Detroit pizza is a Motor City take on a Sicilian pie, rectangular and pillowy with cheese scattered edge to edge, toppings above it and sauce on top, generally in two thick bands. What I like about it is the lacy, almost frico-like intensity of the cheese at the edges, where it crisps against the pan. I generally make it with pepperoni, but a mixture of sliced onions and pitted Kalamata olives wouldn’t disappoint.
In Michigan, the pizza’s made with brick cheese, a cousin of Cheddar that takes its name from the bricks that were originally used to press the curds. But if you can’t find it, no matter: A mixture of Cheddar and low-moisture mozzarella will do, or white Muenster and mozzarella, or Monterey Jack and mozzarella. You just want a little bite in there, something that emphasizes the American side of the Italian American equation.
Legend has it that Detroit-style pizza is best made in a deep, blackened, blue-steel pan of the sort once used as drip trays in the city’s auto plants. (They’re available online.) But a plain baking pan will do just as nicely, and I’ve done well with a cast-iron skillet, too. My goal is to make at least a half-dozen of them before the weather’s too hot to run the oven at 500. I hope you’ll join me.
Other things to cook this weekend? Maybe a blueberry, almond and lemon cake for snacking; Cuban black beans with a mound of rice; soy-braised tofu; a nostalgic fried fish sandwich; a strained sweet yogurt; a Spring barley soup.
And I might go rogue with a burger griddled with onions and cheese, served on a buttered Bay’s English muffin spread with fry sauce and covered in pickled jalapeños, just because. (Try it!)
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Now, it’s nothing to do with nutmeg or oven-baked ribs, but you should read Ayelet Waldman, in The New Yorker, on the power of quilting.
There’s a fascinating piece in The Los Angeles Review of Books, by Melina Moe, on the rejection letters Toni Morrison wrote when she was an editor at Random House in the 1970s. “The material is interesting,” she wrote in one, “but not the writing: it needs a lot of work to give it the energy a story must have.” Yikes!
Bees are back!
Finally, here’s new St. Vincent, fuzzy and insistent, “Flea.” “Drip you in diamonds, pour you in cream.” I’ll see you on Sunday?
