Guess what, it’s Dickhole Dannis time!
Let’s talk about the worst day of the work week if you work a 9-5 Monday through Friday job.
Monday, you come in semi-refreshed after a weekend off. Wednesday, you know you’re getting closer to the weekend. Thursday you start not giving a shit, and then, well, you’re at Friday. Congratulations.
I skipped Tuesday. Because Tuesday is bullshit. You’re probably at work right now, stressed, thinking, “Man, I wish I were at home naked and covered in a sheen of peanut butter while army crawling across the floor, right now, reliving my good ol’ glory days.”
So, I’m sending you an email on Tuesday afternoon to waste some of your time and get you closer to tomorrow. This is why I make the big Substack bucks.
(Okay, maybe not like…a lot of bucks.)
Last week, before I clocked into my usual pizza shift, I conducted an experiment with our beautiful Stefano Ferrara pizza oven (here’s a cool story about them) at Paulie Gee’s Logan Square.
My current version of an office is very different than all of my last jobs.
You’d think that after three and a half years working at a pizza restaurant, I’d get bored of the tools I use every day, but when you’re dealing with fire, your pyromania never fades. I mean, come on. This is live fire. It’s awesome.
This is why I decided to try cooking different pizza snacks in an oven that we run around 1000°F.
Ah, the old staples.
Hot Pockets, French Bread pizzas, Pizza Puffs (a local Chicago favorite), and shitty Lunchables. Please note that these are Lunchables Uploaded, which means absolutely nothing. The only place I’m uploading this pizza to is up my ass. Or to the cloud.
In order to not fuck up the floor of the oven, I let these items thaw until they were around the same temperature as our pizza dough.
I do not know why there is a random pepperoni sitting on the pizza tray. Also, I accidentally spilled about half of the bullshit Lunchables Uploaded cheese all over the floor and I cried.
Life is hell.
There are multiple zones in the woodfired oven that vary in temperature.
The hottest spot is at the 12 o’clock position, then it gets cooler as you go counterclockwise.
This is why I put the French bread pizza near the mouth of the oven. Even the floor in this spot hovers around 800°F. I let the classic latchkey kid snack sit while I contemplated death.
When you see pizzamakers lift the pizza up to the top of the oven, it is not for show.
This is called doming. We do this to finish cooking the pizza but to also add color to the top and caramelize the cheese.
I tried to caramelize a French bread pizza.
I forgot just how white the cheese is on these things.
It’s very strange. It kind of reminds me of the color of Darth Vader’s head.
I often think about Darth Vader when I’m eating pizza.
And this was the Darth Vader of pizza too, to be honest. Burnt on the outside (I ruined the bread part, it was pitch black) and icy on the inside, just like his vacant heart.
Next up was the pepperoni pizza Hot Pocket.
Since the core of the Hot Pocket was still cold, I decided to inch closer to the middle of the oven in a hotter spot, and slowly let it bake off.
Do not click this link to what this one guy did with a Hot Pocket. You will get in trouble.
I did a great job!
Man, look at that beauty. It’s not “burned,” you assholes, it’s “artfully charred.”
Despite it’s blackened exterior and still chilly interior, I ate it anyway, because I have no shame.
What’s weird was that the charcoal layer didn’t really have much of a flavor. My scientific guess is that since Hot Pockets have approximately 3,239,298,425,234,823,572,934,701 ingredients in them, this created a protective casing that was designed to last until the last vestiges of humanity duke it out to remain alive while the earth slowly devours itself.
This got dark real quick.
This is a pizza puff. It looks very small and very cute in the oven.
I only learned fairly recently that pizza puffs are a regional food and not commonly found outside of Chicago. My dear friend Nick wrote a great article about pizza puffs and where they came from.
Basically, they’re like chimichangas, flour tortilla and all, with a shitty pizza filling on the inside. You generally get them deep fried at hot dog stands around here. The proper method of eating them is waiting until you’re pretty sure it’s cool enough to bite into. Then you take an enormous bite and burn the living dangus out of your mouth. It’s pretty great.
A lot of people trash talk pizza puffs. Whatever. They’re awesome.
Look at how beautifully this came out!
Many woodfired pizzamakers covet the black bubbles on the outside of the dough. We call it “leoparding” or “leopard-spotting” They don’t taste burned and they look like about 75% of the clothing you can purchase at Chico’s.
Just kidding. I fucked it up.
The bottom of the pizza puff fused to the floor of the oven and when I flipped the delicious pizza puff over to examine it, I discovered that it had transformed into what appeared to be roadkill.
My final woodfired pizza-snack was the bullshit Lunchables Uploaded deep dish pepperoni pizza. Why is it so adorable looking?
We feed our children garbage. Many children complain that they don’t get to eat enough garbage because when they see their friends eating garbage at school, they request to eat the same garbage as their friends even if you packed them a healthy nutritious lunch that you slaved over.
Here is the best photo of food I’ve ever taken.
It is blurry enough to give you an actual headache.
Why does this actually look good?
Sure, the ring around the crust does look a little black, but whatever. I already housed a decrepit-looking Hot Pocket.
The bottom cook was a little uneven, but that’s because I didn’t spin it properly and also, you’re not supposed to put a deep dish Lunchables Uploaded into a woodfired oven.
It was delicious in a cheap fast-food pizza sort of way and I feel filthy even sitting here and writing that. I ate the whole thing, corn syrup-based tomato sauce dripping down my face and all. Someone call the fire department and hose me off. Daddy’s been a dirty boy.
That was fun and entirely unnecessary. I hope I wasted enough of your time so that you temporarily forgot that it’s Tuesday. And thank you, paid subscribers — I used that hard-earned money to burn the crap out of a bunch of food (don’t worry, we ate all of it).
As always, spread the love, share the links (particularly on Twitter and Facebook, because that appears to be where all the fun’s at), and make me feel like I’m not in some empty void, shouting at the nothingness here in the absolute darkness of it all, while everything closes in on us, everything, everything, everything.
Boy, that English degree sure came in handy today.