Pizza Dog

Many of those who read this blog have already heard in other places, but we had a bit of a scare Christmas night.  Our dog managed to sneak into the kitchen while we were video chatting with my wife's folks (it's the future!) and gulp down an entire pizza's worth of raw dough that was completing its final rise, such as it was (I'd been having trouble with the yeast--more on that later).

Our first reaction was, "Oh, that darned dog," and a certain degree of frustration on my part because it was Xmas night and we didn't have a lot more food on hand and nothing was open, but fortunately my wife thought to check the Internet to see if we should be concerned.  Subsequent consultation with the emergency on-call vet and vet hospitals confirmed that we should indeed.

You see, raw bread doughs in general (not just pizza) have yeast in them, which, since they've yet to go into the oven, are still doing their yeasty thing.  To wit; fermentation.  This has several effects in a dog's stomach.

First, it produces carbon dioxide.  This can cause distention and bloat in a dog, bloat meaning not simply the sort of belchy sort of condition that humans get but a severe overstretching and possibly twisting of the stomach, which Wikipedia says is fatal roughly a third of the time without surgery, depending on circumstances.

Second, the yeast also produces alcohol.  This can make the dog very drunk, since it's right there in the stomach lining.  This is much less likely to be fatal, but dogs are smaller than we are, and alcohol poisoning is still possible.

Finally, the fermentation process can also produce some toxic by-products.  Most of them evaporate or are otherwise negligible in a finished baked good, but in a dog's stomach, they're just kind of sitting there being toxic, and that's not good either.

So we had to schlep him down to the emergency 24-hour vet hospital (Which we now know the location of! Bonus learning!), and they induced vomiting.  Fortunately, it was a small batch of dough, and not a lot of active yeast (see earlier comment), so we were all fairly confident that he'd be fine.  A couple of hours of observation later, we were cleared to take him home, and at this point he's probably forgotten all about it.

Glowy

The adhesive in the protective packaging for Breathe Right nasal strips (the paper sleeve, not the adhesive on the strips themselves) is the kind that glows in the dark when you peel it apart.

Stray Foods

I have discovered that, despite Mark Bittman's proffered advice, pizza dough really does need to use bread flour instead of all-purpose.  One "slight" change, and all of a sudden the dough looks like real pizza dough.

On the other hand, I'm still not getting the final result quite right.  It's not browning and crisping the way that I'd like it to.  I think I'm going to have to throw out one more instruction, and just heat the oven as hot as it will possibly go (probably somewhere around 500, I haven't measured it), wait a fair bit longer after the temp sensor clicks off to make sure that the pizza stone is completely and thoroughly heated, and just (as Alton Brown used to say) "put the spurs to 'er."  That might do the trick.

And, as a small additional note, there's a rumor going around that the price of Nutella may be going up in the near future.  Well, it appears that some of the domestic manufacturers are trying to get in on the action, and thus Jif Brand Chocolate flavored Hazelnut spread has appeared on our grocery shelves.

You wouldn't think that you could screw up a combination of hazelnut and chocolate, would you?  And yet, somehow they did.  I strongly disagree with this Examiner article's conclusion--they do not taste at all alike, and the Jif product is clearly inferior.  My advice?  Pay more for the original-- it's worth it.