January 2010 Archives

There are already plenty of summaries and discussions of Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, so I'll make mine as brief as possible.

Your body wants to be a certain weight (called the "set point"). Normally your body handles all the food you eat by adjusting its metabolism to burn more or less energy, and by adjusting your appetite to make sure you eat more or less in the future.

Refined carbohydrates and sugar confuse this system. They stimulate production of insulin, which forces your body to store blood glucose as fat. Your weight increases, even above your set point.

Because what you ate got stored as fat rather than being used as energy, your body starves. Metabolism slows down, and appetite increases, just as it would in case of real malnourishment.

Eating carbohydrates and sugar puts you in a weird situation. On one hand, your body thinks it's starving, so you're hungry all the time and you're sedentary and listless. But on the other hand, your body is constantly being ordered to stockpile nutrients, so you're piling on fat pounds. And to make matters worse, you might get type-2 diabetes, heart disease, or even cancer (which it turns out seems to thrive on insulin).

Side note: all that research about how dietary fat makes you fat and causes heart disease? Turns out it was misrepresented, misinterpreted, or contradicted by better research.

Conclusion: avoid refined carbs and sugar. Do so and your body will return to its set point. As a bonus, you'll be less likely to get diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

I've been experimenting with pizza from scratch for about a year. I have not yet achieved the perfect homemade plain cheese pizza (my sauce is all wrong), but I have finally gotten the crust right. I let the dough ball sit out for a couple hours to rise, then I stretch it out into a round shape. I don't use a rolling pin or press it, because that squishes the bubbles from the yeast that make the crust light and airy. Then I slide it onto a sheet of parchment paper (that's the key to my method) and cook it on the lowest rack in the oven at 400 degrees for about 11 minutes. This cooks the dough all the way through and nicely browns the bottom of the crust.

Other experiments I've tried along the way:

• A preheated iron pan that you then stick in the oven. This did cook the dough, but the crust had no crispiness.
• Quickly browning the round in a pan, then sliding it right onto the rack in the oven. This might have worked, but I was never able to transfer it without ruining it.
• Cooking the crust almost all the way through in a pan, then putting on the toppings and broiling briefly in the oven. This was pretty good, but it was a lot of work (stretching the dough, then stopping to cook, then returning to ingredients, then cooking again), and it was very hard to get it consistently crispy; I often burned the bottom of the crust.
• A pizza screen. This was close, but the screen seemed to deflect or absorb too much heat, and I could never get the crispiness I wanted. Cleaning the screen was a nightmare.
• A cookie sheet. Easy but awful crust.

I never tried a pizza stone. From product reviews on Amazon, they never seemed to last more than a couple dozen uses, and they're expensive to buy and to ship. Also, success with a pizza stone seems to be entirely dependent on how close you can get your oven to 1000 degrees, and my 1950s electric oven is nowhere near competent for that task.

Next mission: a good, easy-to-make sauce. I'm currently using plain old spaghetti sauce, which costs less than store-bought pizza sauce and tastes just as good, but it doesn't have the bright taste of tomato and basil that I love on a good pizza.