My(π) > Your(π)
If you have lived in more than one area during your life you may have experienced a human characteristic that can be used to traverse an interesting culinary journey. The journey is one of both cooking and eating and it opens the door to new tastes and new creations. I call it The Pizza Principle and here is how it works.
Say you’ve been living in your town for sometime and you have been getting pizza from the same shop for years. Why? Because that shop has the best pizza in the area. Thin crust, great sauce, just the right amount of cheese. The best!
Then you move to a new home in a different town. Pretty soon, maybe even on moving day, you want to order a pizza. You are no rube so you check with one of your new neighbors to find out which of the local pizza parlors is the best and order the pie. Turns out the pizza’s OK but not quite as good as the pizza you could get in the old neighborhood. Even so, the new place is near by and not so bad, really, so, over time, it becomes your regular place. After a few months you may find that the pizza that this place is making seems to be getting better. You suspect that maybe some customers made suggestions or maybe they hired a new pizza maker, got a new ingredients supplier or who knows? You are just happy that you can get really good pies not far from home!
One of your friends from the old neighborhood invites you for dinner and promises to grab a couple of pizza’s from your old favorite shop. It’s good to catch up with your old pals, the beer is crisp and the pizza is…….well…..OK, but not quite as good as you remember. What happened? Did you catch the old place on an off night? Did THEY change pizza makers or suppliers? Maybe, but more than likely the only thing that changed was you. Your favorite pizza place is now the one in your new neighborhood!
Why? It’s due to the Pizza Principle. As long as a pizza is not just plain horrible, if you eat it often enough it will become, if not your favorite, at the very least, one of your favorites.
The Pizza Principle: Given a certain minimum level of quality, the pizza you eat most often becomes your favorite.
My(π) > Your(π)
This works with all sorts of foods, not just pizza. Basically, you just get comfortable with whatever you eat on a regular basis. In a way, except for some wired-in preferences like sugar, fat and salt, just about everything we eat is, to some extent, an acquired taste.
Not convinced? Think about your first taste of beer. Fizzy, tart, tangy, burns your mouth a bit….yuk! However, if you powered through that unpleasantness a few more times….voilà!…you like beer! Don’t drink beer? How about coffee? Same idea. Sushi? Liver? Escarole? Bitter Melon? If it’s decent quality and you eat it enough times you are going to like it!
So How Can We Leverage The Pizza Principle In A Hack?
The Pizza Principle opens up an opportunity for us to expand the culinary universe we and our families can traverse. It gives us the ability to take some of the foods and seasonings we normally serve and modify them in ways small and large to bring new meals and new versions of old meals to the table. This could be something as simple as selecting a single item and introducing it to entrées for the first time. Maybe adding a small amount of soy sauce to beef barley soup or a tablespoon of ketchup to the gravy we make from a roast. Or you could add something brand new to a familiar dish, say, using quinoa in place of the rice in your stuffed cabbage recipe. This could then be a stepping stone to introducing you or your family to plain quinoa as a side dish or quinoa based entrée at a later date.
The Pizza Principle is a key feature of the Chef Hacker philosophy and it is employed in many recipes but the real magic comes from learning to use the concepts and unleashing your own creativity on your own dishes. Why not work with me to incorporate The Pizza Principle into your culinary repertoire?