Ben Benner’s Blog

I made pizza, from scratch, recently. It was quite good.

I made the pizza dough from the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes cookbook, with the exception of swapping out 1.5 cups of all-purpose flour with 1 cup of whole wheat flour.

(Before)

(After)

The last time I made this dough I followed the recipe exactly that time and in the end felt that the dough could use a bit of whole wheat. The other thing I did this time around was to roll-out the dough much thinner to get a nice crispy thin-crust pizza.

The first time, I thought I had rolled it out enough for a thin-crust, not like cracker thin, but thin. Instead, I got a much more “original” crust style. It was good, but a little too doughy for my liking.

I followed Gina’s lead of putting the toppings under the cheese, with the exception of the tomatoes, which next time I will slice thinner and put under the cheese. My thoughts at the time was that the grape tomatoes on the top of the cheese would have a chance to release their water into the heat and keep the pizza from getting soggy at all.

More of my pizza pics.

Back to the grind.
Laterz

bdbenner food, pizza Cooking, homemade pizza, pizza

Gina and I had lunch @ Mandola’s yesterday, it is this great Italian deli that opened up a couple of years back.

They make fresh rustic bread, their own mozzarella cheese, they have a great selection of Italian cookies and they also have gelato. They have a few aisles of specialty Italian goods (sauces, pastas, cans/jars of preserved fishes).

They also have a restaurant part there as well, where you order sandwiches, pizzas, pastas, salads and some other yummy stuff.

We split a sausage and mushroom pizza and each had  their “Mista’ salads.

The staff member that brought us our food recognized the NetworkIP logo on Gina’s shirt. Now, I have had people think they knew NetworkIP, but really had a different company in mind. And the fact that Keith kept only saying “Network”, this led Gina and I to initially think he just had the name confused.

But then he mentioned Longview.

So, indeed Keith Nelson knew NetworkIP. He proceeded to mention some folks that work at Centris (formerly known as “Network Operator Services”). He had gone to culinary school in Austin and said that three years ago had met Amy (presumably a manager at Mandola’s, didn’t have a chance to ask) and he has been working at Mandola’s ever since.

He stated that he worked at “Network” while he was in high school doing odd jobs here and there and that he tried to be an operator at one point, but he just got bored. He at first mentioned that his family helped found Network, but I could not remember hearing about anyone with the last name of Nelson.

Turns out he is the nephew of one of the executives at Network Operator Services.

Keith was very surprised to hear that there was an Austin office, which actually isn’t that surprising as the Austin office isn’t listed anywhere, I guess it is a secret. (oops, spilled the beans.)

Anyway, he asked that Gina pass along a message to one of the executives that she works closely with.

It was an interesting chance meeting and from now on I will keep an eye out for Keith whenever at Mandola’s.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner Personal italian deli, Mandola's, pizza, six degrees seperation, weird