It’s a cruel trick of the brain that the things we can’t easily reach become so much dearer to us by that quality alone. Consider one of the recent additions to the list of my favorite foods ever: pissaladière, Provençal pizza. It has all the makings of a Neven Pleaser: rich, salty, satisfying. Yet I can’t think of a single restaurant in Portland that serves in (on a regular basis, anyway).

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to make pissaladière at home. Before we look at the ingredients, a brief disclaimer: like pizza, this is a dish of many styles and variations. This recipe is a combination of several kinds I’ve read about, ordered, and attempted myself. Feel free to improvise. I’m including a bonus sauce at the end; it’s optional but delicious, and good to know as a secret weapon for other dishes.

The below recipe, combined with a nice salad, will feed two. If you plan on using both puff pastry sheets from the package, double everything and bake in sequence.

• 1 sheet puff pastry, frozen
• 8-12 anchovy fillets; half chopped, half whole
• 10-15 niçoise (“nee-swaz”) olives or Kalamatas, pitted and quartered
• 1 large onion, sliced chunky
• fresh thyme
• fresh parsley, chopped
• good olive oil
• salt, sugar, black pepper

Ingredient notes: the best possible anchovies are Ortiz brand; Scalia will also work. Check your local Italian deli - the grocery store is unlikely to carry anything you’d want to eat.

Preheat the oven to 500º F. Next, grab the puff pastry sheet; they usually come in pairs, so remove one from the package and place it on a tray on the counter for 30 to 60 minutes, until it unfolds easily.

Meanwhile, let’s caramelize the onions - heat a bit of oil in a shallow nonstick skillet on medium-high. When it’s shimmering, add the onion and half a teaspoon each of salt and sugar. Stir lightly immediately to distribute the sugar. Cook 15-25 minutes until the onion is soft, with some brown spots, but not fully browned. If any slices were so small that they’re now burnt black, remove them. When done, remove from heat and add half a tablespoon of water to the skillet to keep the onions shiny and moving. Set aside.

Time to assemble: place a large sheet of parchment paper (NOT wax paper) on a pizza peel or a cookie sheet. Unfold the puff pastry sheet onto it and roll it out with a rolling pin lightly; we want to prevent the whole thing from puffing up madly, but don’t “crush” it.

Brush the whole thing with olive oil; if your anchovies came in a nice oil themselves, add some of that. Next, top with the olives, then the chopped anchovies, leaving a 1/2” border around the toppings. Add a sprinkle of fresh thyme and grind on some black pepper. Grab onions from the skillet using tongs and top the pissaladière. Finish it off with the whole anchovy fillets arranged in a pretty criss-cross pattern.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, until the edges of the puff pastry and the underside are golden brown. The edges may puff up quite a bit, but they’ll deflate once out of the oven. Let it cool for 5 minutes, then cut into a 2 × 3 grid. Top with the parsley and the sauce. What sauce? This sauce:

Bonus recipe: herbed mayonnaise

I learned this as sauce ravigote, which is probably not quite right, though the definition of the sauce appears to be controversial. Let’s just call it a sort of herbed mayo.

• 1 tbsp mayo; if possible, Kewpie brand
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
• 1 tbsp canola, grapeseed, or other mild oil
  
• 1/2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 tbsp combined fresh herbs: parsley, chervil, tarragon, thyme; minced as finely as possible

Combine the egg, mayo, and mustard in a small bowl. Slowly drizzle in the oil while whisking vigorously, making sure it gets integrated and the sauce stays together without separating. Stir in the juice and the herbs. Add salt if needed.

Grab dollops of the sauce with a fork and drizzle it over the pissaladière; if you have any left over, it’ll keep in the fridge for a week. Use it on literally anything savory.

Serve everything with a crisp white wine or lemonade for the youngsters.

The book that would say all there is to say about pizza - a dish with many complexities, variations, and pitfalls - would be astronomically large, like Borges’ Library of Babel; the best I can hope to do here at Salt & Fat is start small and keep going. Today, I’ll use my weekend dinner as an example.

Pizza with tomato-butter sauce, Scalia anchovies, garlic, and fresh oregano.

More on the first two ingredients later; The Book of Anchovy is a multi-volume treatise as well.

First, let’s note that this is a cheeseless pizza. This is not so because I’m vegan, lactose-intolerant, or because I’m watching my fat intake. It’s simply because not every pizza needs cheese. It’s not a hippie affectation, not a menu substitution: cheeseless pizza is its own fully-fledged thing. In this case, had I added cheese, the garlic and the fresh oregano would’ve fought it somewhat. I wanted a salty-bread type of feeling to my dinner, and the freshly-made sauce needed to show off its sweetness. The creaminess of mozzarella - delicious as it is - would’ve mellowed all this out too much.

A controversial generalization: most pizza is overcheesed. There, I’ve said it.

Next, the order of the ingredients: the pizza went in the oven with tomato sauce, garlic, and a drizzle of oil on it. Both anchovies and fresh herbs are too delicate to be exposed to all that direct heat. When a pizza is good and ready, it’s hot enough to cook a pound of anchovies on contact, so mine go on after baking. No dried-out, bitter acciughe or wilted herbs in my house. Garlic is tricky; a bit of roastiness is great, but turn your back to it for ten seconds and it can burn badly. I used Gus Mueller’s baking method, which results in a cooking time short enough that I could sit there and watch the oven. No, I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night.

I usually go in with another drizzle of olive oil on the slices when plating, but that’s just because I absolutely love Lucini oil; if any savory bread gets between me and it, it’ll get oiled and eaten. And yes, there’s salt on that pizza, too, in addition to the sauce and the anchovies. Just a bit, I swear!

That’s all for now. Keep your toppings first-class and few, perfect your dough and oven before anything else, and trust your gut.

Reheat or not reheat - that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the kitchen to suffer
The chills and arrows of frigid bakings,
Or take microwav’s against a sea of crystals
And, by heating, end them. To heat, to re-gelatinize—
No more -

No more, indeed. So, what to do with leftover pizza and other breads? Once they’ve called the fridge their home long enough to get cold, how do you reheat them? Do you reheat them at all?

With time, bread goes stale. In a process called retrogradation, moisture leaves the starch granules (but sticks around between them) and de-gelatinizes the bread, resulting in that dry, cardboard-y, leathery texture we all loathe. You can’t do much to stop this; at room temperature, you get about two days of edibility if you store the bread in an airtight container or bag (“bread boxes” are pretty, but no better at their advertised use than any other box.) After that, in the freezer it goes.

However you choose to reheat later, whether your bread/pizza/pastry was frozen or refrigerated, time will be a major factor. When you raise the temperature of de-gelatinized bread, it will re-gelatinize, but only briefly. As soon as it cools down, it’ll become even worse than before, as moisture now leaves the bread permanently and cannot be reintegrated.

So, your options are:

1. Reheat (wrapped in foil if frozen) in a hot oven; eat quickly
2. Reheat in a microwave; eat super-quickly
3. Eat cold (especially popular with and appropriate for pizza)

There’s no shame in any of them, and no excuse not to eat your leftovers.

Update: Andrew Janjigian posted his pizza-reheating method on Slice. I’m sold!