Thin Crust Pizza - Part I

I miss Pizza Hut.

Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying that Pizza Hut is or was a great pizza. But in the early 1970's when there wasn't a pizza shop on every corner the Pizza Hut Thin 'n Crispy was my go-to pizza fix. But they still make a Thin 'n Crispy, so what is it that I'm missing?

It's not the same Pizza Hut that was started by two brothers in Wichita in 1958. In 1977 they sold the business to Pepsico and shortly after that is when I think the changes began.

I was such a regular that when the new menus came in the manager asked me if I'd like to keep an old one as a souvenir. Prices haven't changed much, have they? (circa 1972)

The non-pizza side of the menu. When I wasn't eating a Thin 'n Crispy I was lovin' the Cavatini Supreme. I was't a beer drinker in 1972. Too bad - 50 cents a glass.

Sometimes I feel that I don't know a thing about pizza. This is despite the fact that I have been to hundreds of pizza restaurants, own over 20 books on pizza, have made over a thousand pizzas at home and thousands more working in restaurants and have even attended pizza conventions in Las Vegas and New Orleans. And yet I'm always searching for the next pizza adventure, be it a nouveau twist or a nostalgic simplicity.

If there is one snooty clique that thinks they know everything about pizza, it is a society called the Vera Pizza Napoletana, or VPN. Here is a summary of their rules. They may seem strict, but they have actually loosened up over the years:

1. Only use 00 flour
2. Must use fresh cake yeast
3. No rolling pin may be used
4. Must use Italian grown San Marzano tomatoes
5. Must use buffalo mozzarella
6. Must take a somewhat pricey course to get certified
7. Must be cooked in a wood burning oven. Gas ovens were later allowed under separate rules so that (my guess) they could sell more pricey courses
8. No fats may be used in the dough
9. The peel used to deliver the pizza into the oven must be wood or aluminum
10. Oven must be at least 900 degrees and cook time may not exceed 90 seconds

Now many consider me a pizza snob. As such you might think that I would embrace these rules. I doubt that my Pizza Hut from the 70's followed many - if any - of these rules. And I - in my less snobby time - loved that pizza. I'm also sure that I could love it today. I will attempt to make a tasty - yet simple - thin crust pizza by breaking all ten of these rules. Here is my counter to these rules:

1. I will use King Arthur's Bread flour. This flour is awesome for pizza.
2. Will use Baker's Corner Fast Rising yeast which I purchased at Aldi for 79 cents for a 3-pack
3. Pizza Hut used to run their dough through a sheeter. I will use a rolling pin to ensure my thin crust pizza is indeed thin. 
4. Will use a can of canned tomato sauce - though not all canned sauces are the same.
5. Will use packaged whole milk mozzarella. While I normally use fresh mozzarella in my pizzas my goal today is to imitate a legacy Pizza Hut thin crust pizza.
6. My training exceeded the cost of getting certified if you consider all the restaurants I visited, all the books I read, the conferences I attended and the time I spent researching pizza. And after all that I'm not certified!
7. I wish I had a wood burning oven. Pizza Hut used gas, I owned an electric oven, now I have gas. Both work. If your pizza doesn't come out to your liking don't blame the oven.
8. I am sure that there was some fat in the Pizza Hut Thin 'n Crispy dough. I fear it was shortening. I never use shortening for anything, ever. My dough will contain a little fat, I'll talk about that in Part II.
9. I have a peel made of neither wood nor aluminum that I've been using for over 20 years. More on that later.
10. My oven will be set to 500 degrees. I'm giving it all she's got captain.

Flour, water, salt and yeast are all that's needed for a dough. I'm showing olive oil and I'll sneak in another fat in Part 2.

Four simple ingredients for the sauce - tomato sauce, oregano, olive oil and sugar

This post appeared with the help of Joe F. I had been spending my summer doing summer things. That did not make Joe F happy. He wanted another post, said it had been too long. So I tossed away a beautiful summer evening just so that I could get this out.

Parts of that previous paragraph are true.

In a few weeks (or sooner, depending on how much of a pain in the ass Joe F. is) in Part 2 of this article I will try to replicate the Thin 'n Crispy recipe.

Do Dried Beans Go Bad?

I have a philosophy: "Given that there is an easy way and a hard way to do something, if the easy way was better there wouldn't be a hard way." That's why people who know me know that I never do anything the easy way. And so it is with dried beans. Why open a can when you can soak them overnight and cook them for two hours?

A few months ago I made my famous Bean and Pasta Italian soup. The Italian name is "pasta fagioli" but the American pronunciation is so stupid (pasta fazool, I've even heard say, "fazoo") that I refuse to play that game.

Anyway, this has been a can't-miss recipe for me. But a few months ago it disappointed me when some of the beans were crunchy. Not tooth-breaking crunchy, but they definitely had bite. WTF?

Quick background: What are the best beans? The healthiest? The most fiber? The tastiest? The answer is that I have no idea. Online information has often differed from the package info. So for the past several years - whatever it is I'm making - I mix five types of beans in a container and those are my beans. Doesn't matter what I'm making, if it's beans (lentils are different) that's what I use.

My translucent container doesn't photograph well but this is my 5-bean collection - kidney, great northern, black, pinto and navy.

Back to my fazoo. So I played with my soup and identified the smaller beans as the ones that tasted under-cooked. Those would be the navy beans. I searched online to see if navy beans had a reputation for being hard. Not really. Most cooks had no problem with navy beans but in one case I saw that someone suggested that their beans might be old.

Old? Really? These are dried beans. They could be used as gravel. They're hard when they're new. But I needed to get to the bottom of this. A test was needed.

With a 2014 expiration date the beans on the left were probably bought in 2013. The beans on the right were bought on Tuesday. That's about a 5 year difference.

The plan was quite simple. Take new beans, take old beans. Soak them overnight. Cook them. See if they're different. Don't worry, I'll find some way to complicate this.

I put the beans in cups to prepare for overnight soaking. Whoa - the 2014 beans on the left look darker and old. Maybe age does make a difference.

One if the issues I struggled with was how to cook them identically? Cooked on the stove I would need two identical pans on two identical burners adjusted to exactly the same temperature to get the exact same slow boil. No, I wasn't willing to baby sits beans for two hours.

Then I thought about ways to cook the beans in the same pot, but being able to keep them separate. To do this I would make a cheesecloth "sack" for old and new beans and throw the sacks in the same pot. So I tried making one and decided against it. The beans in the center of the sack were surrounded by other beans instead of freely-moving water.

Finally I looked in the pantry and noticed that I had two nearly identical loaf pans, the only difference being a strip of high-temp automotive gasket sealer on one of the pans.

After soaking, the suggested cook time varies by source from 30 minutes to two hours. I went for two hours to give them every chance to cook through. The gasket sealer is from a bread-baking experiment that I'm not sure I want to share.

The cooking went off without a hitch. Once the beans had cooled a bit I tasted them. I went back and forth to make sure that I wasn't chewing on an "outlier bean" that was especially hard or soft. No doubt about it. The 2014 beans were harder. The 2019 beans were very soft, arguably overcooked. But no complaints from me. When cooking beans I will always err on the side of overcooking. There is nothing desirable about beans al dente.

The 2014 beans (left) and 2019 beans after cooking. The beans on the right look more tender, don't they? Not sure? More to come.

So I could end it there. Beans do get old, expiration date does matter, we can all go home now. But I wanted to create a visual. So I gathered up the apparatus shown below: A yardstick, a can of tuna, a heavy 28-ounce meat pounder, a cutting board and our beans.

To demonstrate the difference between the old beans and the new I dropped a meat pounder from a height of 1 3/8" on a cluster of the 2014 navy beans and the 2019 beans See below. The tuna can, standing 1 3/8" tall, was my height gauge.

When the meat pounder was dropped on the 2014 beans it nearly bounced off. But when dropped onto the fresh dried beans it mashed most of them.

So now I am a believer. This weekend I will toss any beans more than one-year old and will replace them. Then I will make sure that I rotate my stock. Nothing lasts forever, not even rock-hard navy beans.