I’m not really much of a cook. I mean, I can cook but I don’t really do it very much anymore. Like most guys, I almost never bake. Baking, I’m told, is a lot different than cooking in that one has to follow the recipe explicitly; whereas with cooking you can tweak some ingredients, measurements or even cooking time to change the taste.
Back in my previous life, X1 and I had decided we wanted pizza. This time, we weren’t going to pick up a pizza and we definitely weren’t heating up a frozen pizza from the grocery store. We would, as much as realistically possible for us as two college students, make it from scratch. Of course, this didn’t mean making the crust from scratch and hand-tossing the bed. We copied a recipe from a cook book and bought the ingredients from the grocery store.
By and large, it was pretty self-explanatory: buy a crust, add pizza sauce, cheese and toppings. Bake. Had we kept it this simple, if would have been fine. It would have been not unlike a Kraft Lunchables pizza, but edible nonetheless. However, we decided to be bold and add garlic – as the recipe called for. I don’t remember who said what, but the exchange went like this
“The recipe is calling for a clove of garlic”
“How much is a clove?”
“I don’t know. I guess this” as one of us held up a bulb of garlic.
“That seems like a lot.”
“Yeah but how is this,” as one of us broke off a clove “…supposed to cover a whole pizza?”
“Okay.”
Why not? It made sense.
Before I go any further, I need to explain that my sense of smell, is by far, my weakest sense. I don’t think it’s so much that I can’t smell things as much as it is that I was never taught how to identify certain scents. If I walk into a restaurant or a grocery store, for instance, I will get hungry; not realizing that the smells of certain foods will set off my appetite.
What would happen in the next few seconds is the reason I explained my inability to identify scents. As we pulled the pizza from the oven, it looked good; at least for or the few seconds that I could see it. There was a smell coming from the pizza so pungent that it made my eyes burn. What’s more, I could taste it; even though the pizza was a few feet away from my mouth.
Unfortunately, neither X1 nor I understood the difference between a clove of garlic and a bulb of garlic. In hindsight, we would have been fine of we just bought some minced garlic a spread “a pinch or so” ourselves. Unfortunately minced garlic was an alien concept to both X1 and I.
We realized right away what the problem was. The fact that we were guessing – with garlic of all ingredients – tipped us off. Had we been trying to kill a coven of vampires, this pizza would have been perfect. For human consumption? Not so much. We didn’t even attempt to eat it; but we had to wait until it cooled off before we could even throw it away.
This was the first, last and only time I’ve ever attempted to make a pizza from scratch.
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The article “pizza pessima” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.
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