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Good Eats: Flat is Beautiful V
Alton continues his ongoing appreciation of flat food by revisiting pizza. An earlier episode offered a pizza recipe that takes overnight, requiring a lot of planning, and produces a puffy crust. But some like a cracker-like, thin crust, and some like a pizza that takes less time. For both of these groups Alton has a solution: a thin, crispy, Neapolitan style pie. It's very hard to make a pie like this at home, because to do it right one needs a very hot brick oven. But Alton thinks he has the answer, offering three different approaches to
Grilled Pizza.
Recap
Two people share pizza in a restaurant, as a sky-high viewpoint looks down on them. One notes that the other likes the pizza from that show “Tastes Good” or whatever it's called. His friend agrees, but states that while Alton's crust is thick and chewy, tonight she wants a pizza with a thin and charred crust like she had in Italy...
Read the full recap
Episode Quotes
First Diner: (about Alton and his pizza crust) That guy is a complete dork!
Second Diner: Well, yeah! But his crust is really good. It's chewy and puffy, bu tonight I want thin, and kinda charred, like the pizza we had in Italy.
Alton: We will strive to fold the important characteristics into the pizza that we call... Good Eats!
Alton: (about active dry yeast) You dry up the little bugs in such a way as to basically encapsulate live cells inside tiny little pods composed of dead yeasts – yechh. When dissolved in water, the dead cells wash away, and the living emerge, Phoenix-like, from suspended animation.
Alton: Sure, you could, potentially, file off the door lock and bake during the self-clean cycle, when temperatures top 800° F, but... that particular modification would void your warranty and quite possibly, your homeowner's insurance. Besides, 800° F is just medium warm for a real pizza oven.
Alton: This is my favorite peel, Emma. Emma Peel? You know, you youngsters are just going to have to look that one up!
Alton: (about preparing pizza over a gas burner) Don't worry about holes. They're rustic; people pay extra for that.
Cultural References
Alton describes the activation of dry yeast as a “Phoenix-like” transformation. The legend of the Phoenix likely originated in ancient Egypt or India. Various cultures adapted it, including the Persions, the Greeks and the Romans. A phoenix lives for anywhere from 500 to 1,000 years, at the end of which it bursts into flames and is reborn from its own ashes. Or, possibly, its offspring is reborn. The adjective “phoenix” has come to symbolize things thought dead (or, at least, moribund) that seem to miraculously regain life.
Alton has named his favorite pizza peel “Emma”.
Emma Peel is a fictional super-spy from a 1960s British television series entitled “
The Avengers". She and her partner John Steed routinely thwarted some of the strangest villains imagined and looked great doing it. Dame Diana Rigg played the role on television. A later, extremely forgettable film cast Uma Thurman.
Snatching back the towel, Alton cries that “this was no boating accident!” Under Alton's towel was simply a few dough balls, but the scene he's recalling occurred in the 1975 “when animals attack” thriller Jaws. Mayor Vaughn, desperate to protect the reputation of a town sustained by tourism, pressed to have a cause of death declared as a boat propeller mishap. But when shark expert Matt Hooper examines the remains, he immediately realizes that “this was no boating accident” from the nature and severity of the injuries.