Apropos of the pizza thread and my annoyance that so many restaurants and takeaways can't get something so fucking simple right. Take pizza, make a basic dough, you don't need to fuck around with sourdough or exotic ingredients (and if you are, then at least figure out how to do a basic pizza first). The same dough as pasta is made from. Flatten it into something like a circle and make sure it's thin. Top with some chopped tomatoes (excess juice removed), oregano and olive oil, tear up some decent mozzarella (not that fucking grated yellow stuff). Whatever else takes your fancy. Stick in the hottest oven you can find for a few minutes until the dough just starts to blister and burn. Toss over some basil and another glug of olive oil if needed.
That's it. If you're going to sell pizzas master this first.
I periodically make the mistake of grabbing a pizza on my way home because I can't be bothered to cook and it's always foul. Mostly because the base always seems to be thick stodgy crust (if it declares 'thin crust' on the packaging it's a big fat lie for a big fat pizza) and the sauce on top has basically the same sweetness as jam. I'm not sure when it became a thing to put a couple of spoons of sugar in tomato sauce (it's not ketchup). Anyway, I end up throwing it away because it's inedible. Several weeks back I had the supremely dubious pleasure of meeting a Papa John pizza. Oh jesus, thick dank soggy dough, a random sprinkling of tasteless toppings. Oh the grounds the base was effectively inedible they'd provided a dipping sauce to try and disguise the fact. And it was BBQ sauce. For a pizza. How can you make something so simple so bad? Stop it.
Same yesterday, grabbed a cheese and ham panini while waiting for a train. Cheese and ham toasty. How difficult to put cheese and ham between some bread and toast it? Basically I ended up with a lump of soggy stodge. The cheese wasn't cheese, it was what appeared to be some kind of ersatz bechamel sauce. That had, of course, simple soaked into the bread because that's what happens when your put liquid on bread and is why we don't eat soup sandwiches. The ham really wasn't worth a pig dying over, it could have been anything with a vague slimy texture and no taste. To be honest, there was so little of it in there, it was hard to say. To cap it all, they really hadn't even bothered to toast it, just show it the grill, so I had the delight of a pallid, lukewarm, tasteless lump of damp bread. I ate half of it before giving up as it was just calories with no pleasure. I would have taken it back but I was already on the train.
You can't put ham and cheese in a bread and toast it. I don't expect much from a train station concourse concession, but seriously.
