Day 8: Cooking Class

I grew up in a house where we used cooking sheets for pizza. Once we even had a layered pan with holes in it to help the crust crisp up, I guess. My sister had a pizza stone a few years ago, and I was impressed. I once saw my cousin putting a pizza in the oven on a sheet of aluminum foil with no pan or sheet or anything. It blew my mind when he took it out with his bare hands.

Never in my life did it occur to me to ever put a frozen pizza directly on the oven rack.

First of all, because why would you? How dirty is that thing, probably? I know, there’s the argument about self-cleaning ovens. Even though my oven does have that self-cleaning feature, I’m not big on the idea of turning up my oven temperature to something that would approximate the surface of the sun.

If I cook a frozen pizza now — not something that happens weekly or anything, but frequent enough that I know my routine — I put it on a baking sheet lined with foil. This keeps the pizza a nice safe distance from any oven nastiness, and at the same time keeps the pizza off the sheet so it doesn’t have to be washed. It works pretty well. Maybe this kind of thing puts some people in the mind of Phil Hartman’s old SNL character The Anal-Retentive Chef, but it works for me and keeps a pan out of the dishwasher. Win win.

If you put your frozen pizza right on the oven rack, I can’t relate to your thinking. I guess whatever works for you and makes you happy is something you should just go ahead and keep on doing…unless you put mayonnaise on hot dogs, because then I’m pretty sure something is wrong with you.

My teaching partner and I had this discussion today from opposite sides of the issue. She posted it as a question on Facebook, and, at least at my most recent check, the number of misguided souls who put their pizzas directly on the oven rack are outnumbering the ones who live lives of measured common sense.

I have a hard time caring about losing this argument, though.

In the end we’re talking about frozen pizza.

By definition, they’re all a little disgusting.