The new kid in town

It has been said that even bad pizza is still pretty good.  The person who said it wasn’t me and they probably weren’t even of Italian origin yet it still seems to be a fairly popular opinion as most people get excited at the mere mention of a pizza pie regardless of its individual merits.  For those of us who well and truly appreciate Italian food, the pizza is a gold standard, a level playing field by which we judge restaurants and by association the people who recommend them. 

In my time I have tried many a parlor and found that even if no pizza is truly bad there are some which are certainly better than others, you have your Domino’s, your Papa Johns, your Pizza huts, the many chains that provide a consistent, if underwhelming product on a mass scale.  These pizzas represent what I would consider “C” grade pizza, adequate in that they are edible and to some degree enjoyable but certainly they do not stand out in the pantheon of Parmesan.  The myriad of frozen foodstuffs available in your grocer’s freezer tend to occupy the “D” range of the scale, if you search enough you may find one or two that breaks out of the pack and at an affordable price with an ease of use with enough drink in your system one can actually look forward to eating it.  That is not the norm however and in the opinion of this author we’ll all be better off not mentioning them further.

Thus we come to the “B” range, probably the widest ranging category for it encompasses the great wealth of pizza shops one can find in any American neighborhood.  These are the places with family names on them, ones which pop up in ones or twos, ones that have a long running but good natured feud with another pizza shop in the same area.  If a franchise is the ‘bread and butter’ of pizza, then these shops represent the ‘steak and potatoes’, each in and of themselves ranging from fair to exceptional but wholly satisfying and bestowing upon the diner a very real satisfaction with what is in front of them.  That moment when you take your first bite and say to yourself ‘I have made a good decision’. 

A good “B” range shop looks largely unchanged since the 1980’s, proudly displaying their lack of upgrades as if to boast that they’ve been doing things right for decades, that the original recipe is the only one they need and that the worst business decision possible is trying to improve on success.  They understand what anyone who truly meditates on the qualities of a pizza comes to know, that a good pizza is not defined by enormous size, loads of toppings, or sides of garlic bread.  A good pizza is focused on the synthesis of its most basic elements; Crust, Sauce, and Cheese.  One needs only to make these three main pillars strong and your house of pies will stand the test of time.

In Galway, and as far as I know the island as a whole, the scale is a bit off, for by and large the only pizza you can find comes either from a freezer or a take away shop.  By this point the Irish are not so isolated as to be afraid or standoffish towards this Italian invasion, but by whatever missed connection the people here do not take their pizzas-let alone Calzones or Stromboli- as seriously as I do.  Your average pizza is stuck firmly in the ‘C’ category and, not to be insulting of the locals, they simply don’t know or care that this is the case.  There was in this city one shining example of a pizza done with care and crafted with that steady hand that does not waver in the face of convenience, Pizza Cabin sits on the far end of town, tucked discreetly into a wall amidst the clubs and pubs of the town’s party district.  They do not deliver and they do not serve anything but reliable and uniform quality pizzas which come in two sizes and offer you the choice of just cheese or with toppings, a mix of onion, mushroom and green pepper which cannot be altered in any way.

They were, for me, a faint beacon of hope, though far flung and inconvenient there was always the possibility that this yank could get himself a proper slice in a foreign land and for the length of one meal, not feel so out of place in his appetites.  Enter, The Dough Bros.  My wife had been telling me about them for a month or more impressed by a presentation they gave at a small business conference she’d excitedly told me their set up;  Two brothers and one friend selling made to order pizzas out of a food truck at the local market on weekends.  They intrigued me from the outset because their scheme was bold, it was unprecedented, it was wholly unlike an idea which I would expect from the Irish and furthermore, it stunk of the kind of madness that only the confidant and capable are willing to aim for. 

And so it went on for a few weekends, I thought about heading to town and seeing if they lived up to the expectation but again and again finding reasons not to go, be it the rain or chores or just general laziness.  Finally, last Saturday I walked in to do errands armed with a coupon for a free 10” pizza and a growing hunger in the depths of my gut.  I wrapped up my business and walked through the busy market, past the felafel stand, the creperie, the guy who fries doughnuts one at a time, but didn’t see the Dough Bros anywhere and figured they were busy in another town or at a private function as they do.  Coming back into the heart of town, however, I spotted a new façade it was simple, striking, straight to the point, green and white with a sign reading The Dough Bros above the entrance. 

Stepping inside it was much the same, a Spartan seating area composed of bare wood and simple chalkboards displaying your menu choices, black and white tile floor, green trim on white tile walls, and a small section just off of the cash register where three lads whip together each pizza with rhythmic efficiency.  A slot in the back wall reveals the all critical oven, logs glowing at the back, where a constant stream of cheesy bubbling creations enter and are retrieved minutes later.  Still, the shop doesn’t feel cheap or shoddy, it could benefit from 50 euro’s worth of bits from Woodies and a few touches of paint but as it stands there a charming ‘make do and mend’ attitude to the décor that fits with the start-up idea. 

I order the daily special “Marioghertia” and take a moment to check on the other patrons, it’s the end of the Arts Festival and almost every seat is occupied, the diners are mixed in age and background, everyone seems comfortable and a low pressure atmosphere is maintained.  Among the fare on offer are a Tandori pizza with lemon chicken and herbs, a Pepperoni and Jalapeño, a take on the Cesar salad which is topped with rocket and croutons, and a couple of classic staples like the Marghertia and Neapolitan.  Some of the combinations are daring and tending towards the “curry chips” area of the scale, but seeing them come out one after another it’s clear that these are balanced and topped with a careful consideration given to each element.  Clearly there was forethought put into their invention and it’s easy to imagine many tasty nights spent in the test kitchen getting the portions just right.

My pizza comes up and I got a bottle of cider to go along with it, keep in mind this isn’t a glass of Bulmers but a proper 500ml of craft cider, which is available alongside bottles of Galway hooker and other local brews and bottles of Peroni and Sol with plenty of sodas to round out your selection.  I decide to eat in their upstairs section and find a converted beer garden, tent covered with a fair shake of sunlight coming in from the open wall.  It’s one of those charming spaces you couldn’t know existed as its sandwiched between the surrounding buildings, and while it is again, simple and a bit roughshod, it’s an easy place to settle in and enjoy a nice meal while a fine mix of modern and classic tunes are piped in from what I will assume is an employee’s Ipod. 

Now all of this doesn’t amount to much if the product which I have come for, the sought after pizza is substandard.  Mine is a simple affair because I want to judge their workmanship without distraction by the bite of an olive or the sweetness of a corn salad, adorned with sprigs of Thai basil and two types of succulent tomato it is the essence of a pizza amplified by one degree.  The Dough Bros pride themselves on their crust, as it is advertised to only contain real 00 flour, water, salt, and yeast, no oils and no fats, and proofed for three days in the refrigerator before baking.  That may not translate for everyone reading this but in the shorthand of the Pisano elite, they got it right.  It is crunchy, and chewy, and sweet, and satisfying in all of the right ways, it holds up well but does not overwhelm, it provides without stuffing you to the point of lethargy.  Their crust is just the right vehicle for a solid sauce-not overly sugar laden or watery- and the well spoken mozzarella as a cherry on top.

It is an altogether pleasant experience and dare I say a revelation to eat something created with this much care and attention.  The art of a good pizza is in its balance, between what a trio-formaggio lacks and a penta formaggio overdoes is the perfect blend of a quattro formaggio, it’s understanding that a sausage pizza is not improved by the addition of pepperoni, ground beef, Canadian bacon, ham and barbecued chicken, and an imbalance in the trinity cannot be fixed by a side of chips.  I finished my plate and relaxed with a good book while finishing my pint, I even reflected on how nice it was to be asked while I was eating if everything was alright, a custom which seems often to be missing from the Irish hospitality industry.
And so the question must arise, where do the Dough Bros rank on the great scale of pizza supremacy?  I did not mention before the “A” range of pizzas, for perhaps that is a place of rarefied air occupied only by theoretical pizzas, a condition that is possible only under exact circumstances which cannot ever be replicated in the lab.  Maybe that “A” grade only came from your grandmother’s kitchen, or from that one café in Rome which you couldn’t pronounce and will never find again in a million years.  It is the pizza you share with your biggest crush across a linoleum table over a deep conversation. 

The Dough Bros are, in my humble and completely objective opinion, quite high “B” grade, and now share a spot in my esteem with the venerable Pizza Cabin.  I can’t quite say if one is better than the other, that question may become the ‘New York style’ vs. ‘Chicago style’ of western Ireland and hopefully the Dough Bros will be around for years to come so that future generations of college students and affable drunks can debate it at length.  With the energy and ingenuity of youth behind them I hope the lads will go far and keep the promise posted in chalk inside of their ten week pop up restaurant experiment to stick around if it works out.

The gnarliest thing I've ever driven.

I am no stranger to motor vehicles, I’ve driven cars and trucks, delivery vans,  box-trucks, RV’s, boats, motorcycles, jet skis, snow mobiles, go karts, dune buggies, fork lifts, scissor lifts, boom lifts, lawn mowers, tractors of various size and spent enough time on horseback to know to fall off of one with the greatest of ease.  On top of that I’ve been a passenger on a few fairly harrowing journeys such as the ‘Road to Hana’ in Hawaii, a truly cliff side drive that negates the warranty on your rental car agreement and risks plunging you into the ocean at every turn.  There was also the spin I took on the Silver Lake sand dunes, where I leant my goggles to my brother, the driver, and was subsequently blinded by a spray of muddy sand, continuing on in my ride up and down 40 foot hills dodging 4x4’s and ATV’s in near total darkness.

But despite all of that it was, of course, the job of the bog to give me the most nerve wracking, and surprisingly short, drive of my life.  As I usually get into these situations, Basil told me that we needed to move a tractor from one part of the bog to another, as the turf is growing dry and was ready to be collected.  There were a few hiccups from the outset, the first being that the battery of the tractor was dead and we needed to lug out a replacement, the bog itself was still too soft from recent rains so we would have to walk part of the way, and finally Basil’s back was a bit banjaxed so I’d be in the hard metal seat when it came to the actual moving.  No matter though, since I’m a Yank I figure it’s nothing I can’t handle.

We borrow a battery out of a spare tractor, grab the jumper cables and head out to the very end of one fork in the bog road and there, at the far end of the field, the tractor in question sits.  This is where things start to get a bit difficult as the industrial battery has to be lugged out by hand only to discover that our spare battery also lacks the power to provide a satisfactory jump so it’s hauled back to the bed of the truck despite complaint on behalf of my hands.  We consider next to take the battery out of the truck and use it as a surrogate, only we lack the proper wrenches to extract it.  So it’s decided that, with no other easy option, that we’ll risk getting literally bogged down in the muck and reverse the truck in for a direct connection.  With fingers crossed the truck is backed in and by god it does not get stuck and leave us painfully screwed, walking back towards the house to arrange a tow out. 

Lo and behold the tractor turns over with the help of a two Euro coin in lieu of a key and I’m given a quick run down on just how to handle the beast, it has three gears and reverse, a throttle, a clutch, and brakes which I suspect are mainly for show.  It is windowless, rusted, moss covered, and feels less like a tool of agriculture and more like a bygone machine of war and from atop its steel seat it sounds like a pack of deep throated and angry dogs inhabit the engine compartment.  First gear edges it steadily forward though, and soon I’ve left the security of the open turn and am on the unpredictable bog road. 

Now the tractor may be a bit out of date, not perfectly maintained, and slightly unwieldy.  But off of the soft turf and onto the stony ruts of a road it is the trailer I’m towing which really starts to put me on edge, you see the trailer is in fact wider than the doubled up rear wheels of the tractor making it just ever so much more liable to slip off into one of the ditches on either side and pull me down towards an ugly wreck.  I have to hold my concentration as strongly as possible on correcting the tires off of the uneven and ugly ruts, bumps, and potholes, but there is one slight distraction, for added to the din of the rough old engine turning, the trailer is conveyed along on a pair of steel drums which produce a sound like grim, catastrophic death echoing just ten feet behind me. 

First gear is all well and good, but it’s only prolonging the suffering, throwing it into second is achieved after a fair amount of grinding and shoving and now we’re fairly flying.  The howl of metallic churning intensifies and the worrisome shaking continues as I try to drive thoughts of one ill timed slip of the steering wheel out of my mind.  I’m following behind Basil in his blue pick-up truck but we’re not alone on this road, for others are collecting their own turf and have parked their cars on the shoulders of the road, I can feel their stares of apprehension as I carefully navigate my oversized load around their relatively new, shiny, undented cars.  A fender bender under these circumstances is not the first impression I want to make on my new neighbors, not exactly because they’ll hold it against me forever, but because they’ll never let me forget it no matter how long I live there and how many rounds of pints I buy them.

I navigate the parking lot without incident and look ahead to the one, last, decisive obstacle to overcome.  At the turnaround in the road there is a narrow bridge, with a low wall on one side and nothing to keep things from tumbling over the other it is the literal embodiment of a rock and a hard place for me and my contraption.  But with a combination of nerve and those brakes of suspect effectiveness I creep over the span, holding my breath and saying the shepherds prayer.  We’re in the home stretch now, heading for the far end of the bog again I throw caution to the wind and shift into third gear.  This may have been a mistake I quickly realize, because while the speedometer is pegged permanently at zero I estimate I’m now traveling somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 miles per hour.  That speed may not seem all too unsafe and when you’re in the security of an enclosed and safety feature equipped vehicle it is nearly a grandmotherly pace.

But when the wind is blowing rusted bits of metal into your face as they fall from the deteriorating roof of tractor, you can look down to see the stones flying by underneath your feet, you’re trying to figure out how best to free yourself from the wreckage if it rolls over, and behind you trundles a great mass of angry metal and wood, 35 miles per hour may as well be the speed of sound.  There’s no going back now though and the finish line is in sight  I pull past the turn in for our bog with its rows of footed turf waiting to be transferred to the big pile around the back of the house and begin the process of backing into place.  After the 8th or 9th point in the turn I’m finally in position and can shut up the irritable motor, angry at being called into service for yet another year. 

We’ll leave the actual loading for another time and head back home.  My constitution is just starting to settle as I tell Regina about the experience, how it was the hairiest thing I’ve ever driven and how it took everything I had to keep it on the road.  I show her a picture and she laughs, “Oh, the turf cart.  Yeah, when we were kids we used to ride in the back of it, it was loads of fun.”  Yet again I am humbled, for as often as I think this country is trying to kill me, the locals see it as one big playground.

The lay of the Land.

I take it unto myself to tell you all about this place I now call home, this emerald isle, this great Erin, Hibernia and all of its glory.  Some part of that is explaining what is different here, what strange and exotic natures rule and how a corn fed, red blooded American such as myself deals with these changes.  I try not to just think of the obvious things to get under the surface of culture and find what exists at the heart of a people, a place, a spirit that defines Ireland and the Irish as I have come to know them. 

One thing that I think defines the Irish is how they find themselves tied to nature and the land around them.  As a yank, I see our colonization of the states as a process of hammering the land to fit our needs, of pulling its resources up form the crust, of harnessing rivers and bringing the world to heel.  I don’t mean this is an exactly celebratory way, but for better or-more honestly-worse I conceptualize our ‘settling’ of our continent as a process of lacing it over with asphalt and power lines until one must journey many hundred of miles, with full intent and drive, in order to feel overwhelmed by nature once more. 

Although man has inhabited Ireland for around nine thousand years, since roughly the end of the last ice age, they have not yet bulldozed and dynamited their humble island into commercialized homogeny.  They have instead worked it out, quite by accident or perhaps simply not desiring another way, to live within their land, hand in hand with their earth and content in many ways to find harmony with it. 

Take the roads oft traveled, I have noticed, or rather, not noticed, that when driving through the country that often the only road you are able to see is the one you’re riding on.  Even then it’s often not possible to see past the next bend of the tarmac, giving you an experience of being isolated from the industrialized world, alone in your car on fifty meters of pavement surrounded by the vast expanse of green space on all sides.  The Irish word for road is ‘Bóthar’ which when broken into segments translates into Bó for cow and thar for path with the story going that the land was mapped by herdsmen whose cattle were naturally able to find the easiest way to traverse the geography.  Over time the routes pioneered by steers were formalized and paved over as cars became more common. 

Thus, when driving, you will find yourself diving through hollows in the woods or keeping to the ridgeline as valleys stretch out beside you for miles and miles.  You get a sense of exactly what’s around you even if it’s simply field after field, a patchwork of grass dotted with sheep and etched with the grey stone walls which are ubiquitous.  These walls are, to me, more impressive than a castle or monolith, as they defy my conventional American notions of land management.

The American west was settled by means of barbed wire (invented in Dekalb Illinois) as it was a cheap and efficient means of fencing in herds of heifers and helping to end the process of cattle rustling and the range wars over land rights.  The Irish accomplished this same feat utilizing loose stones and vegetation.  The walls stand about three or four feet high, in vast networks over whole regions, cobbled together using no mortar or means aside from gravity and engineering.  I have tried many times to puzzle out how this was achieved, staring intently at the craftsmanship trying to prize out some order, some method to the madness but all I can see is a mass of free standing, unhewn stones assembled in accordance with the nature of Celtic gods of chaos and trickery.

In their own way, the walls are symbols of the people’s presence on the Island and their reverence and understanding of nature’s unconquerable permanence.  They are simultaneously a natural extension of the earth and a means of domesticating it.  Largely unchanged since the first surveyors carved fiefdoms and lordships from the settlements and holdings of free farmers the walls dictate who owns what just as reliably as the hedges do.  Hedges, of course, being dense and inhospitable barriers of shrubbery groomed and contained until their thickness approaches the properties of a thatched roof.  They line the roads and keep animals on their parcel, throughout the year they are maintained by councils and individuals  in just another example of the people living hand in hand with nature, neither commanding the other fully but both bending to suit the other. 

Finally, I must bring up something mythic and vital, a lifeblood and building block of the Irish way of life.  For within the color pallet of this Island there are the greens of the fields and forests, the grey skies and stones, the white and black clouds, the white and black Guinness pints, red hair and blue eyes, and all the colors of the vibrant rainbows which cross the sky with welcoming frequency.  There is one color which gets overlooked more often than not, as valuable as gold, as sought after as diamonds, two things, both brown, are to me inseparable from life in Ireland.  One if the cup of tea, and the other is the bog.

Cups of tea need no explanation (although I may rhapsodize on this later) but I imagine bogs are an alien concept to most of my U.S. readers.  First off, no, they are not where Irish cranberries come from, they are where turf comes from.  Turf being a piece of dried organic matter burned for heat during the winter, you may remember it from a past column on the art of building a fire using it, I actually have that article brought up to me quite often over here.  It’s not surprising because turf is a way of life, and my new family in the west of Ireland, the heart of bog country, often lives their life around it. 

My father-in-law, along with his brothers, have designed and built turf processing machines for decades, these mammoth contraptions are one part tank, one part dump truck, and one part cement mixer as they take raw peat pulled from the earth by a backhoe and churn it into long lines of uniform bricks.  These machines have been exported all the way from Minnesota to Mozambique and work tirelessly for years providing the local people with fuel and warmth.  Much of the area gets its electricity from a turf fire plant which consumes it on an industrial scale, and as a commodity around the neighborhood, turf is traded and exchanged among the locals when the weather demands it.

The Bog itself is something of an oddity, amidst the green hills and fields the bog is a strange stretch of land, low scrub brush growing in shades of grey and brown motley it is as alien as the Burren, the renowned tracts of limestone pushed up from the seafloor eons ago, said to be among the rarest land on earth it has more in common with the surface of the moon than other earthly biomes.  While the bog seems uniform from afar once you get up close you will see that massive pits are dug out and deposited into rows where those aforementioned bricks bake in the sun over weeks on end.  First, as those lines of uniform construction, the turf stands out as an undeniably man made invention, dominating the landscape and tricking the eye just like an orchard of evenly spaced trees. 

Work, however, is not done on the turf as first it must be turned over, allowing for an even drying from its dripping, wet, initial stage.  If the weather has been good, then after it’s evenly cured the turf can be ‘footed’ or stacked into piles and allowed to air out even further.  This process is all done by hand and I’ve only recently found myself employed at it.  There is no set way of footing turf, so I am told, but there is method and art to it which I am assured I’ll get the hang of eventually.  Watching native Irish do it is a wonder to behold as stooped and steady they are able to arrange the turf in neatly balanced piles in a matter of seconds.   Surely half the skill is feeling out the density and dynamics of an individual sod and carefully determining where it should sit on the pile, while the other half is doing so with any square meter section in an orderly and efficient manner. 

Struggling with these two aspects, I again appreciate the skill and art involved in making those mortar-less walls many ages ago.  Basil demonstrates for me the ‘old way’ of doing it as he effortlessly constructs a pyramid of turf which resembles the poles of a teepee, Evan (my brother in law) says he got good at it when his legs got long enough to span the rows, now he lays out long arched lines of peat in orderly ‘furroughs’ at a pace which seems inhuman.  My handiwork is uneven and slow, crude and haphazard, prone to tumbling over if you walk too close to it.  They say I’ll get it in time, and that any bit helps, but I am not so sure.  As we leave from footing the bog now looks Martian, I have thought before that a landscape of footed turf looks like row after row of ancient temples, it is mountains and a geography wholly unfamiliar to myself, again, half the hand of man and half the force of nature.

Later the turf will be tossed into a great hopper on the back of another machine and driven to barns where great piles are amassed over the years and slowly picked away at over winters.  In 25 years they say the pits fill back in, that left to their own devices the people have grazed from the bogs and let them replenish, a renewable source of energy as old as the runes and free as the birds.  In the states we say that chopping wood warms you twice, but here you work for the turf and when the howling winds of a winter storm blow in you can settle yourself in front of a turf fire, a bit of your homeland burning steadily away, and with a hot whiskey in your free hand appreciate how you worked for the turf, and now the turf works for you.