Go for the gold: Pizza Party!

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Melina Hammer for The New York Times

Monday, February 8, 2021

Pizza Party!

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Can you spare me your lunch break? I’m asking because I think it’d be super if we could all make pizza dough today, let it proof in the refrigerator for a good long while, and then have a pizza party together later in the week. Say on Wednesday? Wouldn’t that be nice? To know that there are people making pizza all over the world, each pie slightly different, a snowflake made of dough, and all of us enjoying them together, apart?

You don’t have to have made pizza before. Here’s all you need to know to get started. You can make your pizza on a stone or a steel, on tiles, on the back of a sheet pan, in a cast-iron pan. And you can top the pie as you like: as a margherita pizza (above), say, or one covered with sweet and hot peppers.

Once you’ve got your dough, in fact, you don’t even need a recipe. You could make a pie with tomato sauce, mozz, pepperoni, pickled jalapeños and a drizzle of honey. You could make the sauce for penne alla vodka, and use it for a vodka pie, with low-moisture mozzarella and shavings of Grana Padano. Sausage and anchovies? Ham and pineapple? A calzone with store-bought cheesecake and strawberry jam inside it for dessert? I can’t wait.

For dinner tonight: pan-roasted chicken in cream sauce? Or salmon with anchovy-garlic butter? I do like this gingery fried rice with bok choy, mushrooms and basil.

And if I don’t cook it tonight, I will some night soon: steak Diane for two, and blender chocolate mousse for afterward, before a viewing of “Silver Linings Playbook.”

Many thousands more recipes to make this week are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. (West Indian lamb curry, anyone? Chickpea harissa soup?) Go browse our digital aisles and see what you discover. Then save the recipes you want to cook. Rate the ones you’ve cooked. And leave notes on the recipes, too, if you’ve discovered a shortcut or employed an ingredient substitution that you want to remember or share with fellow subscribers.

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As always, we are standing by to help, should anything should go wrong while you’re cooking or using the site and apps. Just drop us a line: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (If not, or if you’d like to send a dart or a mash note, write me directly: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it’s a long drive on a lonely highway from potatoes and ham, but this is a satisfying police report, from the Brainerd Dispatch in Minnesota.

It’s our bet that we need only five minutes to get you to fall in love with string quartets. Come read and listen. You’ll see.

What a nightmare of a story in The Cut by Bridget Read, about a very bad roommate situation in the West Village.

Allan Gurganus has a new short story in The Sewanee Review: “Unassisted Human Flight.” Read that.

Finally, with a hat-tip to Jon Pareles, here’s Alostmen to play us off, “Minus Me,” featuring Ambolley. I’ll be back on Wednesday.