Dear Omid,
Thank you for your reply and Best Wishes. Yes, well spotted. I have an interest in wild yeast sourdough management [non refridgerated]within a commercial setting. I remember Marco Parente mentioning that commercial operators often use 3 different temperature controlled areas at progressive stages of the doughs formation journey. Most trials [ room temp ] I have observed from members practice a ferment temperature and then a proof temperature prior to firing, albeit at various temperatures and duration. I thought, mistakenly, that your introduction of a third temperature phase [ seemingly a progressive ferment ] was maybe born from spending some time `behind the scenes` at Pizzeria Bruno and observing the different dough management that a commercial setting demands. Omid, I will now stop playing detective and go back to making dough!.
Kind Regards,
Barnstable
Dear Barnstable, this morning, after I read your above-referenced reply and prepared some dough, I went back to bed as I was still tired. I had a very vivid and illuminating, yet baffling,
pizza dream, which seemed to take a very long time to unfold as I was asleep. This dream of many colors and dimensions was, I believe, triggered by reading your post! If you allow me, I would like to share the dream with you. And, to do that, I will need to somewhat rephrase the account in order to make it intelligible without, hopefully, falsifying it. In the dream, I encountered four philosophers: Patrick Pidgeon (a college professor under whom I studied for a number of years), Martin Heidegger (known for his ontological studies on "being" and "time"), Friedrich Nietzsche (who wrote extensively on the theme of "art" and the psychological "transformations" associated with it), and Søren Kierkegaard (for whom lack of "passion" in the modern age was a central theme). As I was in a dark room sitting before the philosophers, the first one began to speak.
§1. Patrick Pidgeon: Since the role of language is tremendous, you need better formulation of the concepts
"point of pasta",
"fermentation",
"levitation",
"maturation", and
"time". [There were more concepts which I can not remember.] They need to be precisely articulated without losing the ground on which they stand. Without them, you are not making pizzas, but
accidents. Keep asking yourself what are the questions [or problems] to which these concepts are the answers. Formulate your questions carefully, as wrong questions will beg for wrong answers!
§2. Next, Heidegger took the floor: "Time" is not merely a "quantity" of something, but a "quality" that is begot through its passage. [I assume one can entertain the same thought in respect to "temperature".] A burden of the Western societies have been their misconception of time . . . always finding something to count . . . the number of wrinkles on one's face, the number of calories one consumes, one's weight, the number of hours to ferment dough, the maximum number of pizzas prepared in minimum amount of time . . . never thinking that time is expressive of "significations", of "potentials", of "possibilities" [
posse ("to exist") +
habilitās ("being capable") = "capable of existing"] of being-in-the-world. [Heidegger often viewed "being" as a modality, as opposed to an entity or a thing.]
§3. Next, Nietzsche made himself heard by reading a well-known passage, which I quote verbatim below, from one of his books:"What? Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this—reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity. . . . That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue to work and do research scientifically in your sense. . . . —an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more—that is a crudity and naïveté. . . . A 'scientific' interpretation of the world,
as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in
meaning. . . . An essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world. [Suppose] that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a "scientific" estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is 'music' in it!" (
Gay Science, 373)
Creation of a work of art, such as the Neapolitan pizza, fundamentally involves re-creating your self and co-evolving with that which you create. That which you create re-creates you as much as you create it! After all, what is the meaning of art? What is it good for? To what purpose? What was the problem to which art offers to be a solution? What is the human impulse which turns against itself, against life, without art?
Consider artists such as Michelangelo, Mozart, Goethe, even Einstein who was a scientist, and ask yourself what all these great souls had in common in their acts of creating? They were able to overcome—not depreciate—their impulses. They were able to harmonize their passions and reason; they were able to organize the disarray of their impulses, giving style to their own characters; they were masters of their impulses; they were able to overcome—not kill—their animal nature; they were able to sacrifice [make sacred], spiritualize, and sublimate their own impulses to new heights where they could see the world from new perspectives. They knew that mastering their passions was pertinent to a "suffering" that breeds strength and depth of soul. They were able to be tolerant not out of weakness, but out of self-cultivated strength. They gave to others not out of pity or impoverished needs, but out of the richness of their characters. Where they found their well-being, others often find their own ruination! They suffered from the overfullness, not impoverishment, of their lives so much that they had to redeem themselves by recreating themselves and the world in which they found themselves. They were
creators. A recipe does not make pizza; human
character does!
§4a. At last, Kierkegaard voiced himself:Any artistic creation, such as crafting a Neapolitan pizza, is at roots a matter of "ethics" [i.e., being "able"] and "morals" [i.e., "what" you do with your ability and "how"]. Your "ethics" and "morals" determine what you can create.
§4b.Then Kierkegaard pulled out one of his works, from which he read aloud (and I am quoting it, below, right from the book):"Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion. . . . In fact, one is tempted to ask whether there is a single man left ready, for once, to commit an outrageous folly. Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation." (
The Present Age)
