Reid & Robie

Tradition, tradition!

– Fiddler on the Roof

Robie and I don’t have many traditions.

We don’t have annual Christmas rituals (though we do have a handful of must-watch Christmas movies that include Die Hard, A Charlie Brown Christmas and Trading Places). We don’t cook a roast lamb recipe passed down through generations at Easter. We don’t insist on barbecue for July 4^th, regularly pass up plates of turkey and stuffing to travel abroad, frequently let birthdays slip by without fanfare and avoid leaving the house on amateur night (Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve and any time Jimmy Buffet came to town).

But there’s one family tradition we follow faithfully: Friday night pizza night. Because what began as a cheap date for my parents scraping together pennies in college turned into a weekly habit that followed them through the years and across the country.

My earliest memories of weekends began watching Saturday morning cartoons and School House Rock videos that taught me about numbers, history and the solar system. I discovered Lolly’s little shop of adverbs, a railway station called Conjunction Junction, and how the legislature passes laws. (Cue the fat lobbyist running down the Capitol steps announcing, “He signed you, Bill. Now you’re a law!”)

These were followed by whatever college and pro sports were on that season until Tinkerbell lit up the Magic Kingdom and the credits rolled for The Wonderful World of Disney signaling it was time for bed and the start of another week. But no matter where we lived, weekends always began with homemade pizza from Chef Boyardee’s Pizza in a Box. And later, a large supreme pie from Carmine’s.

When we got married, Robie and I committed to carrying on the tradition. We ordered pepperoni rolls from Double Dave’s and thin crust from Campisi’s, tested Pizza Hut’s delivery and Domino’s 30-minute guarantee. But before long we donned matching aprons and covered them with floury handprints to make our own pies.

Along with the red Crate & Barrel aprons, we outfitted our apartment with a pizza paddle and stone, bought fresh mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes, and threw a basil plant on the patio to pluck its tasty leaves. We toiled over a hot stove to make our own sauce, sourced pepperoni and sausage from an Italian market and began collecting an assortment of pizza recipes, some traditional, others strange and exotic.

We tried Wolfgang Puck’s Spago pizza with smoked salmon and caviar, made Sammy Hagar’s Cabo Wabo pizza with basil pesto and tequila-marinated shrimp, studied Joanne Weir’s salad-topped pizzas, tweaked Bobby Flay’s Strasbourg-inspired tarte flambé, fell in love with Todd English’s fig, bleu cheese and prosciutto pizza and ripped off Pizza Inn’s long-gone spinach, tomato and mozzarella deep-dish.

But when we left for the Caribbean, our boat didn’t have an oven, and we believed our Friday night ritual was finished. Until Robie put a store bought pita smothered in tomato sauce, cheese and pepperoni on the small grill hanging from The Last Resort’s aft rail and learned we could make pizza out of almost anything.

On the water, we couldn’t always find the usual ingredients and rarely knew what day it was. So, in French Martinique we made baguette pizzas with sausage on a Tuesday. In Dutch Curacao, we topped wholewheat pitas with liverwurst, smoked gouda and onions and ate them on Sunday. In Cartagena we enjoyed surf ‘n turf pizzas with lobster and filet mignon. In Guatemala we used corn tortillas and swapped tomatillos for tomatoes and devoured them every day of the week. And when we hosted a friend on our boat for Thanksgiving, we celebrated the greatest American food holiday by making pizzas.

In the years since returning to land, Robie and I learned to make our own dough. We mastered New York thin crust, square Detroit-style and Chicago deep dish. We hosted family and friends and showed them how to roll and stretch the soft, supple dough, helped a writer friend make a booklet about homemade pizzas, cooked our pies in the oven in winter, grilled them outdoors in the summer and dutifully followed One Bite Pizza. Along the way, we made several surprising hits, had more than one colossal fail and always shared our Friday ritual online.

But after selling our home to become white collar refugees, Robie and I faced our biggest challenge yet. Would the rental apartments have ovens or grills? Was it possible to make pizza in a microwave? On the stovetop? And would we find enough variety of ingredients to keep the routine from getting staid?

After unpacking in Liverpool, Robie and I set out to find the nearest grocery store. As I focused on necessities like bread, milk and cheese, Robie combed the aisles searching for pizza ingredients. And once he found naan bread in the bakery department, we knew we had the base for our first British pizza.

Over the next few weeks, we made naan pizzas topped with pear, bacon and bleu cheese, and breakfast pizza with bacon, cheddar cheese and eggs. But while the toppings were fun and interesting, the soft, doughy naan wasn’t a substitute for crisp, chewy pizza dough.

But when I recalled the process of weighing flour, sugar and salt, measuring yeast and olive oil, using just the right temperature water and carefully combining the ingredients in a standing mixer before it sat overnight in the fridge, I knew we weren’t prepared to make our own dough. Because in Liverpool we had no scale, no thermometer and certainly no standing mixer. Not even mixing bowls.

On the hunt for a better option, I checked the frozen food aisles but found only premade pizzas. In the refrigerated section there were balls of dough advertised as suitable for dinner rolls or pizza, but the delicate crumb of a dinner roll wasn’t the texture I was going for. The clerk in the prepared foods department couldn’t figure out how to sell me a ball of uncooked dough, and the market’s bakery didn’t make any.

Then one afternoon I turned on the telly to see what weird and wonderful things I could find on Britain’s Channel 4 (an English version of PBS but with ads). And when I landed on Jamie Oliver’s £1 Wonders, I stopped scrolling. Because before I chucked my collection of cookbooks to go on this venture, I had four written by him.

The series takes a page out of Frankie Celenza’s Struggle Meals, a show designed to teaching a generation of Millennials how to cook with hacks and tips for making delicious meals without fancy kitchen equipment or spending a lot of dough. Because no matter what your bank balance is, it’s good to know you can substitute yogurt for sour cream, create buttermilk by adding vinegar to milk, maintain a stock bucket, grow your own herbs and learn to use dried beans. And while Jamie doesn’t embrace Frankie’s famous packet drawer to get free flavor in single-serve condiments swiped around town, he does cook nearly everything on the hob (that’s a stovetop to us Yanks) to save on energy costs after natural gas prices spiked across Europe thanks to Putin’s war.

Pricing out every ingredient, Jamie ensures each portion comes in under £1 a serving. And with Robie and I trying to get a handle on our grocery bill, we needed all the help we could get. Because the things I once took for granted as always having in the pantry – salt, pepper, chiles, mustard, olive oil, vinegar, soy sauce, rice and flour – now had to be replaced every three months. Or not used at all.

In the first episode of £1 Wonders Jamie makes a recipe he calls “Cheat’s Pizza,” with a homemade dough topped with sausage, onions, pickled jalapeños and cheddar cheese that he cooks in a sauté pan on the hob. And as soon as the show was over, I quickly hit rewind and grabbed pen and paper to jot down the recipe.

Using 250 grams of self-raising flour (as the Brits call flour mixed with baking powder) plus 150 milliliters of cold water and a dash of salt, Jamie rolled out a dough that didn’t require a long proof time. Within minutes he had his dough ready to cook using three simple ingredients. One that came free with our apartment, one we had on hand and another that cost a mere £1.85 for a 5-pound bag.

But like all Americans, I have a hard time making heads or tails of the metric system. And it didn’t help that Jamie weighed the flour and measured the liquid, but with the help of Google, a calculator and conversion app I eventually came up with the following equations:

250 grams of self-raising flour = 1.55 cups (or 1½ cups + 1 tbsp)

150 ml of cold water = 0.63 cups (or ½ cup + 2 tbsp)

The problem was our apartment wasn’t stocked with much. For cooking, we had two small saucepans, two sauté pans and a roasting rack but oddly, no roasting pan. Or measuring cups. Yet after years of watching Struggle Meals, I knew I could turn anything into a measuring cup if I just had the correct proportions.

Quickly calculating the ratio of flour to water, I determined that 150 ml of water was roughly 40% of 250 grams of flour. So, using the Ikea coffee mug in the apartment’s cupboard as a base, I decided that a mugful of flour added to less than half a mug of water plus a dash of salt would make one medium pizza. And I was so confident in my equation that the next rainy afternoon, I trotted into the kitchen and whipped out the flour and coffee cup.

Without a bowl, I mixed the paste directly on the Formica countertop. Then I rolled it out using an empty wine bottle (another of Frankie’s ingenious tricks) before putting my pie in the large sauté pan on the stovetop. While Jamie topped his pizza and cooked it for 5 minutes before finishing it in the oven, I cooked mine naked and flipped it like an oversized pancake. After 10 minutes I had what can only be described as an overly thick, giant tortilla.

But since my dough had been slightly larger than the sauté pan, I worried that the edges weren’t fully cooked. And while Jamie finished his pie in the oven, I knew the apartment’s cheap sauté pan wasn’t ovenproof. But now that it was partially cooked and wouldn’t stick to the rack, I set the dough on the roasting rack and prepared to throw it in the oven.

Then I got greedy. Instead of merely testing out a dough recipe, I wanted something Robie and I could eat for lunch. But since we were out of our regular pizza toppings, I pulled out the only ingredients we had in the fridge.

And that’s when everything went sideways.

Still uncomfortable with the multitude of settings and too impatient to wait for the oven to come up to temperature, I slid my dressed pie into the oven. But without any sauce, the thin slices of chicken and cheese Robie used to make sandwiches quickly dried out.

The result wasn’t much to look at. And while the flavors were fine, the ratios were off. But the first bite confirmed the dough still wasn’t cooked (or as Gordon Ramsey likes to scream on Hell’s Kitchen, “It’s RAW!”). On the plus side, the three-ingredient dough puffed nicely and had a chewy texture like pizza. I just needed to find a way to cook it through.

Our solution was to buy what Alton Brown always insists on using in his kitchen, a multitasker. Something that could roast a whole chicken or pork loin, hold baking potatoes, jalapeño cornbread, sponge cake, a tray of flaky spanakopita, eggplant and mozzarella stacks bathed in tomato sauce, macaroni and cheese or shortbread cookies as well as pizza. And when Robie bought the 13 x 10-inch rectangular baking pan (because apparently that’s the standard even in countries that use the metric system), he knew the £1.50 price tag wouldn’t break the budget if we donated it to whoever was planning to stay in the apartment after we left.

On Friday I doubled the amount of flour and water and let the dough rest before pressing it out in my new, well-oiled pan. Then we topped it with a thick layer of tomato sauce, balls of sausage, mounds of mozzarella and plenty of sliced onions.

And now the Friday night tradition lives on!