Clarice's Pieces: The Quest for the Great Pizza

[Geee]

American Thinker:

About two years, ago, inspired by the fantastic work of Sullivan Street Bakery's, Jim Lahey, I tried my hand at artisan bread. Oh, to be sure, I tried bread making before but even though I am a rather decent cook and baker, good tasting bread escaped my reach until Jim came along with his brilliant idea of making a wetter dough, using instant yeast, letting it rise for a long time and then baking it in a preheated Dutch oven -- all of which duplicates the effect of baking in steam injected commercial ovens while avoiding the time consuming efforts of first making starters, bigas, poolishes.

The bread was so easy and delicious that I bought his book to learn how to make more breads and pizzas and sandwiches. I highly recommend you work your way through this and try some of the other treats in it -- like the incredible stecca, long olive oil coated Italian loaves studded with garlic or olives or cherry tomatoes .

My husband's co-worker is married to a man who is also obsessive about cooking and when he sought her sympathy over what was going on in our house, she dismissed him with," It could be a lot worse. They could be into cars or drugs." Well, I suppose I should warn you, that once you try the Leahy beads and see how easy it is to make first class artisan loaves, you wouldn't want to stop learning more.

My next foray was into Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, the collaborative work of a Minnesota Doctor (Jeff Hertzberg) and pastry chef (Zoe Francois) which has led to their own website, another book, and a third (on pizza and flatbread)on the way.