U.S. Campus Life Pizza's many faces By Masako Yamada	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
ところ変わればピザも変わる 子羊の肉やトマトなどをトッピングした手作りの中東ピザ。

It all started when my boyfriend and I visited a pizza parlor in New York City. He had gone to that pizza parlor before and was convinced that it was the best pizza in New York. He had spoken fondly of this pizza many times while in Boston, and insisted on making an excursion from my parents' home in New Jersey to eat this pizza.

We decided to visit the pizza parlor with two of my friends from high school. This made him a bit nervous, since he was responsible for making three food-loving women happy and he wasn't sure whether his memory of the magic pizza was quite accurate.

The pizza was classic New York-style pizza, with a slightly crisp, slightly leathery crust. The pizza was already baked, and our slices were reheated in the oven. The cheese was thick and greasy. The mushrooms were canned. The garlic was powdered. The video game machines were from the 1980's. Yes, this kind of place is hard to find in Boston.

I liked the pizza, but I've had plenty of better pizzas with fresh homemade dough and light toppings, all charred to a delicate crisp in a wood-burning brick oven. Die-hard fans of New York-style pizza may say that these touches go against the essence of pizza, but when the chef really cares about making a high-quality product, it shows.

After we left the pizza place, we checked some nearby shops for dessert. We had great rice pudding and terrible coffee at a Middle Eastern diner. On our way out, we noticed that they were making their own kind of "pizza" called lahmacun. We saw a man carefully rolling out fresh dough into very thin rounds and putting on a light topping made with lamb. Almost immediately, my boyfriend regretted not having gotten the lahmacun, and he even suggested we take another (long) trip to get some. We knew this quest would have to continue in Boston.

We've since discovered that many Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries have this kind of pizza. The spellings vary from lahmacun, lambajeen, lamejun, lachmanjun and lahma jiin. We've eaten two versions at restaurants in Boston, one Turkish and the other Lebanese. They were both good. We then decided to try our hand at making it ourselves, sauteing ground lamb with onions and tomatoes, adding the distinctive accent of mint and flat-leaf parsley, and spicing it up with cinnamon, paprika and chili. We found the homemade version to be the best.

The results were so good that I decided to plan a party around this homemade lamb pizza. Several days after our initial experiment, I invited 10 people to my apartment for a "make your own pizza" night. I prepared fresh dough and lots of toppings. Everybody got some dough, rolled it out to his or her desired thickness and shape, and piled on different toppings. The pizzas were then baked in the oven.

The spicy lamb topping was the star of the evening, but I also provided more conventional toppings such as chopped green pepper, anchovies, olives and sausage. I knew it would be difficult (as well as boring) to satisfy everybody's appetites on just pizza, so I also made some other items. We enjoyed peeking at each others' masterpieces and commenting on each others' progress. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the pleasures of eating fondue with a group of friends. This was even more of a hands-on communal event, and it was easy on me, since everybody contributed to making dinner. The smoke alarm went off twice because of the extremely high heat required to bake pizza, but even this was entertainment.

The 10 of us crowded around a table designed for four and we continued to chat long after the pizza was gone. "Make your own pizza" night was a great success. There is street pizza slapped together by hard-working immigrants, yuppie pizza designed by chefs with culinary school degrees and homemade pizza assembled by individuals who know exactly what they want. Almost everybody likes pizza, whether it's dressed-up or dressed-down.

Shukan ST: Feb. 8, 2002

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