“What’s your pizza dough recipe,” people often ask me. “Flour, water, yeast, salt,” I say. Whatever response they were expecting, this one is no doubt disappointing. It offers no solution to a mystery (how do you make pizza dough) nor does it offer any set of instructions to follow. Is that even a recipe? A list of ingredients? How to read my response? Ingredients baffle most of us — in food, in relationships, in politics, in writing. How do you do something? Here are the ingredients. Put it together. Simple. Confusing too.
Pizza dough, for some reason, mystifies. But why? Why are we mystified by this basic combination of ingredients? Nothing is as simple, I think, as dough or, in particular, pizza dough. And yet, nothing is as complex. What about room temperature? Water? Type of flour? Type of yeast? Technique? Oven temperature? To steam? Not to steam? All of this, of course, is outside the basic issue of dough and its four ingredients which is what the question asks at its core. The question is not interested in variables. What is your recipe? How do I make that? I spend a lot of time asking similar questions about different things. How do I make that? We are in a cultural moment where a large segment of the population is asking about other mysteries such as how do we make racial justice? Another part of our population asks how do we make ourselves safe during a pandemic? I ask these questions as well, but I also ask more personal questions of myself.
Grocery stores sell “premade” dough, which basically means someone (or some thing) already mixed the four ingredients together, wrapped it in cellophane, and put it in an open grocery refrigerator for sale. Mystery solved. You can buy premade pizza dough and cookie dough, but can you buy premade bread dough? Dough is slang for money. As is bread. Doughy indicates someone who is pale. Dough Boys were American soldiers in World War I. When one does well, one may be rolling in the dough. The Notorious B.I.G. sang “I love the dough.” Lil Wayne sang “Dough is what I got.” The move from pizza to war to money is an odd one. Most moves among food and the personal are odd. Food becomes conflated with other forms of desire, and in popular culture, mostly financial. “Y’all know y’all can’t buy sh*t,” Missy Elliot says in “Ain’t Got No Dough.” She’s right. I can’t. You can’t. Though what I mean by “sh*t” and what she means might differ greatly.
In the pandemic’s early days, there was a run on yeast and flour. Two vital ingredients or two perceived vital ingredients for riding out a virus at home. Everyone, stuck at home and scared about what they can’t see but what they know could kill them, wanted to bake. Baking eased anxiety. Now, according to one news story, the baking fascination has relaxed. Are we less anxious? We are not, of course. When people fear disaster, they want bread. They want the basic. They want dough. They want hyperbole as well. A pandemic is very real and very hyperbolic at once. The end of. The beginning of. You can’t buy sh*t. So make it at home. Baking, some say, is a form of expression, like writing. What we bake, like writing, is often meant to be shared. Baking bread can be intimate or it can be performance. Baking is a hyperbolic act we see on TV shows that foreground competitions or cake creations one admires but cannot eat. What is the value in making one’s own dough as opposed to buying the infamous and easy to acquire Trader Joe’s dough? Is there a symbolic pleasure to the mixture of four ingredients, the waiting for their rise and fall and rise again once they have formed a mass where live creatures eat sugar and fart bubbles, the baking of these ingredients into something hopefully tasty and fulfilling with maybe a “crumb” or, at the least, good texture? I don’t know. If there is symbolism, it’s a mystery to me.
The elasticity of the dough comes from gluten, formed when proteins stick together. I spend a lot of time thinking in terms of metaphor. Sticking together is one metaphor worth considering, particularly during a pandemic or a sudden awareness of racial injustice, or a marriage or relationship’s collapse. We must stick together. We will get through this; we will get through this together, our governor would say each night at the height of the pandemic. Elasticity may be a metaphor that I draw upon as well. Being flexible. Stretching. Changing. Dough changes. Dough can take on many shapes beyond the metaphoric money angle. Dough can become pizza, but also ciabatta, rolls, pita, baguettes, tortillas, biscuits, fry breads, khachapuri, lavash, jingalov, and so on. As bread, dough dies quickly, going stale after a short time, attracting mold, or it’s simply eaten. Four ingredients transform into an endless iteration. Four ingredients sit on the shelf or in the refrigerator, networked together (stuck together) as something new which previously they were not. This would seem to be the ultimate metaphor: to be something one or more than one person previously was not. Culturally, we tell metaphoric stories about caterpillars and cocoons in order to narrate growth and metamorphosis and change, but we never tell this specific story about dough. Dough is a metaphor for change (x becomes y) and relationships (stuck together; eventually gone stale). When I was married, I baked a lot of dough. Now that I am single, I still do. Am I stuck to something?
When I travel and am walking around in a new city, I like to look in the bakery windows at all the things made with dough: pastries, breads, pizzas, pies, cookies, cakes. These baked goods patiently sit in the window, as if performing for passerby, luring me in with their crusts and shiny glosses and flaky bodies and potential to taste good and satisfy. Dough wants to satisfy, and sometimes that’s all that matters — to be satisfied. I can admire dough from afar. I enjoy reasons to work with dough. My daughter requests hamburgers for dinner, so I make rolls. When I meet a woman, I want to impress her with flatbreads. When I bake, flour dusts my shorts, my shirt, falls to the floor and feels gritty on my bare feet, hardens on my hands in little cakes, sticks to the sink, nests into the counter, is ignored, must be scraped off. I’m not a baker. I’m not a bread expert. I’m not a professional. I’m not even an amateur. I’m someone drawn to dough. While I have many bread cookbooks, I know very little about making bread other than mixing four ingredients and waiting. I’m not following any specific recipes in those books I purchase. I don’t stress bake. Baking bread or pizza does not alleviate anxiety for me. Everything I do, it seems, runs counter to what I should be doing. Bake and feel better! I bake. I feel the same. As I’m told: I should move on. I should forgive. I should forget. I should using baking to deal with the stress of 2020 and all of its collapse. I think I’ve done all that already, but not in the way advice may suggest. I follow my own recipes and ingredients for anxiety or cultural pressures. Those recipes are my own mysteries. I made a pizza last night and have dough fermenting now for rolls. These two acts have nothing to do with any of the reasons others bake when life goes in the wrong direction. Life goes in the wrong direction all the time. Dough hasn’t solved life’s problems for me nor given me respite. Dough has given us so many amazing breads, but the world still is anxious. Dough satisfies all of us. We are still not satisfied.
Many years ago when I was much younger, I used to bike to Jaffa to stare into the Abulafia cases. At that time, I knew nothing about dough or making pizzas or what a flatbread or focaccia are or most of the world’s problems. At that time, I had never made dough or baked anything. In those oval like cases, I stared at sambusak — stuffed pies of potatoes and cheese -, small pizzas with eggs baked into the top, various pastries and cookies. Large ovens burned behind the cases, and when you place an order they ask: heat it up? Yes, heat it all up. Into the ovens go your purchase for a minute or so. They arrive warm, patiently sitting in a small paper bag, ready to be eaten on the street or a short walk away overlooking the Mediterranean where one can ponder the world and anxiety and eat something delicious at the same time. I have since taken my kids there to experience this moment of waiting for something pleasurable and satisfying to be placed in front of you. I took my kids there when everything around our family was moving in the opposite direction, toward more and more anxiety and failure, where my own waiting had stopped. It had stopped. I stared into those cases once again. My kids were only aware of the food given them. Nothing else. That, too, is metaphoric.
Dough narratives seldom pose dough as the problem. Something else around us is wrong, and dough is there to help. Dough should not make us angry, unless it does not rise or the pizza sticks to the peel, or the taste is off, or…or…or….there is always failure on the horizon when baking as someone who knows little about baking or when baking as a professional. Online, people do get angry about dough, often as much as they get angry over an individual killed for no reason other than the color of his or her skin. When Alex Krautmann shared on Twitter a picture of his bagels sliced vertically (St. Louis secret) thousands were outraged. One person called it a “class A felony.” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s preference for a toasted bagel was widely shamed as blasphemy. When Pete Buttigieg was running for the presidential nomination in Iowa, a fundraising email showed him with pizza cut into squares. A tweet about this email attracted many comments, but none about the campaign. People were angry with how the pizza (the dough) was cut. Failure exists over tradition (how to slice, don’t toast) and over presentation/performance as well. Failure is supposed to lead to change. It often leads to outrage. I don’t think Buttigieg’s failure to cut pizza properly into triangles led to his campaign’s failure. I don’t think making pizza and bread all the time led to marriage failure. But still. It only takes four ingredients. How can anyone mess up four ingredients? All of us, it seems. A flawed man writing to Medium and an eager politician share this failure. The performance failed. It’s not the dough’s fault.
Failure and change are basic metaphoric ingredients. I also think a great deal about change lately. Our culture is changing. Our days are changing. Our jobs are changing. People are changing, too, but maybe they should have changed a long time ago since the injustices in front of them are hardly new or novel. Those injustices repeat year after year, day after day, hour after hour; even after the changes have supposedly begun in our culture, the injustices sadly continue. The act of making dough is repetitive. Get the four ingredients. Mix them. Do it again the next time. Writing, too, can be repetitive, at least in my writing: return to issues, emotions, moments in order to continue thinking them through. Use metaphors to join the personal to the contemporary. Lean on popular culture and its own repetitions. I repeat. I repeat my dough mix. I repeat my writing. My books tend to repeat and turn back to ideas as a way to signpost but also as a way to build narrative. Narratives repeat. Once I was lost, now I am found. Once I hated, now I learned my errors. Once I failed, now I have changed. Relationships become repetitive as well. So what changes if all we do is repeat? If I repeat similar stories and ideas (as if I’m writing a larger project or indeed working through ideas), then does anything change? There are mysteries all around us, not just in how to make pizza dough. Our writing, at times, attempts to solve these mysteries by repeating itself. That is the reason I write. Facebook posts and tweets about racism, for instance, are that type of writing as each repeats anger and advice. So is this type of writing. I repeat themes and focuses so that various ideas will eventually come together and stick. I am talking about different mysteries, of course. And I’m not. Writing about pizza dough is not so much a writing about the mystery of how to make pizza dough. It’s a writing about many things that normally don’t stick together but maybe that should. I apologize, then, to those who have seen my Instagram and Facebook photographs of pizzas I’ve made, think I know something about making pizza, and then ask me: “What’s your dough recipe?” Four ingredients. Repeat them. That’s the entire story. It likely does not satisfy.
I’m thinking about those supposedly wrongly cut pizza slices Buttigieg’s campaign took sh*t for. Or that toasted bagel the Mayor of New York took sh*t for. Or all the sh*t I took for so many years as I made dough, baked the dough, cleaned up the dough, served the dough and saw it thrown out or ignored. I would remain unsatisfied. You can’t buy sh*t. No, you can’t. Then what the f*ck can we buy? I’m still not sure. I understand what our culture in this specific moment is metaphorically trying to buy. But then I think of all the anger and outrage at every gesture directed at the metaphoric dough that motivates this repetitive writing. So much sh*t. A campaign ad. A marriage. A series of relationships. A moment of baking in a kitchen in a 1949 house in a hip residential area of Lexington, KY with two kids waiting for their dinner. Will my pizza or rolls satisfy them? All the metaphors stuck together. What can we buy? You can’t buy sh*t.
