a hook of a drinker’s nose--the kind of spooky sculpture that both attracts and terrifies a kid of 7.
But judging from the careful and consistent way they assembled each pie, these guys had found their calling: the edges of the crust shattered from crispness when cut into squares while the cheese, pock-marked with caramelized spots, snapped back into place. The cheese was good enough, "real" at least, but not so good as to pull your attention away from the crackling crust or the spicy, burnt-orange layer of sauce. The thinness was deceptive. The small pieces, too numerous to count, went down easy.
The beauty of this kind of crust came to me much later, after I'd sampled and knew many different pizza styles: Chicago, "authentic" Italian, Brooklyn, Swiss. The Swiss tarte flambee or Flammkuchen was a lot like the Midwestern pizza I knew. The crust had a bit more elasticity than Gary’s. Actually, it was a lot like Dave’s Extra Thin, but with different toppings: a pool of heavy cream, slivers of onion, thin twig-cut pieces of ham and a scattering of aged parmesan. Clearly, they baked it in a raging hot oven; the edges and the bottom grew black blisters and the cream wore the tell-tale brown caps of high blistering heat.
We sat in the damp air of Basel, Switzerland and looked out at a gray courtyard trafficked with ducking people dodging the rain. No one here thought to help us out by cutting our pizza into postage-stamp sized squares like Gary did, so we had to tear the fiery thing into hand-sized pieces ourselves. We ate our ragged scraps of hot, floppy pizza, quickly ordered another, thought of home and of guys like Gary and Dave and their now long-gone pizza places. We considered how things might have been different for them if they had harbored a few more pretensions.
How Midwestern of them not to.
Midwestern Cracker-Crust Pizza with Basel-Style Toppings
Crust:
3 cups + 2 Tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon instant yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 ¼ cup warm water
3 Tablespoons olive oil
rested 4 hours at room temperature
toppings:
4 Tablespoons cream cheese, room temperature
4 Tablespoons grated parmesan cheese + more for garnish
6 to 7 Tablespoons cream (could be milk)
pinch salt
few grinds pepper
ham, cut into thin strips
very thinly sliced arcs of sweet yellow onion
drizzle of olive oil
few grinds black pepper
Combine the yeast, sugar and 1/4 cup warm water in a small bowl, mix and leave until the yeast blooms and puffs, about 10 minutes. Pour into a mixing bowl with the rest of the tepid water, whisk, and gradually add the rest of the flour, salt, and olive oil. Turn out onto a clean surface and knead by hand for 10 minutes, or until smooth and supple. Place in an oiled bowl, cover the dough with plastic wrap and leave to rise for 4 hours at room temperature (or up to 36 hours, refrigerated; you could make this a few days ahead if you want.)
To make the cream topping, mix together the cream cheese, cream and parmesan cheese until smooth.
When you're ready to make pizza, preheat your oven as high as it goes. Yes, as high as it goes, 550 if you can. Pizza ovens average about 800 degrees, so that's nothing.
Divide the dough into about 8 portions and roll into balls. Cover with a towel. Roll very thinly with a rolling pin, about 3 at a time. (I've found that I can get it thinner if I don't use any flour on the counter.)
Preheat two heavy cookie sheets in the oven and then carefully lift them out onto the stove. Put circles of rolled-out dough on each, stretching in the air to keep it from retracting (it will want to shrink). Brush with olive oil, then with with the cream cheese mixture, then the ham, onions, parmesan cheese, black pepper and finally, a drizzle of olive oil. Bake at 550 until blistered and golden brown, about 8 minutes. Serve immediately, cut into tiny squares if you like.
Note: to make the crust even more cracker-crusty, reduce the yeast to 1/4 teaspoon. I like the blooming holes and such that I get from 1 teaspoon yeast, but 1/4 teaspoon IS more authentically midwestern. I guess I've gotten fancy.
Another thing: I've found that the longer I keep age the dough in the refrigerator (24 hours or so) the better the pizza. I've kept it as long as 3 days.
