Springfield Locavore

Homemade Pizza!

We've got tomatoes. Lots of tomatoes. We planted 8 Brandywine heirloom tomato plants, and they have been producing plenty of massive, tasty, gorgeous red tomatoes! I like tomatoes, but I can only eat so many straight off the vine! We needed to find a way to use them up in large quantities.

Enter our desire for local pizza!

Recently, when our hankering for pizza has been too strong to ignore, we've been ordering from Fratello's Pizza & More. True, the food isn't local, but the business is 100% local, operated by a couple of brothers (thus the name, since "brother" in Italian is "fratello"). They're very friendly, and I've had some nice conversations when I've stopped in there to pick up a pizza.

However, as I said, the food isn't local. To get a truly local pizza, we'd need to make it ourselves.

Awhile back, when I was shopping in Food Fantasies, I saw in the refrigerated food section that they had bags of pizza dough. Take it home, roll it out, add pizza sauce, cheese, and toppings, then bake. Easy!

We decided to try it. Dawn had experimented with making some tomato soup a couple of days before that, and we still had some of that left. It was a bit thick, so we figured it might work as a pizza sauce. With some cheddar cheese from Ropp Jersey Cheese and some sweet red pepper as a topping, we had a pizza!

Our first attempt was reasonably good, so we decided to try again, with a few changes. First, we wanted to use mozzarella cheese. The cheddar cheese just didn't have the right taste, and it wasn't as "sticky" as mozzarella cheese. Second, we wanted to make a real tomato sauce, rather than just repurposing a thick tomato soup. Third, we wanted to make our own pizza dough. The flour would still be non-local, but at least the dough would be truly homemade.

Getting local mozzarella cheese turned out to be easier than I expected. I knew that Ropp Jersey Cheese was planning to start making mozzarella cheese last winter/spring, but I had never seen any at their booth at the farmers' market. So when I went to the Old Capitol Farmers' Market on Saturday, I asked Jessica whether they had any mozzarella cheese. She got a bit of a sly look on her face and said, "Maybe." :-) It turns out they do make mozzarella cheese, but in very limited quantities, and you have to ask for it. She only had 1 pound that day, and she said they only have it about every third week! Yikes! (And now I've just given away the secret! See how much I do for you, Internet?) Well, in any case, we now had mozzarella cheese!

Dawn found an easy pizza sauce recipe on the Internet, so we made up a batch, using most of our tomatoes (from our garden and from the CSA), as well as basil from our garden. It was easy, but it took far longer than I expected to reduce to the right thickness, so be sure you make your pizza sauce well in advance!

Lastly, there was the pizza dough. Dawn bought some whole wheat flour (from Bob's Red Mill in Oregon, which is only within our 100-mile radius if you measure with very long miles).

On Monday evening, were ready to make homemade pizza! But the dough failed to rise.

Well... crap.

The dough did eventually rise, but by then it was well after dinner time. Actually it was bed time! We put the dough in a bag in the refrigerator and vowed to try again the next day.

So yesterday we rolled out the dough, added the pizza sauce and the mozzarella cheese, then finally popped it in the oven! We decided to go without any toppings, to get a better idea of whether we liked the taste of the crust and the sauce.

About 12 minutes later the pizza was ready! Here's my review:

• Cheese: Great!
• Sauce: Good!
• Crust: Not bad!

Okay, so "not bad" isn't the highest of praise. Still, it was acceptable. Being whole wheat, it was a bit heavy. Plus, we didn't preheat the pizza stone in the oven, so the center of the crust was not as crispy as we would have liked. We'll experiment to see whether we can come up with a better crust, but even if we can't, this still made for a pretty good pizza, even without any toppings!

We've got more mozzarella cheese. And more pizza sauce. And there's a green pepper in the garden that's looking ready to harvest. Would it be wrong to have pizza two nights in a row?

Taking 'Local' Back

This article at Good Times, Taking 'Local' Back, discusses another aspect of the topic of my earlier post about corporations abusing the term "local". It's not just local foods, but "buy local" campaigns in general that are finding very non-local corporations attempting to horn in on the action. Here's an excerpt:

Carrying local produce in their stores may promote environmental sustainability and even help local producers' pocketbooks, Heiman says, but it is still detrimental to a town's overall economic sustainability, since much of the profits generated are siphoned by Whole Foods' corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas. Furthermore, he says, with retailers like Wal-Mart using the word "local" as a promotional tool, and the London-based international bank, HSBC, touting itself as "the world's local bank," the Whole Foods campaign is only the tip of the iceberg.

The Wal-Mart in Gilroy—the nearest location with a produce department—does carry locally grown produce. However, the local growers, according to a representative from the produce department who asked not to be named, are a Dole location in Salinas and an Earthbound Farm location in San Juan Bautista. Dole's official website proclaims that it is "the world's largest producer and marketer of fresh fruit and vegetables," while Earthbound's site says it is "the nation's largest grower and shipper of organic produce."

"They're really trying to leverage the word, 'local,'" Heiman says. After all, he says, if a company claims to be "the world's largest" or "the nation's largest," how local can it really be?

Wal-Mart is local now? Wal-Mart?! Yeesh!

Garrick Veenstra and Lindsay Record on WUIS

Our local PBS radio station, WUIS, is holding a pledge drive this week, teaming up with the Buy Fresh Buy Local Central Illinois campaign of the Illinois Stewardship Alliance. If you make a pledge to WUIS, you will receive a WUIS Buy Fresh, Buy Local Membercard, which provides discounts at numerous area restaurants.

While I was listening during my drive home from work, I was pleased to hear that they had Garrick Veenstra (of Veenstra's Vegetables) and Lindsay Record (of the Illinois Stewardship Alliance) on the air helping out!

If you enjoy listening to WUIS, but haven't yet made a pledge, please do so now. You can make a pledge online. I'm donating $10 per month, which is a painless way to donate $120 to the cause!

By the way, I have an update about Garrick and Andy's CSA, which I'll be posting soon!

Buying Local from Watt Bros. Pharmacy

Watt Bros. Pharmacy opened in 1938, but with Walgreens and CVS on nearly every block, not to mention Wal-Mart, it's a wonder they've been able to remain in business. With my interest in helping to strengthen community ties (stoked by books like Bowling Alone and The Great Good Place), I figured I should transfer my prescriptions from the big chains to Watt Bros. They're right across the street from where I work, so it's not like it would be a great inconvenience! So after work last week, I took in a prescription that needed a refill.

When I told the pharmacist (I don't know whether it was John Watt or one of the others) my last name, Hartshorn, he told me that there's a cookie ingredient called Hartshorn ammonia (similar to baking powder). I knew that in earlier times a deer's antlers (i.e. a hart's horn) could be used to make ammonia, so this made sense.

The pharmacist asked where I lived, and when I told him, he not only knew where that was, he knew the woman who used to live there! Among other things, I learned that her son died just a couple of months after she did.

While we were talking, a man sitting behind the counter eating made a good-natured sarcastic comment. The pharmacist informed me that he was a smart-aleck orthodontist. I replied that I could have guessed the first part.

Even with all of the conversation, my prescription was filled faster than it would have been at a big chain. In addition, I learned some interesting things about my name, about the former owner of my house, and about at least one orthodontist.

In over 20 years of getting my prescriptions filled at big chain stores, I've never returned with a story to tell.