You Can't Win 'Em All

The recent Chicago-style deep dish pizza turned out great.  This weekend I was in the mood for a thin-crust pizza, so I decided to try my hand at another new recipe.

I found a recipe for St. Louis Style Thin Crust Pizza originally printed in Cook's Country.   That's usually a pretty reliable magazine, so that pizza recipe seemed like a good bet.  Reading over the sauce part of the recipe, though, I found it rather uninspiring.  So, I went with the crust recipe as written and did some changes to try to make the sauce a bit zestier.  Having made those changes, I cleaned up one of our pizza stones, mixed up some pizza dough and sauce, and set about making some thin-crust pizza.

The result, while not exactly bad, was one of the most forgettable pizzas I've ever had. The crust was nicely crisp at the edges, but not quite as much so as I'd have liked toward the middle, and the only flavor that really stood out was the bit of corn meal. The sauce was a tiny bit better, but not enough so to raise the pizza above mediocrity.

It was a bit of a disappointment, but that's part of cooking.  While I certainly have my share of favorite, go-to recipes, I don't like sticking with tried-but-true all the time. Trying other things is the only way you have of possibly finding something even better, and when a new recipe doesn't work out, at very least it makes you better appreciate the tried-but-true. So, in the big scheme, no real loss.  Plus, my track record has been pretty good. 

Yesterday I tried out 5 new recipes, four of my own creation (4 1/2 if you count my tinkering with the sauce for this pizza recipe), and three of them were quite good.  Stretch things out over the past week or two and the hit/miss average is even better.  In that time, I've made some pretty good stuff:  the mango beef, potato soup, the Szechuan chicken and cashews, the split pea soup, the deep-dish pizza, ginger snaps, chili, the ham and bean soup, some good curries, the lasagna and a bunch of other good stuff.  A forgettable pizza and a pumpkin side that failed utterly aren't too big a deal compared to all those successes.

I'm still looking for a good thin-crust pizza recipe, though.  Any suggestions?