Mike Nolan
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I lived in Chicago for 10 years, and ate a lot of pizza, hot dogs and Italian beef sandwiches. When I was a sophomore a bunch of us drove down to the south side of Chicago on a Sunday afternoon to the original location for Giordano's, back before it turned into a chain, there was a 2+ hour wait.
Burt Katz's first foray with pizza was as a chef at a place called The Inferno, fairly near the Northwestern campus, you had to walk by it to get to the football stadium. It was very popular with students because the campus dining facilities were closed on Sundays. After that he started Gulliver's and at least 3 other pizza places before he died. (I've still never come up with a reasonable copycat recipe for Gulliver's pizza bread, people would order it while standing in line for a table.)
Back around 1975 there was an article in Chicago Magazine on the multiple styles of Chicago pizza, I made some editorial suggestions to a draft copy of that article. A friend and fellow chess player was their business manager. Before we decided to move to Nebraska I was talking to them about starting a second food reviewer column for casual and fast food dining. (They did run such a column for a few years, too.)
I haven't looked at the Pizza Bible (Amazon shows two books with that title, I assume you're referring to the one published recently). I have occasionally given some thought to buying a copy of Modernist Pizza, but it's like $350.
I have the KAF pizza book, it seems to think garlic is a necessary ingredient in pizza sauce, because I think every sauce recipe includes garlic.
I've tried the Chicago tavern style pizza. It's good (I thought the crust was better the 2nd day) but I think there are better thin-crust dough recipes out there. I haven't tried the Pizza Tonda (Romano) dough yet.
The KAF book has Chicago Tavern Style thin crust pizza but not Chicago Style Deep Dish. But KAF is located in Vermont, so Chicago is somewhere in the wilderness as far as they're concerned.
The Great Chicago Style Pizza Cookbook is probably a better source for Chicago-style pizza recipes, and I think it's back in print.
Nancy Palese, wife of Rocco Palese, the inventor of Chicago Stuffed Pizza, for which Nancy's Pizza was well-renowned, was said to be working on a memoir that would include recipes, but I think she died before she could finish it.
I think all of the legendary pizziola's in Chicago are gone now, Burt's Place and Pequods may be the last of the restaurants doing authentic Chicago Deep Dish Pan Pizza, as most of the others have modified their recipes over the years, mostly to save money IMHO, and it just isn't as good. Burt Katz trained the chefs when he sold Pequods, and my sources in Chicago tell me they've stuck with Burt's recipe, which Gulliver's did not (and it closed).
I haven't seen a lot of rabbits lately, I think the foxes keep the population down. I did have one last year who kept nibbling at my dill.
Last night I made 10 dozen banana mini-muffins, 6 dozen with raisins, 4 dozen with both raisins and pecans. (Not planned that way but I forgot to put the nuts in and by the time I realized it the 3rd batch was already in the oven.)
I dipped some of them in chocolate ganache, they're cooling, we'll try them out in a few minutes.
We had tacos tonight.
As Paul Harvey used to say, eat what you can, can what you can't.
Last year I made several batches of tomato relish and tomato sauce, but it was not a great year for tomatoes here, about half of my plants only produced a handful of tomatoes. That's why I'm trying several new varieties (for me) this year including
Celebrity Plus
Trophy
Kuzco
Unity
Blue BeechEstiva was one of my better producers last season, along with 4th of July. (I even had tomatoes ON the 4th of July last season, but I don't expect that to happen this year because the tomatoes are in the ground about two weeks later than a year ago.)
I got my tomatoes planted today, 36 cages of them, 14 different varieties.
We had the 2nd tavern pizza today, letting the dough rest for 24 hours is definitely worth doing.
Had it with artichoke hearts and red bell pepper today. Very good.
The point to tavern style is that the crusts are pre-rolled and stacked up in the refrigerator, so when someone orders one, the oven is already hot so all they have to do is grab a crust, throw on toppings, pop it in the oven for about 8 minutes and pizza is ready!
I'm trying the Chicago Tavern Style thin-crust pizza dough recipe from the KAF Pizza book today.
It's interesting because you roll it out then refrigerate the round for up to 3 days.
Cages built, plants outside to harden off a bit, hopefully it'll be dry enough to put them in the garden tomorrow or Saturday. It always seems to rain when it's time to put the tomato plants in the ground.
Sounds like a disconnect between the system that creates the labels for the chicken and the checkout system.
I've seen the bone-in chicken breasts labeled 3 or 4 different ways over the years.
I though split breasts were bone-in breasts, as opposed to boneless.
There were reports of up to 5 inches of rain in the area.
It's trying to rain again tonight and there's a tornado warning a bit SW of Lincoln.
I made chocolate chip (M&M) oatmeal cookies last night, using a #100 scoop so they're smaller than the last batch, which used a #70 scoop.
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