This trick works so well I thought I’d repeat/revise an earlier blog post, this time with pictures.

Our cob oven makes great pizzas. Why? High temperatures. You just can’t make good pizza in a home oven. Or so I used to think.

One evening I invited some friends over for an outdoor pizza party but rain put a wrinkle in those plans. I remembered that Josey Baker had some instructions in his book Josey Baker Bread on how to make pizza in a home oven, so I decided to give it a try. Baker credits this home oven technique to a San Francisco street pizza maverick who goes by the name PizzaHacker. I’m happy to report that it works so well that I wonder why I should bother to spend three hours tending a fire to prep the outdoor oven. Is pizza out of a wood fired oven better? Perhaps, but not by much.

The PizzaHacker’s method is simple. Here’s what you do:

1. Preheat an oven oven safe skillet (I like cast iron) over high heat on a burner. Put a little oil in the pan.

2. Plop your shaped dough into the skillet. Top your pizza while it cooks in the skillet for three minutes.

3. After three minutes stick it under the broiler for another three more minutes or until done. That’s it. This method works much better than trying to bake pizza on a pizza stone.

4. Take the pizza out and let it cool down for a minute. Then slice and enjoy.

I wish I had known about this technique before I bought an expensive pizza stone as this method works much, much better.

There’s a new afternoon transgression around the Root Simple compound: the caffé shakerato. A shakerato is an iced coffee mixed in a cocktail shaker. Making one is much easier than hauling yourself down to that dreaded temple of  middlebrowedness whose green siren logo will lead us all to financial ruin and sugar-induced comas. No, you don’t need another Frappuccino.

Making a shakerato is simple. Brew some strong coffee (espresso is best, but I don’t have an espresso maker). Let the coffee cool down (this is important–add the ice too soon, and the coffee gets diluted) and put it in a cocktail shaker with some half and half, sugar to taste and a pinch of salt (everything tastes better with a pinch of salt). Add some ice, throw your hands in the air and shake like you just don’t care. Pour, straining out the ice, of course, and enjoy. You’ll find that the combination of shaking and milk will create a satisfying, frothy beverage.

Add a jigger of dark rum to the shaker if you want to upgrade to a cocktail.

This recipe is a dumbed-down version of the one I found in obsessive cocktail guru Dave Arnold’s book Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail. So far I’ve only allowed myself to check Liquid Science out of the library. I fear that if I owned it I would fall down a deep mid-life crisis cocktail hobby hole involving some of the gadgets and ingredients Arnold details in the book: $8,000 centrifuges, canisters of liquid nitrogen and potentially hazardous beverage experiments involving powdered quinine sulfate.

* Do you have Desperado stuck in your head now, like I do? Sorry about that.