Friday, June 7, 2013

Sourdough Breadzza Semi-Disaster





Looks delicious, no?? Keep reading.

Once upon a time a baker on Fisherman's Wharf in San Fransisco started making sourdough bread.  There was something about the San Fransisco air that made the sourdough starter particularly awesome.  Eventually, it became a franchised, much-better-than-fast-food restaurant, and one of the most recent franchises opened on my neighborhood a few years ago.  My neighborhood NOT being on Fisherman's Wharf, with it's groovy sourdough yeast spores naturally zooming through the air or whatevs, so they fly in the sourdough "mother" weekly. On an airplane and stuff.

Crazy.

Crazy GOOD.

Anyway, the restaurant has a promo thingie, where if you check in on your smart phone on each visit, you earn a free loaf of bread per month for the first six months or something.  I dunno.  I didn't pay that much attention.  I heard "free bread" and was all in.  

So, I take my little guy (who finished 6th grade today, btw, so not that little, really) and his bestie there for lunch as a little end of the school year treat.  And guess what?  Today was a free loaf day for me, so, SCORE!

And, it's Friday, which just means PIZZA around here.  Often I make it from scratch (dough included), sometimes we order in, sometimes we go out to one of our favorite pizza places.  But something about my free loaf of sourdough made me a little giddy this afternoon, and I remembered that much of the USA eats French bread pizza, so why the heck not sourdough bead pizza?

Only problem was, 6 year old Miss Thing has an extremely loose, owie front tooth (as in it's sort of grotesque, even) and there was no way she was going to be able to bite though the super thick, crusty-crust that this bread is famous for.  Hmmm.  What to do?

Instead of the traditional French Bread Pizza sliced horizontally down the middle... Slice it in thick pieces like it was bread (cause, it IS!) and go from there...

But! Then I thought that maybe the sauce would make the bread all googy and soggy, and that wasn't appealing in the slightest.  So I hatched a plan.  Turns out that it was a good one.

I have this method of making a crostini-ish garlic bread, wherein I slice up a baguette, brush each slice with Olive Oil, sprinkle with garlic powder (yeah, that's totally cheating. Don't care) and basil, then top it off with fresh grated Parmesian Reggiano or Romano.  Then I put it under the broiler for just a few minutes-- careful or it will burn... and quickly-- et viola! Mi famiglia's favorite garlic bread.  The top of my garlic bread is toasted and crusty... Awesome.

So, huh.  Maybe if I made it like my garlic bread and THEN added the pizza sauce and toppings it would fend off the soggies?

Oh em gee, it totally did, youse guys.  And, since I placed it on the bottom rack for the second cooking, the bottom got crispy too, which is nothing to sneeze at, either. 

In truth, I was the only one who liked it.  I used tomato *paste* instead of sauce, hoping that would be thicker and less likely to sog it all up, and my husband said that that was too "bright" tasting (I beg to differ).  And then, Miss Thing also has a canker sore in addition to her terribly wiggly tooth, so not only couldn't she bite into it, she couldn't chew it, either (I made her oatmeal), and my son, halfway through his first piece sided with daddy and made himself some Ramen noodles (don't judge me.  Sometimes it's the only thing he WILL eat).

So, bummer.  

Honest to Pete, though, it WAS good.  And the method was inspired, even if no one liked the sauce, and complained about the cheese coverage or (rather) lack thereof.  Personally, I would eat pizza withOUT cheese, so I thought it was nice of me to include a little at ALL, really...  I think there were a few other complaints thrown in there, too, but I stopped listening at some point, as I'm prone to do.  Sigh. 

I swear every time I try to do something different from my five or six meals that I KNOW 3 out of 4 of them will happily eat, they get all revolutionary on me.  And then they wonder why I'm all grumpy about it and stuff.  I am so tired of always making the same things.  I know Miss Thing will grow out of it (mostly, it's her causing a scene these days while my eldest is suddenly eating Thai food where he couldn't handle a little black pepper on his baked potato a year ago), but, ugh.

Am I alone in generally refusing to cook a second "special" meal for a little one (I did make her oatmeal tonight, because she was obviously in pain and not just being stubborn)?  I was always expected to not only eat what was on my plate, but to do so without complaining, or that would be that, end of conversation, to my room, hungry and too bad so sad, thanks for playing.  

Discuss.



I'm going to give a piece to Andy.  He'll eat it.