Why the search for the perfect pizza is never-ending – it’s more to do with emotions than ingredients
- In American Pie, baker Peter Reinhart writes that ‘perfection’ comes with life’s quality moments rather than the pie itself
- His recipes for different crusts and toppings will encourage you to create your own
This cookbook is just one of several on my shelves that focuses on pizza. Every cook who’s been bitten by the pizza-making bug is in “search for the perfect pizza”.
In American Pie (2003), Peter Reinhart searches for the perfect pizza in Italy and the United States (if he were to do an update, he should check out Japan). In his introduction, he points out that one’s perception of “perfection” can change. “For a long time, I thought the best pizza in the country was from Mama’s in Bala Cynwyd, just outside Philadelphia. And then something happened.”
That “something” was life: he grew up, moved away, worked (including time in a religious order and as a baking instructor at top US culinary schools) and married. Years later, he went back to visit his family and had another taste of his beloved Mama’s. “There was definitely something amiss […] ‘Maybe it’s me,’ I thought. It wasn’t just the crust that was a little different.
“The cheese and sauce certainly still resonated with old memories, and even if it wasn’t the best Mama’s, it was close enough that it should have elicited, within my usually tolerant margin-for-error forgiveness code, at least a sign of pleasure. But something had changed within me. My expectations, an internal bar of standards that is both conscious and subconscious, had been violated. A slow wave of realisation set in, one that I couldn’t suppress even though I tried.”
Perfect pizza, he writes, can be perfect just for the moment. While working as a houseparent for troubled children in Raleigh, North Carolina, he would often take his charges to a nearby pizzeria. “That pizza, and only that pizza among all the pizza shops in town, was a panacea, our emotional salve […] It was perfect […] Was it the best pizza I’d ever had? No, but it was ‘perfect’ pizza, a peerless match of textures and flavours that fed more than our stomachs and palates.
