For the second time in the past month and the second time in my life, I just made no-knead pizza dough. It has thrown my conceptual world into a tizzy.

Since I was about 20 years old, I’ve made pizza by making a dough, kneading it, and cooking it. People (= my wife) claim to like it. But the Internet was all abuzz with the no-knead approach, so I of course tried it, just as I tried eating Diet Coke and Mentos together, poured a bucket of ice over a stranger’s head, and bit some kid’s finger. The recipe is 100% weird.

The ingredients are basically the same: three cups of flour, some water, salt, and 1/8th of a tsp of yeast. Yes, you read that right: 1/8th of a teaspoon. My teaspoon measuring set stops at 1/4. So I had to fill that one up, and gently blow on it until it looked half full. Or half empty.

You then mix all the ingredients together but just until they’re combined. As you may have guessed already, you do not knead it. Instead you put it in a warm place for 22-24 hours. You then take it out and once again you do not knead it. You pull it into shape, put on sauce and cheese, and bake it at 500F for 8-10 minutes, or until it’s a little crunchy on the bottom.

Then you take it out carefully because it’s very very hot and the melted cheese is designed to attach itself to flesh like a pain magnet. And, now at last you knead the shit out of it.

Nah, now you eat it. And it tastes more like pizzeria crust than my fluffy kneaded dough. Crunchy, chewy, slightly charred.

The process shoots to hell my mental model of how gluten forms. I thought molecules rubbed against each other and got entangled like barbed wire riding a packed rush hour train, forming long chains of stringy gluten. The kneading did the entangling. But in this recipe nothing does. Gluten apparently is the result of bread’s need for intimacy.

And you know what else doesn’t make sense? The recipe says to put crushed canned tomatoes on top as the sauce, rather the cooked concoction I’ve been making. And that sauce is better, too.

What next? Chickens that lay omelets?

BTW, here’s the recipe I used. Please note that it doesn’t require kneading the dough.

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Socrates: The Extra Parmesanides

The unexamined pizza is probably still worth eating.

St. Augustine: Deep Dish Confessions

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed.

The mind commands itself and meets resistance.

The body commands pizza and it arrives within thirty minutes or it’s free. [“…ut servirem domino deo meo”]

Nietzsche: Thus Spake ‘Za-thruster, the Pizza Delivery Guy

The pizza that does not kill me makes me stronger.

If you gaze into a pizza, the pizza stares back at you. If you’re tripping balls.

Martin Heidegger: Being and Slices

“Dasein’s Being is always Being-toward-Pizza. Pizza stands before us as an ex-static project that discloses that which is Dasein’s ownmost, for no one can eat your pizza for you.”

Bonus for Librarians: Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Pizza Science

1. Pizzas are for use

2. For every eater, his pizza

3. For every pizza, its eater

4. Our warming oven saves time for the eater

5. Our pizzas are totally organic

Isaac Asimov: Three Rules of Pizzas

Suggested by Andromeda Yelton (@ThatAndromeda). Thanks!

1. A pizza may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A pizza must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A pizza must do ABSOLUTE NOTHING to protect its own existence as long as such lack of protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

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