I am from Naples and eat regularly at Gino Sorbillo's and Ciro Salvo's places. As it often happens here, everyone will swear by its pretty small and obscure "favorite place", but they are masters without doubt ;)
The dough recipe from the article is pretty legit and exactly the way I do it at home; the main problem I see is that it would be pretty hard to find good Mozzarella or Fiordilatte cheese (Fiordilatte di Agerola is slightly drier than Mozzarella, therefore producing less liquid in the oven, and also costs less), and I find that pizza done according to the Neapolitan recipe loses much when using a different kind of cheese.
A pet peeve of mine is that many recipes, while getting most of it right, use instant yeast; an important part of Neapolitan pizza is the slow dough rise using very little amounts of yeast, that should take from a minimum of 7/8 hours to an entire day or more (of course by storing it in a fridge).
A good place to source the cheeses in the US is Caputo Brothers in Pennsylvania. They are one of the few places in the US doing cultured mozzarella and also have a lower moisture version for pizza.
I use packed dry yeast but I have always let my dough do a slow rise in the refrigerator for a minimum of 3 days up to 6 days. I use 00 flour and cook the pizza's using my Roccbox pizza oven or a custom Baking Steel 23x19 3/8" steel in the oven.
Also if you want a good guide for NY style pizza then this is a good read.
He hacks his home oven to use the self-cleaning cycle to bake at 800°F. :blink: I'm not comfortable doing that. I rarely crank mine to 500°F, when I do there's quite a bit of smoke that has to be vent.
We like doing pizzas on our grill, which can get to 500F+ easy enough. A cheap pizza stone works really well on there and has a bonus of not heating up the house in the summer.
What is this, that it's 'on'? In the UK a grill is the hot element you put something under, in the oven. 'Broiler' in America I believe. I realise you're not in the UK ('500F'), but what then is this grill, that's clearly not the same?
> not heating up the house
An outdoor covered barbecue/smoker/pizza oven type thing?
Yup, you got me. (US) The temp gauge on our outdoor grill is in Fahrenheit, so ~260C for the rest of the world. When I say grill, I'm talking a propane based patio cooking surface, with lid. One of these sorts of things:
Probably equivalent to what you'd call a barbecue. Charcoal or gas fed, bottom heating, usually with a grated surface and outdoors. Though with proper ventilation you can use them indoors.
Some Americans will call it a barbecue too, but barbecue should really be equivalent to smoker.
Another thing to note is that since a lot of Neapolitan pizza makers conduct the entire fermentation at room temp, salt percentages are important and can change throughout the year with ambient temps.
Sorbillo's is the best I've tried. I remember walking in front of the shop a few times and thinking it's some kind of tourist trap (it's on the possibly most touristy street in the city), but decided to try it out in the end. Absolutely fantastic. The pie was great, but TBH I think there were other places in town whose pies were as good, but the quality of the toppings... just wow. And I was surprised that the price was the same as any other place in town (I think a marinara was something like 3-4 Euros).
My second favorite is in Switzerland of all places, in the small town of Meilen. Amazing toppings too. But I went there once since the start of the lockdowns, and it didn't taste as good. I don't know if it's the pandemic leaving a bitter taste, or just an issue for their supply chains...
I'm not sure if you have ever been to NYC but an interesting observation I have had with Gino Sorbillo is the pizza in Napoli is very good, but he/they opened a restaurant in NYC and it's absolutely average at best.
I assume they import everything, but quality wise, the places are polar opposites.
I recently went to Naples and IMO the secret to just how amazing everything tastes there is the quality of produce.
I don't know whether you can even export it - I don't know whether that kind of quality travels.
On the Netflix show ugly delicious one of the chefs explain supposedly in Naples chefs will choose their mozzarella freshness by the hour (e.g. 6 hours or 12 hours) but to make "authentic" Neapolitan pizza with Neapolitan mozzarella you're not going to get Mozzarella fresher than 7 days old...
> I recently went to Naples and IMO the secret to just how amazing everything tastes there is the quality of produce. I don't know whether you can even export it - I don't know whether that kind of quality travels.
Bingo. Produce and ingredients are generally very high quality in Italy, because people care about and make their purchases based on that, rather than simply looking at how much they're getting at a given price and how good it looks on the shelves.
yes -- but on the same show they highlighted people making ridiculous high quality fresh naples-style pizza in other countries other than italy - japan, denmark, etc.
the cheese is the hardest part of the pizza to replicate outside of italy for sure, you can easily buy high quality imported olive oil, flour, and san marzano tomatos.
yeah the guy from Denmark resorted to making his own mozzarella by rearing his own cows - hence the point about exporting.
Japan have decent local dairy (Hokkaido milk) and their overall attitude to produce is similar to Italy which probably is a big contributor to their food culture
Given the stories I hear from pretty much everyone in my circle who's been to the US, there's a general problem with food there tasting bland, in comparison to Europe. Like others, I suspect the ingredients in the States are worse for some reason (perhaps they've been optimized too much for shelf life).
However, you have to understand that a lot of the US really doesn't deal well with food that isn't bland--a holdover from WWII rationing and canned foods, probably. IIRC, McDonalds(?) went through a huge engineering process to attempt to add an ingredient to their pipeline. They found that adding cucumber was fine, but avocado was a step too far for the midwest.
> McDonalds(?) went through a huge engineering process to attempt to add an ingredient to their pipeline. They found that adding cucumber was fine, but avocado was a step too far for the midwest.
That's something I'd love to read in more details about. Personally, I'd say avocado is a step too far in anything that isn't fruit salad. But so is (pickled) cucumber. I wish they'd remove it from their burgers altogether. The reasoning is, pickled cucumber overwhelms everything else with its sour flavor. McD burgers I experienced (in several countries, Europe and Asia) have a balanced composition of tastes, and that slice of cucumber there is as if someone threw a grenade into it. I usually hunt it down and eat it with my first bite, so that I can enjoy the rest of the burger in peace.
> Given the stories I hear from pretty much everyone in my circle who's been to the US, there's a general problem with food there tasting bland, in comparison to Europe
I think that heavily depends on where your circle is eating at in both places.
Not sure in NY, there I tried only ovest and a couple of others so I can’t really judge. In London I tried all the famous ones: Da Michele, 50 Kalò, Sartori, Santa Maria, Santorè, Franco Manca and probably many others that I don’t remember now.
Da Michele I think is a bit overrated. In 50 Kalò I appreciated a lot the extremely fresh and flavourful ingredients but the pizza dough was not the best. Santa Maria, at least the original in Ealing Broadway, is probably more tasty and balanced compared to the others above. Franco Manca has a pretty good price/quality ratio, but it’s not as good as the previous ones. As a matter of personal preference Sartori is the best that I tried in London, just a sliver above all the very nice ones cited before, and also a bit better than his “twin” place Santorè.
I’d like to go back to Napoli and try Sorbillo’s pizza there. In my place in Italy I can’t find a pizza as good as London, for what is worth...
And for a different type of pizza but honestly my favorite pizza on Earth, try the Portobello pizza at Mediterraneo on the UES. They have no idea how good that pizza is otherwise they'd turn the whole place into a pizzeria and just do that everyday
Ah right, pizzarte was another one that I tried in NY, almost forgot. It’s really good, but still not at the level at the best that I tried in London or in Italy in my opinion.
Why would instant yeast have an effect on slow rising? You'd just use a smaller amount than AD or cake yeast? I can't think of any significant difference especially compared to AD.
It seems that I wrongly thought that "instant yeast" was what we call "lievito istantaneo", i.e. baking powder, that would give a a pretty different end-product.
It looks like it can also refer to instant active yeast, i.e. dehydrated beer yeast, that should actually be fine as far as I can tell (I have no idea of exact proportions however).
That being said, you can probably use a smaller amount of instant yeast, it definitely shouldn't be replaced as a 1:1 with regular yeast as the fermentation time is an integral part of the flavour profile.
Dehydrated yeast will work, but getting the amounts right is more difficult in my experience. I can cut a paper-thin sliver from a yeast cube easier than than I can count the right number of grains of dehydrated yeast.
Most people have a hard time measuring 0.02% baking percentage of 200g flour. Not because they don't know what grams is, but because they don't have the equipment or means to measure it.
Everytime I hear someone say things about units, it is not that people don't understand - there are other issues around that. For example, Americans know that metric system is better but they can't just switch solo until the entire nation changes which is a huge task.
Furthermore, those people who gawk at Americans still use 360 degrees for a full circle, 24 hour segments in a day and other weird units - for e.g. Switzerland still uses points for fonts! Not mm.
I would go ahead and even say - Metric system is based on base 10 which sucks, we should rewind back the history and grow 12 fingers because Duodecimal system is far better than decimal system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal
We are just stuck with base 10. Just like Americans are stuck with their archaic units. It has nothing to do with the fact that people are smart/dumb. I am gonna push back on that nonsense.
In my opinion, the only way to cook/bake is with a digital scale, and as far as I know, any scale you'd buy in the US has the option of grams or ounces at the push of a button.
In practice, I constantly use both. To some extent it depends on the packaging of the ingredients, which may use either unit.
When measuring small things, it's only practical to use teaspoons and fractions, but otherwise I weigh everything. I even tend to weigh liquids in dry ounces sometimes, as I've memorized 8 fluid ounces = 8.337 dry ounces.
Using different measuring systems is no more of a mark of inferiority than using different languages. And similarly to languages, modern technology makes it fairly easy to translate even if you don't know.
It is definitely a misconception that you don't see metric measurements in the US. They're everywhere, including your car, school, stores...
For this sort of dough you may need e.g. 1.8g of yeast (that's the actual quantity I used for the last dough I made). It depends on how much flour you make, of course, but pizza doughs with long fermentation use minute amounts of yeast. If you use 1.6g or 2.0g instead of 1.8g, your pizza may be ready twelve hours too soon or too late.
I bought a second kitchen scale to deal with the minute quantities, since my old one is accurate to only 1g.
As far as I know, beer yeast is different from bread yeast these days. Instant yeast for baking is said to be dried using a process that is gentler and kills fewer cells.
Instant yeast tends to be very aggressive/successful so what happens if you use a small amount of instant yeast is you get a slow rise but it's a monoculture microbially speaking versus if you use a typical sourdough starter (called "madre" in Italian baking) there are several strains of bacteria which are about equivalent in terms of how fast they multiply. So the final dough has a more diverse microbiome. The theory is that leads to a more complex taste because of the way the different yeast strains digest the sugars etc and affect the taste of the resulting product.
Definitely agree in regards to sourdough starter vs yeast. Although I thought most Neapolitan pizzerias didn't use sourdough anyways - would love to be wrong about this.
Those ratios looked off to me so I tried it out today.
Now, the amount of moisture a flour will absorb depends on many things, including its age, source and your climate. I'm in an arid region of Canada, and our flours are typically harder than most. Having said that, I'm lucky enough to have access to relatively fresh, locally milled flour.
So as I said, this moisture ratio looked off to me compared to what I usually bake with.
At 300 ml of water, I didn't even get a dough that would combine. I added about a tablespoon and a half of extra water, and still got a much firmer dough than I would usually want. After resting for 20 minutes, folding it left creases as it wouldn't stick to itself.
I've got it rising now, so we'll see if it still turns out, but if you're trying this with typical American store-bought 0 or 1 flour, I would recommend starting with 5-10% more water and adding flour if necessary once it's combined.
> an important part of Neapolitan pizza is the slow dough rise using very little amounts of yeast, that should take from a minimum of 7/8 hours to an entire day or more (of course by storing it in a fridge).
This is gospel for pizza. My wife used to run a NYC-style pizza place in college, and later a chain pizza place, and they both had 24-72 hour slow proofs in the fridge. In other words, they mixed the dough and let it rise, very slowly, in the fridge for 2-3 days before using it. Kenji Lopez-Alt has similar advice in his pizza articles.
It is, because it has to deliver heat from the bottom at high temperature and for a pretty short time (around two minutes); it's not that unusual in Naples to have a wood oven in our vacation homes, but in the city many live in condos so it's impossible.
Leopard spots, also called "maculatura" or "mako" in some pizza-lovers forums, is considered by some a mark of perfect maturation of the "panetto" (the little bread, i.e. the dough used for a single pizza); to be honest it's quite a mystery to me how to obtain a good one, and as it often happens in this matters reality tends to conflate with legend: I've also heard sometimes that it is a sign of temperature mismanagement of the panetto, and I am not experienced enough to have a say on this :)
Neopolitan is a setup for failure in the home kitchen. It's one of the most demanding styles in terms of equipment and preparation. It makes zero sense to pursue it at home unless you actually have a very strong preference for this style (highly unlikely if commercial pizza is even a crude reflection of preferences).
It's fetishism. It's sought because it has cultural cachet, it's hard to obtain, it's 'authentic', etc.
> setup for failure ... most demanding ... makes zero sense ... It's fetishism. It's sought because it has cultural cachet, it's hard to obtain, it's 'authentic', etc.
Totally agree. There's beauty in such crazy pursuits, don't you think?
I shared the link in the spirit of HN, knowing this place is full of people who enjoy chasing obsessions that are risky, or just because, or because someone said it was impossible.
Long live kitchen hackers with zero sense! It's always enriching and occasionally successful. :-)
Damn, he bakes those at 825F (440 °C), which unfortunately is unattainable with most regular home ovens. Mine e.g. maxes out at 300 °C so it's not hot enough to let the crust rise significantly and produce a nicely charred underside, at least not before completely burning the top.
What I'm currently experimenting with to solve this problem is to put the pizza on a flat, heavy and preheated iron pan or plancha and heat it at maximum power on the induction stove for 3 minutes to get the metal really hot. Then I put it in the oven at 300 °C for around 10 minutes. Doesn't produce perfectly charred pizza but comes a lot closer to what you can achieve with a real pizza oven. Still I'm not fully satisfied with the result, so thanks for the article link, I'll definitely try to apply some tricks mentioned there!
> he bakes those at 825F (440 °C), which unfortunately is unattainable with most regular home ovens
He was using a regular home oven, subverting the cleaning cycle: "The cabinet of most ovens is obviously designed for serious heat because the cleaning cycle will top out at over 975 which is the max reading on my Raytec digital infrared thermometer. The outside of the cabinet doesn't even get up to 85F when the oven is at 800 inside. So I clipped off the lock using garden shears so I could run it on the cleaning cycle. I pushed a piece of aluminum foil into the door latch (the door light switch) so that electronics don't think I've broken some rule by opening the door when it thinks it's locked. ..."
I've eaten there, it was pretty good. If you're going for that kind of dedication to pizza however, breaking off the lock on the cleaning cycle of your oven is a wonky way to go about it. You'd be better suited building a wood fire oven or just buying a commercial oven instead. Eventually this is the conclusion they learned, they just took the way long way to get there.
Ah I see, interesting! I think they call that pyrolytic cleaning in Europe. The problem with that is that some ovens will lock the door for at least 30 minutes to keep people from burning themselves on the very hot surface. I learned this the hard way when I accidentally enabled this program, luckily without having any food in the oven :D
I get really good results with a 550F oven (pretty normal top temp in the US) with a pizza stone and a 7-9 minute bake (actually temperatures vary oven by oven, and some like to let the actual temp sag by as much as 100F rather than holding, so you've gotta reset them sometimes to get it back to 550).
Then again I also think the dough my Zojirushi bread machine turns out, left to rest overnight in the fridge, is close enough to my hand-made dough that I don't really bother with the latter anymore. So maybe I'm just not very discerning. My pizza's definitely better than all but the highest-end, fancy-pizza-oven places locally, though.
Stovetop start in cast iron is great for pan-style pizza, though. Heat the oven, build the pizza (on oil) in the pan, heat it 'till it sizzles for a minute or so, then in the oven, broiler to finish the top when you think it's getting close to done. Way less clean-up and lower equipment requirements than a stone-and-peel bake.
The high heat drives moisture out of the ingredients faster than the moisture can collect on the top of the pizza. You can simply remove the moisture from the ingredients ahead of time. I make the marinara & set the sauce in a fine strainer in a pot, and let it drain for at least 45, preferably an hour. For the mozzarella, I put down a cutting board, a towel, some paper towel, the cheese, then reverse the whole process & place a skillet on top. (This can overdry the mozzarella, causing it to melt out, so it takes some experience.)
Without moisture, you can cook the pizza longer, at a lower temperature.
I combine this with Kenji Lopez-Alt's "no hack pizza" method: the pizza is cooked on a stone in a heavy cast iron skillet. To make the pizza, pull the skillet out of the oven, and put it on the stove at the highest setting your stove goes to (preferably a gas stove). Make the pizza in the skillet, then return the whole thing to the oven.
Does removing the moisture prevent that thin layer of raw/uncooked/wet dough just under the marinara sauce? That's my biggest problem with making pizza at home and I thought it was because I just couldn't get my home oven hot enough.
For a quick pizza, I use a "Ooni" pizza oven and the results have been great. It's relatively cheap and you can get the temperatures you are looking for. I joined their first kickstarter and have been buying their ovens ever since:
This is a good cheap alternative: https://www.amazon.com/Breville-Crispy-Crust-Pizza-BREBPZ600... It looks like it might be discontinued although there is a similar one by another brand on amazon. Its major drawback is its only good for a pizza as large as 10-12 inches and if your pizza gets a large high bubble it can touch the upper element. I have made much better pizza with it then my standard kitchen oven. I do want to build a brick oven in the backyard when I get a chance some day though.
For years I've dreamed of building a wood-fired pizza oven, or buying one of the cast kits from https://www.fornobravo.com/. But this looks way easier and cheaper.
My parents have a wood fired, and I have an Ooni Koda. I can compare:
- The base is better on the wood fired oven. The Kodas stone doesn't get hot enough. I've read recommendations to replace the stone with a steel, because it's more conductive.
- The koda heats up in a timescale I'm ok with. Like, 20 minutes. For the wood fired oven, it usually takes about 2 hours for the oven itself to be hot enough, but you really want the oven to be completely saturated with heat. This can take over 4 hours.
- I've had the Koda about 6 months now, and used it about 20 times. It hasn't really registered on the meter attached to my 13 kg gas bottle, and this is the only thing I use it for. I'm not at all concerned about the gas usage, even when its used a refill is cheap.
- The wood oven, in contrast, goes through wood significantly faster than our wood burning stove.
- I can do more with the wood oven, like bread, or roasts. The profile of the Koda means my normal cookware doesn't fit, and while I'm ok with buying Ooni's low profile cast iron, I just haven't done it yet. That said, while I like the idea of cooking food under real fire with smoke and intense direct heat, I don't see that with essentially a big gas oven. I have other tools.
- I can take the Koda anywhere, but when my parents move house there's no chance the wood oven moves.
I've got the big ooni oven, and use it pretty much daily for 1-5 pizzas. It takes 20-25 minutes to heat up, then maybe 90 seconds to cook a pizza. The gas burner states it uses about 450g per hour on max, which seems to tally with what I get out of a 13kg propane bottle, which is in the region of 45 -60 days. The propane tank costs €34 to refill here.
edit: I also dreamed for years of building a wood-fired oven, but I'm totally happy with the gas one. The way I can make myself a pizza in 25 minutes start to finish is hard to argue with. People ask me if the lack of smoke in the oven makes for a subpar pizza, but in my opinion it makes no difference. The oven is so hot that any smoke in a wood-fired oven is well above the pizza. It's just the heat you need.
I have a green-egg[1] style ceramic grill that works really well for pizza. Wood-fired, and can get up to a pretty good temperature. I use a pizza stone in it.
I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it, but there are some pizza hobbyists on YouTube who actually remove the safety lock from their ovens and then put them on self-cleaning mode to get the temperature up super high.
A few years back I gave the Roccbox a shot (https://us.gozney.com/products/roccbox). It takes a special flour (Tipo 00 is what I use) so it doesn't char at 850F. The oven is certainly not cheap and there are cheaper alternatives, but I wanted something portable and more rugged-makes camping fun and we cook more than pizza. It get's me that nice charred bottom, but I typically tend to overcook the cheese.
I still continue to use my oven at times, especially when the weather isn't helping. The broiler is helpful there with a pizza stone.
No matter what I use, it's a fine dance to get things right. Sometimes it comes out great, especially when I give things a few days to cold-rise in the fridge. Usually something goes wrong, either too burnt, not fully cooked, or simply not enough pizza :)
Tipo 00 is not special but very common flour n. 405 (german system).
Many tutorials refer to this flour like there is something special inside that will make the pizza better...but there isn't.
The way I've been doing mine is to preheat the oven as hot as it will get and with a baking steel on the rack second to the top. You could probably do something similar with the iron pan/plancha.
Then when it is as hot as it's going to get, slide the pizza on to the steel/pan/whatever and switch the oven to high broil. The heat from the baking steel cooks from the bottom and the broiler hits it from the top, delivering high heat on both sides.
I can get a pretty solid pizza in 5 minutes and there are lots of variations on this method (broil for a few min, switch to bake for the last few, etc) but you can play around with your oven and setup to get the best results.
Intuitively, I don't think so. The steel is colder than the actual oven, what it does better is transfer heat by conduction into the dough (better than stone at that). That only works if it's touching the pizza.
You would heat the metal to temp before putting the pizza in. Dark metals have higher radiant heat, so maybe cast iron above it would be even better than steel.
This[0] is the kind of results I'm able to get in a normal Ikea electric oven that maxes out at 250 C. Another thing you can do with it is experiment with a Weber-like barbecue...
This recipe is beyond my reach mostly due to lack of a proper oven. Still, it's one of the best reads I've had in a long while. I'd read content like this on any topic if only I knew how to find it. Perhaps there should be a google for SEO-unoptimised content.
Supposedly, the owner shipped in Italian raw materials for the clay oven, as well as Italian masons to build it. I don't know that the oven is the reason for why their product is so good, but it is just miles apart from any other type of pizza in Chicago.
They also have wines that can't be found anywhere else in the US.
Personally prefer both NY style and deep dish over Neapolitan. Neapolitans are beautiful and have good flavors, but I think the floppy structure is much worse.
Norther Italian here: the recipe for the dough is reasonable. I usually go for 500g flour (typically a mix of 0 and 00 which I find at my grocery store) and 300ml water.
If you want a much quicker fermentation, You can use between 15g and 25g of yeast. Put a couple teaspoons of sugar to let the yeast work better, and make sure the water is between 20°C and 45°C.
But the most interesting idea for home baking is the "double fermentation": let the dough rest for about one hour in a slightly warm environment (20°C - 40°C - usually that means starting the oven for one minute, then turning it off and putting the covered dough in). Then prepare the base for the pizza on your baking tin, but DO NOT PUT anything on it; instead, leave it for 30-45 min more resting in the oven. Then, extract it, put the tomato and other things, and cook it.
No offence intended, I'm genuinely curious; isn't pizza a southern thing? This reads to me like a person from the northern US weighing in on BBQ. It's perfectly allowed, but why qualify with northern?
> This reads to me like a person from the northern US weighing in on BBQ
The US is much larger than Italy, you know!
By the way, I qualified as "Northern" exactly for the "southern thing" reason. Pizza is an italian staple and, as such, different regions have different recipes and dough styles - not just trying to imitate the "original" version. Such original version is Neapolitan pizza, which is indeed very good.
But it's hard to bake a true Neapolitan pizza at home. Would you prepare your dough 24 hours before? Have you got the right temperature where to leave it? Does your oven reach 450°C ? So I chimed in with some suggestions to bake a good pizza at home - and, as far as I know, most people use a variation of such recipe when at home. Including people from Neaples!
I wasn't commenting on the perfect dough for the perfect Neapolitan pizza for a pizzeria; that's far beyond my competence levels.
EDIT:
after all, from my comment it COULD look like I was commenting on the "Neapolitan master" pizza recipe; that was not my intention. My bad. My suggestion is valid for HOME BAKING.
Wow, Instagram has really gone over to the dark side. They haven't just broken the back button, they have entirely disabled it. There is no way to escape that site other than typing in a new URL or going to your browser history.
Interesting. I'm using firefox with noscript. So it's not that Instagram has intentionally disabled the back button, it's (apparently) that they're trying to intercept it somehow and when they fail it ends up disabled. Still kinda hinky if you ask me.
I'm curious, do you have a very thin layer of seemingly uncooked/raw/wet dough just under the tomato sauce? We use a high quality pizza steel, run our oven at max heat and preheat everything for 45 minutes, but that layer is always there.
I have found that the key to getting the dough really stretchy is the autolyse part: first mix ~⅔ of the flour/yeast with all of the water to make something like a pancake batter, stir for a few minutes, and let that sit for at least 20 minutes. Then add in the rest of the flour, knead, and let rest overnight.
I can't speak to pizza, but I have an espresso story to tell.
One of my favorite things about going to Italy is the quality of the coffee. I really like extreme dark roast (your typical American diner coffee doesn't even count as coffee in my book). In Italy you can go into pretty much any coffee shop and come away with a top-quality espresso. (Don't even get me started on Starbucks.) It's a taste I inherited from my parents, who have European roots.
Now, my parents are seriously old-school. They still live in the house I grew up in, a house they bought new in 1975 and pretty much never updated. It still has the original flower-pattern wall paper. Walking into their house today feels like stepping into a time machine that transports you to an episode of the Brady Bunch. And in their kitchen is a 40-year-old Mr. Coffee which my father loves to futz with. On a good day he can coax it into producing an acceptable cup of joe, but that's about it. So for their 50th anniversary I decided I was going to buy them a proper espresso machine.
Now, I know next to nothing about espresso except that I love to drink it, so I started doing some homework and very soon got lost in a morass of coffee geekdom. The range of options available in the espresso machine market is truly mind-boggling, as are the prices. I didn't mind dropping some serious coin (this was their 50th anniversary after all) but I wanted to make sure I was actually getting something for my money. So I decided to do some experiments.
At the time I worked in a co-working office that had a high-end espresso machine (retail price $5000) and several Italians so I asked one of them to show me how to make a proper espresso. I wanted to use the espresso that came out of the office machine as a baseline and compare it to what I could make on a less expensive machine to see if the machine actually made a difference. "The first thing you have to do," he told me, "is to get the right beans. You have to go to this little specialty shop that's a half-hour drive away and get this particular brand of beans..." which, of course, cost $50 a pound or something absurd like that. But I love my parents, so I dutifully complied.
Proper beanage having been procured, we spent several hours brewing espresso with just about every possible variation on the theme you could imagine. Different grinds (we had a high-end burr grinder in the office too), different packings, different machine settings. Not once did we manage to produce a cup that any of us considered even remotely drinkable. It was all acidic and awful, probably because the machine had never been cleaned since it was installed god-only-knows how many years before.
I ended up getting them a Keurig. I got one for myself too. It makes a decent cup of coffee, but nothing compared to what you find in Italy. It is still a mystery to me how the Italians manage to produce such consistently good coffee, but only in Italy. When they come to the U.S. they seem to lose the touch. Maybe there's something in the water.
I don't know much about espresso, but the pourover coffee I make at home is certainly much higher quality than a Keurig machine. The beans are the most important part - you should get them roasted within the last few weeks.
Even the fanciest pourover funnel costs only 50 dollars, but you can certainly get by with a cheap plastic one for a few bucks. If you want to go full hipster, you will also need a temperature controlled electric kettle, and a scale to exactly portion out your coffee.
Then of course there is the grinder. If you are patient enough to hand grind, you can get a Hario ceramic manual grinder for $50 that produces a high quality grind. Otherwise, a quality electric grinder will be more expensive.
All and all, a hipster pourover setup will cost you less than $500 if you go all in. I don't use a scale, a temperature control, or a fancy grinder - I just use a cheap grinder and eyeball my beans, while pouring boiled water over them, so my whole setup cost me about $50 dollars. That coffee still blows the pants off Keurig any day of the week, and I can compost my filters so I am not filling a hole in our planet with a tiny plastic cup every time I want a coffee.
> The beans are the most important part - you should get them roasted within the last few weeks.
That's the key. When I buy mid-range beans (usually what I do—the good stuff's expensive) my pourovers are really just manual drip coffee. Fine, but just... coffee. When I use really good beans, though? It's a whole different drink. All kinds of nuance and delicate flavors.
The tiers I've found are basically: truly bad coffee; a very large range of coffees that pretty much all just taste like "alright coffee" and for me this goes as low as Kirkland-brand ground coffee and as high as... well, the "nicest" whole-bean coffee Costco sells, differentiated mostly by bitterness levels or burntness; and then the good stuff that doesn't even really belong in the same category of product as the rest, purchased in small quantities, very freshly roasted.
It could well be that Italy's espresso beans are much higher quality at the same price than those in the US. That's the case for some other things in other countries—rich ones, even, not just places with much lower GDP/capita (I still don't get why we can't seem to bake a good loaf of bread at a reasonable price, which also has the effect that our sandwiches tend to either suck or be really expensive—see also, cheese).
> and a scale to exactly portion out your coffee.
You're gonna want a scale if you do much cooking, anyway. Especially baking.
As european coffee fan Italys coffee is just overrated. The lowest quality, might be a bit better than elsewhere but best rosteries and cafes are generally in London, Berlin (number of great cafes and roasters there are of the charts) and scandinavia. But you will find really good cafes in any bigger city (including Italy). And even quality roasters are decentralized.
The problem is not so much roasting but getting the beans. Many roasters just wont get to the best stuff from Africa because of limited supply so it makes sense that richer countries snatch the material because they can charge more.
I can imagine US also can afford the best beans so i bet the high high quality is pretty top notch but ive never had US coffe in my life.
I think both with coffee and beer there are two classes of establishment - the average city cafe or bar, and then the specialty "artisanal" establishment in big cities. My guess would be that the coffee at an average Italian town square bar is better than the same coffee at a coffee shop in Spain or France or the USA. However, it's not going to be anywhere on par with a specialty coffee shop in Manhattan that has searched the world and handpicked its bean flavor profiles to perfection.
It's the same thing with beer and Germany. The average beer in a random town brewery somewhere in Germany is tastier than a Budweiser, but as a beer lover, I would much rather end up at a beer bar with a 100 different beers on tap in a place like London or New York.
The interesting twist with Germany is that the same beer purity laws that originally allowed them to become a beer leader in the world are now holding them back in the craft beer revolution.
From my experience, it's more about culture and expectations than anything. You'll occasionally get a shop that can stand above its city, but eventually it'll regress to the mean. Here in the PNW you can walk into any coffee shop and get a good coffee about 50–75% of the time. In NYC, I'd say it's more like 10%. I think it's because people in NYC don't value coffee very much, or care only superficially. On the flipside, even shitty bagels in NYC are better than most of what you can get here. I hated all the coffee I had in France, but it might be because they prefer a bitter cup to be drunk with sugar, rather than the black coffee we drink in the US.
Sad truth is that average Italian town square bar coffee will probably be the exact same global shit brand coffee as in German town square town. If they are different it has to do more with local traditions maybe more skill or higher quality machine.
But yeah that also means that there is someone obsesive in every bigger city trying to get the best stuff world has to offer.
In so many ways the tradition in italy holds it back in coffe world and holds Germany in beer world. But even the German/Czech beer purity laws are not the real problem its the tradition. It's hard to inovate when beer is super popular but everybody thinks beer equals lager. It's conservatism.
> The interesting twist with Germany is that the same beer purity laws that originally allowed them to become a beer leader in the world are now holding them back in the craft beer revolution.
They can break those rules all they want and just not call what they're making "beer", right?
Yes. And its not like "craft" beer is somehow harder to make than lagers. Largers are actually one of the most complicated to brew and smaller German breweries do make wonderfuly crazy craft beers.
Besides traditions the craft beer "revolution" is due to hops. US climate and innovation brought new hop varieties that are crutial. To make craft beer you pretty much have to import US hops.
Absolutely not. Source: I’m Italian, I live in London, been to Berlin a couple of times, in the best case you can get something drinkable but nothing comparable to a nice espresso in Italy.
I was actually surprised to find a pretty nice illy coffe in Kobe train station, but then I also found a very good Naples pizza in that city.
I relate to this 100%.
Same background, lived in several places before ending up in London.
You can find good roasted coffee of many types in most of these places.
But if you need an espresso or any other Italian styled coffe. Nothing can beat Italy.
I admit one exception: Portugal.
In a long trip to Lisbon I’ve done I had some of the best coffee there !
Edit: still using my 18yr old Bialetti for most of my coffee here and buying coffee when going back occasionally (ever brought back a trolley full of coffe through airport security checks?). Only reliable way so far to have decent coffee.
It must be different expectations about what is a good coffee.
London is i think the original place from where high end coffe culture spread out to europe and where idea of small independent roasters came from.
I often buy coffee from London when i can get it. Square Mile, Has Bean, Union Coffee, Caravan coffee all mostly highest quality stuff.
Funnily enough i've lived in portugal for a while and coffee was so bad i had hard time finding good beans. Luckily some cafes were importing stuff but no roasters.
Illy? Are you serious? Megabrand corporation that often uses mix of Arabica and Robusta not even full Arabica (meaning blend of cheapest cofee).
Look around a bit you can for sure find awesome cafes in London. If not there than probably nowhere. I posted few of my fav London roasteries to comment under this one.
Last month I got a simple pour over setup that's not full-hipster. Coffee is 10x better than a Keurig or instant coffee. Both of which i have. Maybe it's partially being trapped in house but it's bordering on better than the coffee shops nearby.
I dare say that if you are capable of following instructions, and have $15 to invest into a freshly roasted bag of beans from a coffee shop, then your coffee is exactly the same quality as to what you would get from a high end coffee shop. The only difference is that the coffee shop will charge you up to 5 dollars for a fancy pourover, while your 15 dollar bag of beans will last you several weeks.
Having a water cooker that is accurate up to the degree is essential too. I'm experimenting with different temperatures and it's a huge difference. Some coffee is nicer at 91c, some of it is better at 93c.
I ended up with both a Keurig and a Cuisinart DCC-450BK. The Cuisinart makes better coffee (despite its incredibly cheesy construction), but the Keurig is faster so I'll typically use one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. I've found I don't get a lot of value from high-end beans. My favorite coffee is Seattle's Best Post Alley Blend. But my coffee heart will always be in Italy. (Actually, Philz is pretty good too.)
If you're looking for something better for them/you (and ecologically better too--the Keurigs are pretty bad for that), try an Aeropress. It's absurdly inexpensive, but makes easily the best coffee I've had outside of crazy high-end shops, and it's really easy to use. It consistently gets high marks from coffee geeks.
I have an Aeropress, Chemex, and a Hario V60 and I still prefer the Aeropress simply because it's so consistent (it is also the best one to travel with). When you get a great cup on the Chemex/V60, it's really nice, but I find it's harder to nail down a consistently great cup of coffee every single time on the others.
I think Aeropress easily rivals or beats a cup of coffee I've had a "great" coffee shops, if you use good beans. But even grocery store coffee is better in the Aeropress than a cheap auto-drip machine.
Agreed: the consistency is really solid. I've never had a bad cup of coffee from my Aeropress, even when using cheap beans. I do still have a drip coffeemaker at home (weirdly, Oxo makes a terrific drip coffeemaker that's not expensive but really good), but that's mostly because I fix coffee for three-to-four people in the morning so a full carafe is a lot easier than a cup at a time. If I'm just making it for me, Aeropress all the way.
One thing I always found extremely funny is that, while Italy is known everywhere for its love of the espresso (don't get me started on the incredible amount of Italian and especially Neapolitan songs about coffee!), most of us actually do our coffe at home using a simple moka pot [1]. Our grandmothers mostly used the "napoletana" [2] instead, I don't particularly like it but to each their own.
It's such an ordinary, day to day gesture, making a moka when you have a little bit of free time, that I have yet to find an Italian "coffee geek".
The reason why moka pot is so famous has also to do with massive post-war production. Alessi and Bialetti used to make moka pots with equipment originally used to produce mortar shells for WW2. The main difference between the Alessi and Bialetti coffee makers were that the latter used the traditional 8 sided shape which aided in screwing-unscrewing.
Renato Bialetti, which I was lucky enough to greet, got his ashes put in an oversized moka pot, which was blessed during his funeral[0]. He was known for driving some of his factory workers out for lunch on Fridays, on his expensive car.
Yes, they do, except they call it a caffettiera. Every house in italy I've been to has one or more. This is in the north, the south might be different. But it's not the same as an espresso machine.
Hmmm burns the coffee easily when used wrong. You need to be right there to control the temperature and cool it off immediately once the water runs out.
Second that. As much as I want to believe a $10k La Marzocco is absolutely essential to good espresso, a $100 Nespresso machine and Kazaar roast is the best espresso I've ever had.
You don't need to spend 10k for good espresso. Get a used portafilter machine, a grinder and good beans. I used to drink Nespresso but gave up because of the huge amount of waste. Now I am happy with my Saeco Aroma (old model, bought for 150 euros). Actually I even went back to hand grinding with my Hario grinder some month ago. I'll take the time and also have some workout :)
Maybe not "the best" - but for 30 cents a pop, it's so easy, and it's always good. Of course what you drink at caffe Mexico in Naples is a different thing, maybe a different planet; on the other hand,there are whole countries and maybe whole continents where your trusty Nespresso will brew the best coffee.
It's odd that you went from one end of the spectrum (trying to refine your technique and failing) to the complete opposite (a Keurig). Surely there's a middle ground.
For example, the Rancilio Silvia [1] is known to be one of the best and most tweakable/hackable home machines for manually brewed espresso. It can make great Italian espresso out of the box, but there's also a healthy community around it that hacks the internals to brew at better temperatures and so on. It's also very affordable.
Personally, I have a Jura Ena, because I like just pressing one button to get my coffee, and it's fantastic.
I used to have a Gaggia Classic with an updated steam wand that did pretty well. I think it ranks well against the Racillio and is cheaper. It's basically the cheapest decent machine you can buy, AFAIK. People also hack it, with PID controller mods and such.
Your story is very upsetting for people who enjoy espresso. Your issue was almost certainly with your espresso machine, which likely had severe issues with maintenance.
I grew up with a generic espresso machine (pre-Nespresso, so one where you had to grind and compact the beans yourself) and I could make a decent cup from the age of 14. This was with North-American water and beans of average price and quality.
And now you have a plethora of capsule-based espresso machines with identical convenience to a Keurig, from Nespresso to Caffitaly.
You often get really acidic brews from speciality roasted beans because they err on the side of not pushing through the second crack and serve earlier in the roasted life before some of the gas has escaped. Were the beans really black and oily or have a more browny tinge?
This was many years ago so my memory of such details is quite fuzzy, but to the best of my recollection they were not oily. I remember being a little surprised by that.
“ It was all acidic and awful, probably because the machine had never been cleaned since it was installed god-only-knows how many years before.”
This. This was your problem. I have a $2k Rocket Milano (not the fanciest, but not bad), and I clean it thoroughly every couple weeks. It makes a world of difference each time I do, and the first pulls after putting in the effort are wonderful.
Of course, I also spent nearly a year before I found decent beans near me.
Those Italians in your coworker space, were they baristas or office workers? I would expect that Italians in Italy also cannot produce perfect espresso unless they made it their profession.
I grew up in an Italian household with both parents Italian immigrants and have a large extended Italian family.
It would have been an embarrassment to be unable to make a quality espresso.
I never drank any coffee/espresso beverages growing up and it was seen as a rejection of my family's culture, yet despite not consuming it I still was taught how to make espresso and would do it regularly for my parents.
Cuisine is a big part of Italian culture. We didn't go to restaurants because they made food better than we did at home because they were professionals, we'd go to give my mother a break and every time it was like the restaurant was on trial with my mother pointing out every damn thing that was done worse than had she made it.
Edit:
Just wanted to add that having been raised in that environment where authentic home-cooked delicious food was made every day, I can't go to Italian restaurants anymore, not in the US. It's completely ruined it. There were no professional cooks or barristas under that roof, just OG Italians.
In Naples, where I am from, if you work in a bar you're not allowed to touch the espresso machine unless you have worked there for at least 1 year. Maybe, only then, you could start asking questions about how to use it. So, I agree, you don't learn how to use those things unless you have worked with them.
I'm quarantined with two Italians (father-in-law and his mother) from Northern Italy and had been planning on making pizza from scratch to surprise them but always thought I would make a huge mess in the kitchen... from the video, it looks totally manageable! The hardest part is having to wait 11 hours to eat it!
N.Italy: I'm quarantined [well, it's lockdown, really] with two Italians, one is my wife (other is son): I'm not allowed even remotely near the kitchen. Every mealtime has become a stereotypically-italian ultra-marathon. 2.4kg heavier since. Yes, i am trying to keep fit but going from 30-200km daily bicycle rides (eas 28km commute and back for work) to balconia+pasta+pasta sure takes it toll.
As an Italian, I agree with your wife: my countrymen can be downright racist when it comes to food. Often they struggle to accept even other Italian food that is not from their own city. Then again, that's how Italian cuisine managed to survive the industrial revolution whereas others didn't make it.
In my case it is my significant other which had trouble adapting to Italian food. I took over the kitchen anyway :-), and I'm learning how to cook Turkish food, which is as wonderful as the Italian food.
> The hardest part is having to wait 11 hours to eat it!
That's mostly a matter of perspective. You have to plan your Pizza a day ahead, but making the dough on the day before and putting it into the fridge doesn't feel as bad as waiting with a hungry stomach before food is served :-)
Like many, I've been learning new recipes recently and that includes pizza -
I've been using this dough recipe (it has wholewheat in it) [0] and been really liking the flavor of the dough. I've also moved to slow rise, the dough flavor seems more complex (or it could be psychosomatic). I leave it in the fridge for 2 days or 3 days, depending on how quickly we go through one batch.
But for cooking, I'm following this method (which is similar to what suggested in the OP). Basically to cook the pizza with tomato sauce first and then add the cheese [1] (PSA - this guy has such fun personality, be prepared to watch hours of his pizza videos)
I've also bought canned peel san marzano tomatoes (from both Whole Foods and TJs) and just used an impression blender to puree it with some basil.
I watched an interview with the owner of Lucali in NY [2] and he said he cooks his tomato sauce. So I've been cooking my tomato puree simmering it for 30-40 min. It makes it much richer. Still not sure if I like it more or not.
I recently discovered Vito Iacopelli's excellent YouTube channel on (predominantly Neapolitan) pizza making. He runs a Neapolitan pizzaria in Los Angeles and covers things like stretching techniques, tests with different ingredients and fermentation processes, and methods specifically designed to be used at home.
I highly recommend the book "American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza". I have a digital version and it took my pizza game to the next level.
>Master bread baker Peter Reinhart follows the origins of pizza from Italy to the States, capturing the stories behind the greatest artisanal pizzas of the Old World and the New.
>Beginning his journey in Genoa, Reinhart scours the countryside in search of the fabled focaccia col formaggio. He next heads to Rome to sample the famed seven-foot-long pizza al taglio, and then to Naples for the archetypal pizza napoletana. Back in America, the hunt resumes in the unlikely locale of Phoenix, Arizona, where Chris Bianco of Pizzeria Bianco has convinced many that his pie sets the new standard in the country. The pizza mecca of New Haven, grilled pizza in Providence, the deep-dish pies of Chicago, California-style pizza in San Francisco and Los Angeles—these are just a few of the tasty attractions on Reinhart's epic tour.
>Returning to the kitchen, Reinhart gives a master class on pizza-making techniques and provides more than 60 recipes for doughs, sauces and toppings, and the pizzas that bring them all together. His insatiable curiosity and gift for storytelling make American Pie essential reading for those who aspire to make great pizza at home, as well as for anyone who enjoys the thrill of the hunt.
I very much enjoy making pizza (or pasta) in the evening after work. It's a great way to relax, watch something on the side and provides some kind of Italian style escapism where you enter semi-consciously a fantasy world of Mediterranean savoir vivre (what's the Italian term here?). In the end I enjoy (usually together with my girlfriend or guests) the result with a nice bottle of red wine which provides the elevating intoxication to round up the experience.
I like to experiment with my pizza and pasta recipes and place focus on trying to keep it simple. I believe that art benefits of some structure. Think rhyming patterns in poems or tonality in music. I'm aware of atonal music or not rhyming poetry but that's my point - it's a very different experience - more difficult. That's why I also like to not go and buy the best most expensive ingredients but instead attempt to restrict them to what I get from ALDI. Sometimes I'm just going crazy in some bio market and just buy the top notch stuff. But it seems that the taste is not that much depending on whether the tomatoes are from San Marzano or your run-of-the-mill variety from a regular super market.
My latest - not yet used - pizza gadget is an oven stone. Can't wait to find out how it will affect the outcome.
A pizza stone is a definite improvement, but what will make an absolute world of difference is a proper pizza oven (preferably wood-fired, but gas also works).
I instantly went from mediocre home pizza to almost restaurant grade simply by switching from my household oven to an Ooni, despite using the same ingredients and preparation method.
I typically buy my dough from Trader Joe's but what to start doing it myself. There's a recipe in the article, but anyone else have a goto recipe they love?
Edit: The video in the article is a pretty good dough "recipe"
If you go down the rabbit hole, when making your dough try to source some double zero flour (00 flour) and experiment with "hydration" percentages which is the ratio of water and flour. These are the two ingredient factors I have found to have the most impact. The "recipes" are much easier than you think - it's mostly a waiting game
Just a quick thought: depending on how adventurous you feel, you might consider buying ready-made pizza dough from the supermarket, and start with that.
If you like your pizza, the next iteration would be to also make the dough yourself. Expect several iterations / attempts until you can make it well and reproducible, and get a good feel for how much you need.
The first few batches of pizza dough I made were not very good :-).
550 flour, half cube yeast, a tiny spoon salt and sugar, 150ml milk filled up by water to ~275ml fluid. 5 spoons oil. Knead the dough and add the fluid. When it's nice textured leave it for the rest of the day or at least a few hours.
You get a dough you can load full with whatever you want and you'll have enough food for a few days.
Personally, I like my Pizazz Pizza plate/oven thing. I make dough out of like 5 ingredients and let it rise for a few hours in the fridge. Top with whatever and eat--pizza is about enjoyment to me, not this Anthony Bourdain never ending quest for the perfect slice of sushi, its about making it, enjoying it, eating it.
Great read, thanks for sharing, there was just a new oven announced, I think it's ooni, which is for this kind of pizza. It's an outdoor propane pizza oven. BTW, I'm not sure you can cook pizza at 500 degrees in 90 seconds like the article says.
I have an Ooni 3 (burns wood pellets). It gets up to 800-900 degrees. The first pizza cooks in 60 seconds. Each pizza after that takes a little longer. It’s an impressive little oven.
Get the G3 Ferrari electric pizza oven. you can cook a pizza in 2-3 minutes in that. There is even (of course!) an online community of pizza oven hackers who install additional electric heating elements in the oven to get the temperature even higher :)
I'm surprised they use yeast and not sourdough as that would add more flavor. Sourdough is surprisingly easy to make and maintain btw. During these wfh days especially: Just mix 50grams of flour with 50 grams of water and leave in an open container for a couple of days, when you see bubbles, put half of is (50gr) together with 25gr of flour and 25gr of water, repeat. In a bread of 500 grams of meal and 250 ml of water, add 100 gr of your bubbling sourdough, kneed, let rise for 3 hours, and overnight into the fridge, easy peasy.
Btw, that standard kneeding hook of the Kitchen aid is really a pos: Get a better one asap.
I doubt the pizza master will read HN, if he does, my surprise stands and I'd ask him... why not sourdough? ;)
Sourdough is the ancient way, that's why I mentioned it, also, it gives me great pleasure to use it for baking. Take my comment as you will, perhaps you can derive some value from it.
It obviously depends on what you prefer, but Neaples style pizza is fluffy: it doesn't get flattened but instead air pockets are pushed by hand towards the outside border.
Honestly, I prefer using good passata and just a bit of salt and olive oil. If you can't get passata, use crushed tomatoes and blend them first. Don't cook it, any canned tomato product has already been heated as part of the canning process. Quality matters, don't use the cheap cans from the supermarket.
I'm lucky that I have an absolutely fantastic Italian specialty store here in Copenhagen, where I can get amazing quality canned tomatoes and great cuts of cured meat for toppings. And 'nduja, oh boy the 'nduja. For cheese I actually use completely ordinary Danish Havarti, it's like a slightly aged low-moisture whole milk mozzarella, it melts great and it's available literally everywhere here.
Neapolitan pizza is something you really need a wood-fired oven or something that gets similarly hot. An ordinary oven won't cut it. As I live in an apartment and have very limited space for gadgets, I stick to Roman-style pizza tonde, where you can get absolutely amazing results in an ordinary oven with a baking steel (mine is an 8mm thick 8kg slab of iron from an industrial steelworks, but the commercial ones are great too).
IMO you best bet is a simple sauce with good tomatoes. Bianco Dinapoli, Sclafani (from NJ not Italy), Jersey Fresh, and anything from Stanislaus are good choices. From there just mix in salt and a minced clove of garlic (per 28oz can) and whatever else you like (olive oil, basil, oregano). Don't cook it. Its better to mix it and let it sit for a few days in the fridge.
I really wish this wine meme would die. Essentially every test done to ‘prove’ that there’s no difference between cheap and expensive wines has had two massive flaws:
1. The label of ‘wine expert’ is left undefined. True sommeliers have spent thousands of hours studying wine and are not the same thing as a guy that takes a weekend wine-tasting course and gets a certificate. Yet most ‘studies’ fail to mention this.
Just as importantly here, what literally every single source we could find not only leaves out when reporting this story, but in the vast majority of cases falsely states, is the actual qualifications of those being tested by Brochet. It turns out, the people he was using as taste testers were not experts at all, simply undergraduate students studying oenology (wine and wine making). While certainly probably more knowledgeable than your average person on the street, nobody would call an undergraduate mathematics major just learning the ropes a “math expert”, nor would their skills be indicative of what their professors who have vastly more experience and are actual experts are capable of doing.
2. The ‘experiments’ are done in a totally unscientific arbitrary way, with massive amounts of suggestion and psychological influence. If this were any other scientific study, it would be laughed out of the room for its total lack of rigor.
As the Master Sommeliers demonstrate by passing the taste test they are subjected to in the first place, with enough time and study, there are actually people who are exceptionally good at identifying and judging attributes of wines in the right circumstances. But overwhelm there sense with 100 wines or change their expectations about what they are tasting and their perceptions will change significantly, seemingly, making them little better than a random person off the street at telling anything definitive about the wine.
A simple flaw in your reasoning - none of the target audience of this comparison is actually a sommelier expert. The whole argument is about an average joe sampling say a wine costing say 15 euros in france and one costing 500. And the same average joe benefiting very little if at all from paying too much. Its like buying La Ferrari which all experts praise, when all you need is to drive 80kmh to next town.
I personally, by no means an expert in any way, can attest the difference is minimal and mostly comes down to one's own preferences / pairing of wine with food in given situation.
Its often one of those markets where you buy your own emotions with higher price rather than actual, measurable subjective added value.
But yes, if you use a wine costing 2-3 euros, quality of taste in many aspects will be incomparable even to that average joe.
> And the same average joe benefiting very little if at all from paying too much. Its like buying La Ferrari which all experts praise, when all you need is to drive 80kmh to next town.
But that isn't usually why these studies are often referenced, and certainly wasn't what the OP meant. The argument presented is often that there is no difference between high-end wines and low-end wines, which seems to be demonstrably false. That's not the same thing as unless you're an expert, you won't be able to tell the difference.
The reality is that wine appreciation, like any field, requires experience and knowledge to build "taste." This is pretty obvious when it comes to other things - no one would suggest that you could understand or appreciate the nuances of a WW2 film without knowing what WW2 was, but somehow when it comes to matters of taste in art, food, etc., the totally-ignorant person's opinion is equal to the expert's.
I'd say it's far more likely that contemporary culture is aesthetically/phenomenologically illiterate.
Is there a good study out there showing that an expert can reliably distinguish between average and expensive wine? It should be quite easy to prove, but all I ever hear about are studies showing the opposite. Because there's a huge financial incentive in making people believe that expensive wine really tastes better, I think it's reasonable to be more skeptical of wine experts than e.g. WW2 experts.
I mentioned prices in euro and France for a reason - there are wine in 2-3 euros category that can be bought there ie in Carrefour/Casino, that qualify as say 'table wine' and are perfectly fine for having say with lunch and dinner. No bad/sour aftertaste, taste is simple but very smooth.
The country I come from, this would be put in above-average quality (which isn't very nice to my home country, but that's my experience).
> Its like buying La Ferrari which all experts praise, when all you need is to drive 80kmh to next town.
Any car driver can easily appreciate the difference between a Ferrari and, say, a Ford. You can't say the same about wine.
Now, since you're making a utilitarian argument here - what is the point of becoming a sommelier when all it does is make you so sensitive to the taste of wine that you need to spend hundreds of dollars for "a really good one"?
On the surface, this sounds like a huge waste of time and money to me. Perhaps having such a fine taste is pure bliss. My suspicion though is that sommeliers are just bullshitters that use their knowledge of expensive produce to get into the company of wealthy people - and earn a decent living.
> Now, since you're making a utilitarian argument here - what is the point of becoming a sommelier when all it does is make you so sensitive to the taste of wine that you need to spend hundreds of dollars for "a really good one"?
Because not everything is about maximizing economic transactions?
I've met professional wine tasters. They are like human chromatographs. They don't just tell you how good a wine is. They can tell you which compounds are in excess, and which are lacking, they can guess what went wrong with the winemaking process and the growing conditions. They are an essential part of quality control and how wineries fine tune their process.
As for difference between cheap and expensive wines, the same wine tasters tell me that price does not always correlate with quality, it is mostly a marketing thing. In fact, the ones I know are more likely to serve you cheap (but good!) wine. They know enough not to rely on price as a proxy for quality.
They can tell you anything they like, doesn't make it true.
When put up against a real triangle/discrimination test, they just don't stack up. I'm not saying they don't do anything, but claims of being able to discriminate individual compounds in any sort of detail are not substantiated.
In other words, it is possible to tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines, but only if you’re so far along the hedonism treadmill that you’ve literally spent thousands of hours training for a career in it.
I've thought about what must happen to a master sommelier's "blind taste" skills once they've passed the exam and no longer need to practice that skill on a regular basis. My assumption is that, like with any specialist, that skill gets rusty if not used, and that the more important everyday skills in that job revolve around their knowledge of wine, ability to suggest good pairings, and customer service.
That's a good point. It's sort of a "problem of the expert" - as you become better at something, the number of people with your level of knowledge becomes smaller and smaller. Since you have less experts or challenges to go up against (or indirectly, exams), your skill level drops.
You don't even have to go that far. If it takes an expert to tell the difference then it stands to reason that the average person will never really taste the benefit above the average level.
I guess this is why it's called "a matter of taste". Anecdote: I can't stand vinegar in anything. So it's really interesting to see someone insist that I should use it because it makes this or that better.
Experts have to judge based (also) on objective criteria. You don't, you just like it more or less.
the wine director (the exalted sommelier who gets to buy the wine that is sold/served) in a high quality restaurant has both passed the exam and works every day literally tasting wines. They get better at it, not worse, and the best of them create lists of quality and diversity that offer them opportunities to taste that are simply not available to anybody else, especially not to a lowly student.
Just as importantly, don’t fall for fetishism. Neapolitan pizza is a very specific style of pizza that, while “authentic” and photogenic, is by no means a superior style of pizza. Especially made poorly, at home, in an oven that is 200 degrees colder than necessary!
You're right about oven temperature. Household ovens can barely hit 500F, that's not quite enough for proper pizza.
There are some workarounds that will make very good pizza at home.
My favorite is to use an outdoor grill instead of an oven. A hot grill with a pre-heated pizza stone is totally capable of reaching proper temperature. This can actually make neopolitan style pizza crust and works perfectly for other styles too.
If you can't do a grill, starting the pizza in a large preheated cast iron pan on the stove top will help. Finish it off in the oven. Not Neopolitan, but very good.
If you are using the recommended "00-flour" (finely milled high gluten bread flour), and you're not reaching pizza oven temperatures because you're using a household oven, add diastatic malt (powder) to the dough mix. This boosts yeast activity and also helps with coloration of the dough at lower temperatures. Otherwise, the pizza will be "done" before the crust has a chance to color properly.
There's a hack you can do where you use your oven's self clean function to reach high temperatures. Most ovens have a physical interlock preventing you from opening the door during a self clean cycle though, so to work around that you'll have to void your warranty and saw off the lock.
I have done it at my old (rented) apartment without physically destroying the latch. If I remember correctly (this was ~10 years ago), I was able to remove the latch assembly entirely, and then jump the wires for the sensor that detects the latch being engaged.
That said, cooking pizza on the clean cycle is difficult, and not necessarily worth it. Timing and vertical positioning in the oven is crucial, or you will end up with a burnt bottom or toppings. Make sure you have a long peel, and keep your face away from the heat when you open the door.
While I agree on your fetishism point, which is in my opinion a byproduct of both post-colonialist "exoticism" and capital-driven standardization of products: using a refractory stone allows your kitchen oven to reach the right temperatures.
Sorry - refractory stone is not enough for neapolitan pizza in home oven. You need something like the baking steel. And if you manage to get the infrared heater on during bake - you can get into the holy 2 minutes of bake time.
I feel that learning the classics on cooking is a good way to see how engineering mindset is close to cooking and food preparation mindset.
Talking about Italian food in specific, they're very opinionated about what's the best way to work each ingredient, how to work dough, how long to leave pasta resting, and what's the best blend of herbs and the best species for each recipe. On engineering we call it standardization not fetishism. That's what DOP, DOC and DOCG is about, and that's what the Neapolitan on Neapolitan pizza is about, you know that if you eat a Neapolitan pizza that follow the official process you will have a predicted flavor on your pizza, like it or not.
By reading the classics and asking yourself why they cook that way you will start to understand that you can use shortcuts where the output could be the same or close enough. For instance stone is a very bad heat conductor, that's why you need a very hot oven to deliver the right amount of heat to cook your pizza. But if you use a better conductor you could deliver the same amount of energy on a much lower temperature. On the "Modernist Cuisine at Home"[0] book they research this topic and arrive on the conclusion that a thick baking steel sheet arrives on much better results, they even sell their official baking steel [1].
DOP, DOC, etc are not about preference, they are designations for regionally protected products names with some production standards. Just like champagne is only champagne if it was made in champagne region from the right grapes in the right methodology.
These assure on the other hand normally a good quality standard as the regional producers' associations have every incentive to keep quality good.
Neapolitan Pizza is the poster child for fetishism, hipster cargo cult, worshiping a style that has only been deemed by the community as superior, not experienced individually to be so. At its absolute best it is significantly inferior to top American examples.
I had this fetishism about neopolitan pizzas for a while despite having never actually tried one. Mostly due to reading a lot of what Kenji-Lopez and others wrote on the web.
There's an annual pizza festival in the summer i nBoston, which brings a lot of Italians with their stone ovens making neopolitan pies. So I went there and finally got to try neopolitan pies which according to pizza aficionados are supposedly really good.
Man, I was in for a ride. Just not my taste. I'll admit that I may be a charlatan or have a pedestrian palate, but I can say now I'll prefer a slice of NY pie over an authentic neopolitan pie any day of the week.
I agree with you that your own judgement is what matters on things like flavors, as long as you don't close yourself off to certain foods that may take a few tries to appreciate.
But I think you've dialed down a very complicated issue too far when you say "one cannot tell the difference between good and very good". A better characterization would be that many factors go into the perception of taste, and it's not always straightforward to identify "good". Here's a decent article on wine tasting that explores the idea much more honestly than, "Haha, experts can't tell!": https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-profess...
Definitely not necessary to buy ingredients "certified" by the "Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana" but following the traditional methods yields some really tasty pizza.
Technically you're right. But food is for many people more than the taste. It's a form of escapism, a little show that distracts you from the chore. For that to work you need this fantasy of the master chef and authenticity that allows you to enter a different culture mentally. It's kind of live action role play.
I mulled on this comment for a day - your comment saddens me. That said, your ultimate takeaway is sound - do whatever makes you happy, don't rely on others to validate what you should or shouldn't enjoy.
>Please ignore all these experts, all they want is to make you feel special because you drink/eat their stuff.
But if this isn't cynicism for effect and is your true outlook on life I would encourage you to spend some time with any master of something and have them describe in detail to you the things they are seeing in a fellow master doing the same thing.
This <thing> could be anything - sports, music, art, acting, chess, video games...
What you will probably see is the master picking up on all sorts of imperceptible details that seem so subtle that they seem like bullshit. Then try going deep on that same thing, learn it for yourself. Eventually you will reach a stage where you will suddenly discover firsthand how little you know about that skill and how big the world above you is in skill and detail.
Then eventually you will appreciate that this is true for almost every other disciplines and there myriad worlds of hidden detail that you never noticed or appreciated that creators have slaved over. Things that you only notice but can't put your finger on when you compare a pro to an amateur.
Is Monet just dabs on a canvas? Federer just hitting a ball? Is Daigo just a lucky guesser at Street Fighter? Is Mitsuko Uchida just more stuffy and pretentious than your street busker?
Granted, there's a lot of snake oil in food and wine because there's money to be made but don't let that theatre close you off categorically to the world of food (and wine).
Oh, I struggled this for so many years, and I still couldn't convince myself wine is tastier than grape juice. Maybe it's one of those 'street credit' things?
Maybe it's more about finding your own taste and let "experts" believe you can confine nature and culture (food/language/skintones) into imaginary boxes drawn on a map.
That threshold is very different for different people. I'm not a wine drinker so I won't comment but different people definitely have or have developed a much more refined sense of "what is good".
In general of course a person can eat whatever crap they want and it doesn't affect me except when that person is cooking or picking out food for me.
I don't understand the downvotes, given that sugar both feeds the yeast bacteria needed for proper rising, and to balance the high acidity of tomatoes.
yes but you don't mix the dough with the tomatoes until the very end so it wouldn't impact the yeast. With proper flour sugar is not necessary, as the flour itself will be broken down by the yeast (hence the maturing/proofing stage). If you "exhaust" the flour, then you'll need sugar to get an "artificial" Maillard reaction and a nice browning of the crust.
Dough will rise just as well without any added sugar -- the starches in the flour are the primary food source for the yeast. If you don't believe me, try it yourself. The purpose of sugar in doughs is to assist browning -- especially at home-oven temperatures -- and "improve" the flavour. I personally prefer baking dough without sugar, but you do whatever you prefer.
Pizza is a dough base with some veg and cheese sprinkled on top of it. Lets not make it more special than it needs to be. It's not very hard to make it and even first time it will taste good enough.Maybe not as good as if some Italian would do it but definitely not bad either.
The dough recipe from the article is pretty legit and exactly the way I do it at home; the main problem I see is that it would be pretty hard to find good Mozzarella or Fiordilatte cheese (Fiordilatte di Agerola is slightly drier than Mozzarella, therefore producing less liquid in the oven, and also costs less), and I find that pizza done according to the Neapolitan recipe loses much when using a different kind of cheese.
A pet peeve of mine is that many recipes, while getting most of it right, use instant yeast; an important part of Neapolitan pizza is the slow dough rise using very little amounts of yeast, that should take from a minimum of 7/8 hours to an entire day or more (of course by storing it in a fridge).