Later this month, I'll be making spaghetti and meatballs for our small R&D crew. I'm also curious about making a "pizza pie," by which I don't mean another name for a pizza (like in the song), but a pie—with an honest-to-God pie crust—containing the ingredients you'd find on a regular pizza: sauce, cheese, meat, etc. "So, a Chicago pizza, then," rumbled my boss when I told him my intention. No, no: a literal pie, whose crust would not merely be pizza dough. This isn't an original idea, to be sure. Chef John did a pizza rustica here:
Chef John's crust uses a good bit of olive oil (and egg!*), but it's basically a pie crust—not pizza dough, and not a pasta-like shell in the spirit of a timpano. Pie, dammit, pie! This shouldn't be hard to grasp. Anyway, because I'm doing this pizza-pie project and also prepping spaghetti and meatballs, I decided to order two things: (1) a kilo of pepperoni (which you can't find in the Muslim-owned foreign-food stores in Itaewon), and (2) an item I already own, but which is currently in public storage in Virginia: a crank-turning pasta roller. I went for an el-cheapo one; the other pasta rollers ranged from $70-some to almost $200 on GMarket, which seemed preposterous. I don't recall spending all that much for the roller I'd used in Virginia, so I kept my shopping cheap and downscale.
I got word from GMarket that both of my ordered items have shipped. I wonder how the kilogram of pepperoni is going to arrive. Will it be packed in dry ice, or will this be one of those no-refrigeration-needed packages? I've seen pepperoni sold both ways: unrefrigerated and refrigerated. The pasta roller, for its part, supposedly weighs 5 kg.
My fear is that GMarket will somehow fail me. I'd say it has about a 90% success rate, as far as I'm concerned, but I've been bitten a few times: shipments have been suddenly canceled, refunds have been hard to obtain, and orders have been screwed up. The service is wobbly at best. I believe the Brits say dodgy.
I've got a spare lump of pie dough in my fridge right now, but I don't think my items will arrive quite yet: I suspect it'll be at least a week before I see anything. I may have to use that dough up on something else, then make another batch in anticipation of the arrival of the pepperoni, which I plan to pair up with some aggressively fenneled homemade Italian sausage.
More news as it happens.
NB: this is my first-ever blog post published using the new Blogger post-editing format, which Blogger is forcing us to convert to whether we like it or not. For nearly a year, Blogger allowed us the option of using the "legacy" (i.e., current) Blogger format, but no longer: as of the end of June, we'll have no choice but to switch over to this new way of doing things. The new format isn't that hard to adapt to, but it's a pain in the ass having to learn how to navigate buttons and other functions that seem to have been rearranged for no purpose other than to rearrange them. I might get used to the new WYSIWYG format for entering text and images/video; the text editor no longer ignores your spacing when you put two spaces after a period or a colon, so I can go back to typing the old-school way and will, I hope, see the results on my published blog post. I'm now also able to use regular controls like CTRL-I for italics, CRTL-B for boldface, and CTRL-U for underlining, which is nice. Not sure I like how the new editor creates thumbnails for embedded videos, but as long as the videos play normally, that shouldn't be a problem. Hitting "preview post" no longer generates a new tab, which is both good and bad: with the old way of doing things, you could root around your blog post while also looking at a preview image in a second tab. I liked being able to click back and forth between the text editor and the preview image; I can't do that anymore. All in all, the new Blogger format is still a pain, but I'll get used to it soon enough.
*You might argue that the addition of olive oil and egg makes this more of a pasta dough than a pie-crust dough. To that, I would counter that you need to explain the presence of two ingredients found in pie-crust dough: ice-cold water and butter.
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