I’m honored to welcome a new contributor to heavy metal cassettes in the form of Sarahjane Blum. Sarahjane comes to us by way of lovely Minnesota and is the only person I know who claims to have gone to the American Carnage tour twice last year. I’m also fairly certain her brain weighs a metric ton.
Be All End All Pizza
When I was just a wee little metalhead, back in junior high school, with a befuddled sense of style which melded a chelsea girl hairdo with a nose ring to earring chain inspired I’m sure by Rachel Bolan in Skid Row, I still had a lot to learn about what should and shouldn’t go together. What I did know, and something that has served me well, is that Anthrax’s State of Euphoria makes every fucking thing better.
It turns my depression into righteous anger and confusion into, well, righteous anger. And then it makes me dance like a headbanging thrash-punk little girl.
So with that, and in honor of the new year, I bring you, the Be All End All pizza. Now go change your attitude, like you change your shirt.
Also, listen to Anthrax while pounding out your dough, it will infuse it with a little bit of New York and make it that much better–like me, they have had their sartorial challenges, but even if your pizza ends up a little funny looking, it still will be better than any pizza you can come up with while listing to Slayer or any of those California groups.
The key to great pizza is that magic trick where each component comes across with its own distinct identity, but then the whole thing combines to give you one complete sensation. And that trick is worked by repeating a few key ingredients, so you get their flavor more than once. Also, it helps to not treat your poor pizza dough like a damned sherpa, piling every last thing you can think of onto its back.
So the Be All, End All pizza has two toppings, mozzarella-style Daiya and field roast sausage, a garlic-tomato sauce, with plum tomatoes and sun-dried tomatoes (see, repeating flavors, but different at the same time–), and a roasted garlic crust. There I go again with the garlic in the sauce and the different garlic in the crust. It’s just that easy.
I also make a small pizza treat for my dog, cause she rocks even harder than the American Carnage tour.
To be filed under “Why The Fuck Even Make This Stuff?”
While I realize that expecting a Scottish company to produce a decent mozzarella cheese analog is tantamount to asking a Sicilian to develop a vegan corn dog, I couldn’t resist giving this stuff a shot. Those blokes at Bute Island have been producing some very popular and highly regarded vegan cheeses for at least a decade now, so I figured it was finally time to try it on a pie. While I considered myself a marginal fan of their cheddar cheese line (my favorite being smoked), I’d heard from several reliable sources that none of them melted worth a damn and were best enjoyed cold on a cracker or sandwich. One well-meaning blogger even went so far as to say that “the Sheese refused to melt on my pizza, even after cooking it for 40 minutes (emphasis mine)” First of all, anyone who cooks a pizza for 40 minutes should be tried for treason. Second of all, I’m not going to let some charlatan who tortures a pizza for three-quarters of an hour discourage me from my pizza chemistry. I put the stone in the oven and set it at 550…
After opening the strange little resealable package, I gave the wheel a bit of a sniff and was unpleasantly surprised by its Pina colada cheesecake/white russian aroma. Not what I expected at all. From what I remember, mozzarella has almost no detectable smell, and if it did it certainly wasn’t birthday cake. Anyhow, I cut a slice and gave it a try. While the texture and feel under the knife was pretty legit, the taste was less than spectacular. The first sensation was an agreeable creaminess (“hey, this isn’t so terrible”) quickly followed by a waxy violence (“what is this, 1996?”). After a few chews that odd vanilla ice cream sensation reemerged and I could only hope that once I had it shredded and mingling with the sauce that things would get better. They had to, didn’t they?
One positive thing about this Sheese is its shredding ability. It’s consistency and firmness lend to a shredding that is more legit than any other vegan cheese I’ve come across. Of course this means absolutely nothing. It’s nearly as annoying as folks who constantly yack their faces off about the melting ability of certain vegan cheeses. Big deal. Ice cubes melt well also. Going to put ice cubes on a pizza? There’s more to cheese analog integrity that the visual appearance of “real cheese”.
Ready to go on the stone. Used some left over meat sauce from my third Brutal Lasagna Night of the holiday season for this one. Getting a bit tired of this sauce to be honest. To damn meaty and over spiced for a proper pie. Going to go back to my bright San Marzano sauce come the new year…
Crust came out lovely. The rest was an unmitigated disaster. While I do feel that the quality of the crust is 80 percent of the overall pizza eating experience, I couldn’t even bring myself to finish this sad, sad pie. This is perhaps the third time in my life that I stopped eating pizza before I was at least overly full if not near death. Vmass said it was like giving a child up for adoption but much worse. That damn vanilla flavor survived the oven and extended its evil scope all over my beautiful creation. The cheese also didn’t melt at all well, even though I trickled a generous amount of olive oil over it and put it under the broiler. Anything that seemed the slightest bit “melty” soon regained its crayon status once it hit room temperature. Blech.
The crust was the one positive on this day…
The cornicione was slightly doughy yet light with a nice snap.
What else can I say? Everyone is different. Some folks like their pizza to look like traditional college town American style pizza, some folks like their pizza to be simple and edible. I champion the latter. The original pizza, the Marinara, was vegan by default. It was simple dough made from four ingredients, crushed tomato, olive oil, oregano and/or basil, and maybe a bit of rock salt. That was it. If prepared with the proper ingredients and cooked in an appropriate manner, the Marinara is, in my opinion, the most perfectly gratifying food experience on the planet. And while I’m far from making a blanket condemnation of the vegan meat and cheese experience (my friend Cooper made several pizzas over the weekend with Daiya that were out of this world), I still contend that less is more.
Thanks to everyone who’s been checking heavy metal cassettes out. While I wouldn’t necessarily consider my blog to be “on fire,” I am happy that a few regulars seem to be checking in with consistency, and for you I will continue to lay open my pizza making, metal heart. I have mind-blowing stuff planned for 2011, including a new feature I will be calling “Scathing Product Spotlight: Why The Fuck Do They Even Make This Stuff?,” as well as the old classics you’ve come to marginally appreciate/blatantly disregard. Little Miss/Santa Clause gave me the new Immolation and Atheist cds for Jesus Day as well as a great book on pizza called American Pie. It was a good day all around…
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 20 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 111 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 24mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was December 1st with 231 views. The most popular post that day was Vegan Pizza or Death.
The top referring sites in 2010 were foodfightgrocery.com, facebook.com, sz0161.ev.mail.comcast.net, mail.yahoo.com, and metalsucks.net.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for carcass heartwork, heavy metal cassettes, heavy metal cassettes vegan, death metal vegan pizza, and ritual.
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Vegan Pizza or Death November 2010
3 comments
About Me July 2009
2 comments
Vmass Is Doing His Best To Make You Healthy… December 2010
1 comment and 1 Like on WordPress.com,
Codifying Carcass: 3 of the Best From Earache and Columbia Records’ Strange Encounter December 2010
3 comments
The 5 Most Underappreciated Masterpieces of Thrash Metal’s “Wilderness Years” (’92/’93) November 2010
4 comments
So while there’s been a bunch of hoo ha and rigmarole in the past few years over all the supposed advances in vegan meat and cheese analogs (and there has been great strides. I remember the first time I tried vegan cheese. It was 1997 and I special ordered it from the hippies at my little health food store in eastern Connecticut. It was this horrific little gray slab of oil and failure that I tried to make a pizza with. It turned out being the fourth worst day of my life), there are times when I just want to say “sod all this Daiya and Tofurky nonsense and give me some of that Old Country style pie.” After all, the original pizza was vegan, right? And while I’m no stranger to vegan replacement products, it has never sat well me that the barometer for our advancements in vegan popularity/acceptance is not predicated on how the Standard American Diet (S.A.D) has conformed to the more traditional notions of a healthy vegetarian/vegan lifestyle, but more so how the vegan diet has come to resemble more traditional meat and cheese based cuisine. I ask you, what the fuck is that all about?
So with this in mind I decided to make a few pies using minimal ingredients and nothing artificial. I first stumbled upon what would eventually vaguely be recognized as Pizza Marinara during my college days. My broke ass would buy the cheapest, most chemically laden frozen bread dough I could find at the A&P, slop down a grip of Ragu 7 Herb (only the best), and maybe throw on some oregano or whatever other quasi Italian dried herb I could steal from my dad’s house and cook the son of a gun for 20 minutes. I’d then grab a liter of Coke and join my roommate in front of the tele where he was undoubtedly watching scrambled porn or Ren and Stimpy.
Whoever tells you that college is the best time of your life has failed at everything since.
Gather up the goods. If you can swing it financially, always try to buy organic. If you can’t afford it, steal it. If you’re attempting a legit Marinara be sure to use only canned San Marzano tomatoes. They are the best tasting, most aromatic tomatoes out there. They come from a small town of the same name near Naples, Italy and were first grown in volcanic soil in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. Badass. Just drain, add a bit of quality rock salt, and either mash by hand or toss into the blender if you prefer a smoother texture. No need for further enhancement as the flavor simply can’t be improved upon.
These are my doughs. Without me, they are useless. Without them, I am useless. Oh, and if you store your doughs in ziplocks, please reuse them. Those things can either last forever in your freezer, or in a landfill.
This is a wicked homemade walnut and basil pesto that Little Miss made a few days earlier. Gonna make this the foundation of a pesto and tomato pie.
Just about to put this puppy on the stone. Pesto topped with Pomi diced tomatoes, kalamata olives, and a bit of crushed red pepper.
Looks a bit ugly, but tasted good. Could have used a bit more tomato, and maybe slightly less pesto. I was also a bit dissapointed in the crust. I’m not sure if the stove wasn’t hot enough yet or what, but it was a bit crackery. I thought by this point I’d have my technique down, but it’s a strange science making dough from scratch. I still had two more to get it right…
Here’s the first Marinara style. Just the San Marzanos, a couple leafs of basil, rock salt, olive oil, and a few slices of garlic. Bet.
Crust was slightly better than the pesto pie, but still not perfect. I had an idea for the next one. An audacious idea…
That’s it! Crust came out perfect. Super light and crisp with a bit of chew to it. The secret was putting the stone about six inches below the broiler, cranking it to high for a minute so the stone gets assaulted by the intense heat of the broiler, and then slipping the pie in while the broiler is still on high. It was done in half the time of the first two (just under five minutes), and because it was “shocked” by the intense heat, the dough was light and crisp. Most conventional ovens max out at 550 degrees while real deal traditional wood and coal fired ovens are 900 degrees minimum, often times hitting 1100. This makes all the difference.
So until I build my dream oven in the back yard, I shall stick to my stone and the broiler. Damn I’m hungry…
I’m honored to welcome our first contributing blogger to Heavy Metal Cassettes, Mr. D Vmass. He’s an east coast struttin, hockey fight lovin’ son of a bitch who once punched a hole through a man just to see through to the other side. I tried a slice of this pie the other day and it was downright brilliant. Enjoy…
Potato Brussel Sprout Pie
I originally saw this on the Slice blog and have worked to spice it up and make it vegan. Sure there are two vegetables and no sauce. But this jammer has been on a steady rotation of late. It’s a nice change of pace and perfect for the fall.
This recipe is only for the toppings part of the pie. It will work well with whatever your go-to dough recipe happens to be.
Ingredients:
1. 5-6 Brussel sprouts
2. 3-4 Fingerling Potatoes or 1 medium size Boiling potato (waxy type potato)
3. ½ block of Follow Your Heart cheese (Monteray Jack Flavor) – shredded
4. Salt to your taste.
5. Pepper to your taste.
Optionals: Field Roast Italian Sausage, Sweet Potato
Directions:
Prep:
Chop up garlic. (how much is up to you.)
Slice up potatoes ⅛- ¼” slices.
Take the Brussels and cut up or shred into uneven pieces. Dump in bowl. (try to avoid big clumps, this will ensure they will cook up with the baking of the pie.)
Boil up some water—Throw your potatoes in. Cook till they are almost completely done—Strain and dump in bowl with the shredded sprouts.
Put the garlic in a pan with a liberal amount of olive oil cook up till golden. Dump this over the sprouts and potatoes. (Watch out! might be a little splatter.) Mix all this up and coat well with the oil as this will brown the vegetables.
Put the Potatoes and the Brussels into a bowl and toss with a liberal amount of olive oil, salt, pepper.
1. Toss your dough.
2. Put down a small even amount of cheese.
3. Spread out the Potato/ Brussel mixture and any extras
4. Put down another light layer of cheese.
5. Top with your usual pizza herbs.
How you bake the pie depends on your normal routine of baking. Pan, Stone, Grill, no big.
Threw together this stellar pie with the last of the dough from a big batch I made about two weeks earlier. I don’t know if it had something to do with the extended fermentation time (aka “letting it sit around in the fridge for too long,”) or that it spent a few days in the freezer, but this was easily the best crust I’ve ever made and has led to constant daydreaming as well as crippling self-doubt as to whether I’ll ever be able to attain such perfection again. The sauce was left over from the brutal lasagna recipe we enjoyed a few days earlier at Harriet Hand of God’s “flat”, so it was super meaty and a bit sweet. Not a traditional pizza sauce but still a hell of a time and pretty good for a monday night. Enjoy the pics.
So the lovely wife was off at class last Monday and I had one last dough left in the fridge, so I made a pizza. The dough had gone through a 7 day cold fermentation next to the soymilk so I was curious to see how this would influence the taste and texture (the slow fermentation, not the soy milk.) This was my Caputo “OO” recipe which normally should only be used for a Neopolitan style pie (San Marzano tomatoes, fresh basil, rock salt), but I only had ingredients for a New York style sauce so I thought I’d throw all caution to the wind and mash up my pizza cultures. I gathered up my sauce ingredients, cut up the sausage, put the stone in at 550, and got down to work…
Normally I wouldn’t deal with those fascists at Del Monte, but I got a case of the crushed tomatoes for like .70 cents a can and the taste isn’t bad…
You gotta make the sauce from scratch. Organic tomatoes, tomato paste, fresh garlic, raw cane sugar, some herbs, rock salt, olive oil, and the crust dust of course…
Italian Field Roast sausage will change your life…
Well aren’t we a pretty pretty. The crust was super nice, nice elasticity with a bit of crunch…
What else you going to do on a Monday night?
My buddy Vmass picked up 55 pounds of Farina Di Grano Terero Tip “OO” Caputo pizza flour from a connection in Seattle that we’re gonna cut up three ways with ADub. There’s work to be done.
“There is Cornbeef Jigsore Quandary (jackfruit corned beef!), For Whom The Dog Tolls, World Eater, You Suffer, Hell Bent For Lentils (double-decker lentil burger), Number Of The Beans, Stay Hungry, Blessed Black Wings, and a 4 foot long tempeh philly steak called the South Of Heaven.”
I hear Michigan is lovely in December. Anyone up for a roadtrip?
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