[Mike Nolan]

I baked a two-layer Celebration Challah for a dinner party someone we know was throwing and it may have been the nicest looking one I've done. BTW, it's 22 inches long.

[Mike Nolan]

I think I learned the most about English grammar in Latin class in HS.

I've got both the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP guide, and I've read Strunk & White many times. There are many books on grammar out there, though most people probably haven't studied it since high school, if then.

[Mike Nolan]

There's a lot of crossover content between this thread and the Jim Leahy thread. I don't think there's a way to merge threads in WordPres/BBpress, though.

[Mike Nolan]

I do know the legend/story of Ike Sewell. There are at least two pizza places in New York that claim to have been the first to have made pizza in the USA, I think there was even a lawsuit over advertisements.

There was a lot of crossover in styles, as most pizza places made several types. And as I recall, the Chicago Magazine article in the mid 70's was criticized for having left out several types of pizza, so an argument could be made that there were several distinct styles of deep dish, of thin crust, etc. I also recall the war between Uno's and Due's, though some of us thought it was an advertising stunt. (Philly still has its cheese steak wars and there used to be a lot of discussion in Chicago over who made the best Italian Beef, too.)

But at least in the 70's (when we lived in Chicago), thin crust was more of a north side style and deep dish a south side style, though Gulliver's (on Howard) made a really good deep dish pizza back then.

As some of the chains, notably Giordano's, became dominant in the 80's, the geographic distribution largely went away. Old north-side thin crust seems to have vanished, Rick's and Pizza Oven closed, My Pie moved and (I'm told), changed styles.

There are a lot of competing claims as to who invented deep dish and who invented stuffed. Thin crust is closer to the style of pizza we found in Italy when we were there, but we were in Turin, and there's probably a lot of regional differences in Italian pizza (like there were in Chicago 40-50 years ago), and it would take a serious pizza crawl to document them. If someone wants to crowd-fund me on such a trip, I'm game!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

The best book on Chicago pizza is probably the Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook. I believe it is available through Amazon, though I think I bought it in a gift shop at O'Hare Airport. It has a number of different dough recipes (over a dozen, I think) plus a number of sauce recipes.

The pizza dough recipe I have posted here is my variant on one from that book. (I tinkered with the ratios slightly and added semolina.)

There are a number of pizza websites, including Peter Reinhart's Pizza Quest site. I don't recall if Peter has any Chicago-style dough recipes, but as I said in another thread, I'm not convinced he really 'got' what Chicago pizza was about.

I'm a big fan of both deep dish and stuffed, but I really liked thin-crust, which was one of the five distinct styles of Chicago Pizza that Chicago Magazine identified in an article in the mid 1970's, though it seems to have largely disappeared in Chicago these days.

The five styles, and some of the places that specialized in them, at least 40 years ago, were: deep dish, stuffed, thick crust, ultra thin crust and pizza bread. Deep dish originated on the south side (Giordano's), stuffed on the west side (Nancy's), thick crust was near-north (Pizzeria Uno), thin crust was north side (My Pie, Gulliver's, Pizza Oven, Rick's) and pizza bread was common in several areas, though Gulliver's had the best at the time. (When new owners came in at Gulliver's, the story was that they changed the recipe to save on costs, and I'm told the quality suffered badly.)

When I was at Northwestern, there was a pizza place on Central (The Inferno) that made double-dough pizzas where the dough must have been 2 inches thick. I thought they were awful, but for college students on a budget they were cheap and filling.

The two best thin-crust recipes I've found were the 'Roman' dough in Peter Reinhart's book, American Pie, and this one: Thin Crust Dough Recipe. When I say 'thin crust', I mean REALLY thin, you should be able to read newsprint through the dough after it's rolled out! This requires a dough with a lot of extensibility in it, though I can't remember which of the two gluten proteins that is.

[Mike Nolan]

Well, for the most part I wouldn't advise them to go online, either, the quality of much online writing is terrible, it wouldn't have passed in fifth grade English class when I was growing up.

When I was on the school board I lamented at one meeting the fact that nobody knows how to diagram sentences anymore, I'm not sure how many people in the audience, possibly including some teachers, even knew what 'diagramming a sentence' was!

[Mike Nolan]

I got started making the almond rocher last night, boil almond slivers in a sugar solution for 2 minutes then toast them in the oven until they caramelize.

They're delicious before I even add the chocolate! I'm making two small test batches, one with some milk chocolate and one with Ghiradelli chocolate coating (not a true milk chocolate, as it has palm kernel oil instead of cocoa butter.) I think the Ghiradelli coating tastes funny by itself, but I tried a taste of the leftovers in the bowl after making a small batch of 'haystacks' and it tasted pretty good.

[Mike Nolan]

Interesting, I wonder which date is right?

Proofreading is getting to be a lost art, even at the Trib.

[Mike Nolan]

Sometimes I wonder if recipes that call for a small amount of sugar are holdovers from the 50's, when active dry yeast still needed a boost.

Have you tried a teaspoon of vinegar in your 72 hour recipe? That helps break up the complex starches, which should make sugar less necessary.

[Mike Nolan]

I think it's hard these days to create a truly original recipe, and it'a always a lot of work to perfect a new recipe you're developing.

I'm not really into 'holiday' baking, which is often more about shape than taste or texture, so I won't be entering, but I will be interested to see the finalists.

[Mike Nolan]

It happens in professional kitchens, too. I was talking to a pastry chef who said he was working on a major event at a country club, making 100 cheesecakes. He had just started putting them in the ovens when he saw the big bowl of eggs sitting untouched.

So, he dumped the filling back into a big bowl, added the eggs, put everything back in the pie shells, and put them back in the oven. How'd they come out? He said "It was not my best work."

[Mike Nolan]

But you're supposed to believe the government reports telling you 'there is no inflation' and 'food prices are at their lowest point in years'.

[Mike Nolan]

Looks like a fruitcake to me, which might be a perfect analogy for most presidential elections, especially this one.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't have the varieties of chocolate and many of the other ingredients we used in class (like the yummy white-chocolate covered freeze-dried strawberries), but my chocolate tempering pot came this afternoon and I'm starting to plan for a chocolate session soon. I do plan to take photos. (I'll have a better camera, too, I didn't take my Canon T6I DSLR to Chicago, just the Nikon Coolpix, which fits in a shirt pocket.)

The real challenge may be scaling some of the ganache recipes down to a size I can make (and use) at home. (The good news is ganache keeps for about two weeks and can be reheated.)

I'm going to try to repair the bat and either make new legs for my spider or start from scratch and see if I can make a more realistic looking one.

[Mike Nolan]

It's not that I've deliberately stopped ordering from King Arthur Flour, but I haven't been on their website in weeks, and have no specific reason to go there. If/when I run out of white pastry flour, that's still the only place I can find it online. But I haven't baked a pie in months, what with my wife on a 20-carb diet.

I'm getting into photography so I've ordered a lot of photo gear online this year, and now I'm getting into chocolate, so I've ordered a bunch of chocolate gear (a tempering pot, molds, etc) online in the past week.

I did bake a Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake this week, though. I need to make white bread, so I'll probably make Vienna bread some time in the next few days. I make 3 loaves at a time from the Clonmel Kitchens Double Crusty bread recipe, freeze 2, and usually wind up throwing away a third or so of each loaf after 8-10 days. But that means a batch lasts me 3-4 weeks.

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