DIY Dinners: Japes
Back in summer, my fiancé and I embarked on a pizza-off. This was not just any lockdown boredom-killing activity, but an attempt to finally lay to rest a dispute that had long plagued our relationship.
He is American, New Jersey-born and an oftentimes New York resident, and a little bit Italian-American with it.
I am British, with presumably zero Italian blood. I have, however, actually been to Italy on numerous occasions and eaten an awful lot of pizza there – a claim my better half cannot match.
As such, we have wildly differing perspectives on pizza. Take a margherita, for example. For me and my Napoli-favouring tendencies, the crust should be puffy and charred, and a tomato base sprightly and zingy (I’ll even take it fresh and uncooked). Individual hunks of mozzarella should be dotted with (buffalo preferably, and only slightly melted), scattered with fresh basil and drizzled with olive oil. Parmesan is superfluous.
For him, the thin crust should pale in comparison to the centre, which sports a tomato base that is rich and sauce-like, the cheese liberally distributed (practically everywhere), with similar indiscretion used for the basil. His type of pizza warrants a raging hometown debate over whether or not it was proper etiquette to use a paper towel to wipe the grease from the surface. Mine did not.
Volcanic: The finished product of Japes’s DIY deep dish pizza kit
We agree on many of the important things in life, but this is one difference that needed airing. As the pizza-off commenced – each of us making a pizza in our own style in an attempt to convert the other – the barbs gradually began to sharpen. Now, I’m not proud of it, but at some point I might have described his recipe as “some kind of Chicago Town shit”. It did not go down well.
Not only did I offend a New Jerseyan by mismatching subgenres of American-style “pie”, but I baselessly degraded the deep dish pizza to the realms of frozen food without it even being there to defend itself.
In doing so, I revealed myself as a pizza snob. My pizza was better, yes, but my victory was hollow.
Fast forward a few months and, for obvious reasons, I have not been able to go to Chicago to expand my horizons or right the wrongs of my petulant subordinations. Nor have I made it to New Jersey to eat pizza of any sort, deep in dish or thin in crust, with my best mate.
What did, however, come to me in recent weeks, was a DIY deep dish pizza kit from Japes. The Soho restaurant is one of few in the capital to specialise in this type of “pie” – the word meant here in its truest sense.
To my knowledge, this was my first experience with a deep dish pizza, and certainly my first making one. Despite my newfound open-mindedness, I was not prepared for how deep the dish was. I was not prepared to empty an entire bag of grated mozzarella into it. I was not prepared to put the sauce ON TOP OF THE CHEESE. Yes. On top. Thankfully, I was roused from my near-swooning state of shock by what wafted out of the next packet – the gutsy scent of some disarmingly tantalising pepperoni, what was to be my first taste of meat following a month of pescatarianism. Suddenly, I was really rather on board.
In the UK, I thought, as the pizza baked, we’d call this a “hangover quiche” (although quiche Lorraine is, in itself, an excellent hangover cure – that’s a tip you can keep). Was this actually a pizza? Or was it purely a sunken pit of vice that one would throw themselves willingly, particularly after a night of tequila shots and vodka tonics?
See you on the flip side: Mozzarella and pepperoni, added before the tomato sauce.
Thirteen minutes later and it was time to find out. What emerged was akin to a volcanic crater, the crust rather more petrified than charred, housing a pool of lava-like molten cheese, encrusted with scorched, fat-spitting sausage slices and an unstable veneer of marinara.
Initially, I feared to cut it, that the flow would be too much – and then I remembered the “mozzarella pull”. For a woman who likes her mozzarella nigh-on fridge-cold on top of her pizza, the prospect was obscene – but so, I reminded myself, were the best things in life.
I said a quick prayer for my arteries, and pulled. An inch-thick layer of cheese lifted from the pan – with all the strings attached – as did an all-consuming waft of tomato and spiced meat. I was, for all my sins, devastatingly excited.
Deft slice-folding be gone, this was a knife and fork job, surely the only way to make sure every molten morsel made it to where it was supposed to be (I have since been reliably informed that this makes me “the worst kind of person”). And when it got there, I forgot everything I thought I knew.
The tomato sauce was both rich and juicy, seasoned to perfection and bursting with aromatics. Far from the plasticky Play-Doh of my fears, the mozzarella was luscious, flavourful and moreish. And goddamn that pepperoni – enlivened with the heat, it bristled with spice and soothed with unctuous bite.
Strings attached: A cheese-packed slice of Japes’s deep dish pizza
Shortly after my dalliance with Japes, my fiancé was preparing to watch the Super Bowl. He is currently in the US, and I am here – and, to be honest, we’re both pretty fucking sad about it.
We laughed about how Americans had effectively created a national holiday dedicated to sports and snacks, and the fact that he was preparing to make something called “buffalo chicken dip” for the match. It’s another dish I have historically dismissed as the most American food ever – it is a hot sauce dip that has pulled chicken in it – but this time, amid a pretty bad week in our world, I would have given anything to be eating chicken dip in New Jersey.
Americans have done some terrible things to food – so have the British – but what they have done to pizza isn’t necessarily one of them. It is easy to dismiss pizza’s evolution in the States as too brash, too big, too indulgence-driven – but when all those things are done in respect of balance, quality and care, they can be just as soul-soothingly sublime as any Napoli slice.
Tonight, my fiancé is heading to an Italian-American friend’s house for something called “Sunday Sauce”. I do not know what kind of sauce it is, or what the authentic Italian equivalent is, but I’m sure it’ll be bloody great.
This DIY kit was supplied as a complimentary press sample.
For more information, visit shop.japes.uk
