Ah. Ignorance fought.
But then, some thin crust pizzas are sold square-shaped yet don’t have burnt corners. How is that problem avoided?
Yeah, you’re right. It’s much harder to achieve - the square ones I see have the sauce and fillings all the way to the edges, instead of leaving the crusts bare the way round pizzas tend to be. That helps.
I’m guessing that the square crusts are likely going to be rolled out mechanically in a sheeter, as they’re difficult to form evenly by hand as opposed to a round crust. But I’m just spitballing based on many years as a pastry chef.
I was going to say that when you’re stretching dough by hand, a circle is a lot easier than a rectangle.
Plenty of places around here (Boston area) sell pizza baked in rectangular pans, producing rectangular pieces. They don;t do anything special about the corners, but they’re not burned as far as I can see. Cristo’s in Salisbury Beach MA and Hampton Beach NH only sell rectangular pizza.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen “Sicilian Style” pizza in anything but rectangular pans. And I’ve sen that all over the country. Never saw burnt corners on those, although it might be because the dough is so thick.
Neapolitan pizzas started as a thin crust pizza, hand tossed which makes a circle naturally, and put in a round stone or brick structure bread oven, directly on the hot cooking surface, not in pans, then cooked quickly at high temperature. Squares would burn at the corners cooked in that style, not fit in the round oven any more efficiently than square pizzas, and far more efficiently moved around in the oven to ensure even cooking. The roundness of pizza evolved naturally. Square pizza is a hybrid.
They’ve discovered a stage on which a fellow named William Shakespeare once (possibly) performed. The evidence that he did so, the article says, isn’t complete but it’s strong.
The musical piece called Funiculi Funicula – I only know the name because it was one of my exercises on the trumpet – is a possibly familiar tune
I knew vaguely that it was associated with a funicular railway (Like the cog railway on Mt. Washington – hence the title), but didn’t recall the details.
It was written in 1880 to commemorate the opening of the funicular railway going up My. Vesuvius.
There are at least two interesting random facts:
1.) Composer Richard Strauss heard it in Italy and thought it was a folk tune, so he incorporated it into histone poem Aus Italien. It wasn’t – it was only six years old at the time, and the composers thought they ought to get royalties. So they took him to court and won, and they got their royalties.
A decade later Rimsky Korsakov did the same thing, using it in his Neapolitanskaya Pesenka under the impression that it was a folk song. I assume they sued him, too, but the article doesn’t say.
That’s what they get for composing something that sounded so traditional.
2.) I’ve been to Vesuvius, and didn’t remember a funicular railway. we took a bus, and didn’t even get close to the top. It turns out that the railway was destroyed by the eruption of 1944 and abandoned.
It’s a good thing Mount Washington doesn’t erupt.
Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died on the same day, June 25, 2009.
My Dad was a baker and we would have homemade pizzas rolled out onto rectangular cookie sheets, with custom toppings (like one section with shrimp, another with sausage), and I don’t remember the corners being burned.
Sheesh, indeed. And the women’s marathon wasn’t added until 1984. I walked down to the part of the route near where I live and got to see Joan Benoit run by. And I don’t believe her uterus fell out after the race.
It often has to do with the size of the oven. A huge, commercial oven is going to have more even heating than your oven at home does. I have tried and tried, following instructions to back chicken like my co-op does and theirs always turns out better. But they also run their big oven at constant temperatures all day and it has many, evenly spaced heating elements (gas burners). I can’t replicate that at home.
Cutting a rectangular (or rectangular-ish) pizza into wedges and then re-assembling it into a circle (or circle-ish) would only work if the cuts were quite precise (seriously, have you seen the level of quality control on pizza slices?), and would be a lot of work for the minimum-wage cooks, and it still wouldn’t have the melted-cheese strings connecting the slice to the rest of the pizza that modern American consumers expect. Sounds like a lose-lose to me.
Popeye’s Pizza Palace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp5hmksc0sw
Just don’t order a tamale pizza. That’s a culinary perversion that no self-respecting pizza chef will make.
A funicular is a system in which two rail vehicles on an inclined rail are connected by a cable looped around a pulley at the top of the slope, with each vehicle effectively functioning as a counterweight for the other. When one vehicle ascends the slope, the other descends. Motive power is supplied through the pulley at the top of the slope (or sometimes through a separate cable drive/pulley system at the bottom of the slope).
The Mount Washington cog railway is a cog railway. Instead of using the smooth wheels and rails for motive traction, it has a powered cog wheel that engages with a toothed rack positioned between the rails. It’s not a funicular: the train is propelled by its own locomotive and is not connect via cable to any other vehicle.
Well, I just called “Just Tires” to make sure they are open on Columbus Day, and I was put on hold. While on hold, I heard this interesting random fact: The car heater was invented by … (DRUM ROLL) … a WOMAN! Margaret Wilcox, to be exact.
So much for, “Women don’t know anything about cars.” LOL
The true story is more than enough for a good film and I’ve wondered why Lynch felt it was necessary to “embellish” it so much.
JFK and Aldous Huxley, November 22, 1963.
Also C.S. Lewis, same day.
But the face I came in to mention is about the title(s) of a book.
The movie was dreadful, but the book that The Mouse That Roared was based on was great, with two or three sequels. I’ve like them always. But the author, Leonard Wibberley, wrote many books, and while looking for a copy of one online, I found out that TMTR was the Anerican title that popularized the story. It’s title in the UK was The Wrath of Grapes. Most readers know about title changes in other works, Harry Potter anyone? But this is one that is new to me. Another Wibberley novel had two titles, The Seven Hills, and The Testament of Theophilus. I have copies of both of those.
Back in the 1970s, the Grateful Dead would sometimes play short excerpts from Funiculi Funicula in concert while waiting for equipment problems to be fixed. This is a good one.