I used to think you had to do crazy work to get a great pizza.
I did most of the stuff on this page (short of breaking my self-cleaning lock). It is all great advice, and if you follow it and practice a lot, you can make great pizzas and wow your guests.
BUT! After you have done that, you can also violate all the rules and still get great pizzas. Once, I was in Waipio Valley in Hawaii, with just Pillsbury white flour, bread yeast, a block of cheddar cheese, Wesson oil, tomato paste, fresh oregano, and spring water. To bake I had a gas oven with the rack out, a tall soup pot, inverted with a big skillet also inverted over it, close under the broiler. The pizzas came out fantastic! I could only make them 9" across, so I ended up making 30+ of them.
I had no peel. My dough was very, very wet; I scooped enough for each pizza with a big kitchen spoon, spread it out on parchment, drizzled Wesson, smeared tomato, sprinkled oregano, salt, and cheddar, slid it onto the skillet, and started on the next one.
The one thing you mustn't ever neglect is letting the flour and water proof for 40+ minutes before you work it.
To get decent pizza at almost any American restaurant, you have to insist "burn it!" or they will be afraid you will get mad about a little charring, and so undercook it the way Americans demand. You have to tell them that if it bends, it's not done enough.
Regardless of the recipe, technique and setup thin crust pizzas are still incredibly hard to do well at home.
Thicker foccacia-style pizzas are very easy and come out right on the first try, but thin crust pizzas at the very least require an oven that can go above 300c and that's very rare.
When my oven broke I tried to make a pizza napoletana / margherita in the pan, and it worked better than expected!
The trick is to roll the dough out very thin, fold it and then unfold it in the pan (this way it doesn't break on the way), frie it from both sides before you add the tomato paste and cheese. Then just bake it with the lid closed until the mozarella is run.
I could be wrong, but I believe those are more for efficient production of pizza. at least in my area, I only see those in the crappiest takeout places.
Correct. In principle, a conveyer belt oven could produce good results by adjusting temperature and speed correctly, using quality ingredients prepared right, but almost all Americans do not want good pizza, and will be angry if they get it. They want bad pizza just like the last bad pizza they had.
It is practically impossible to teach people to want good quality when they are used to bad, and a reliably losing business strategy.
There was a movie about this: "Big Night" (1996, Isabella Rosselini, Stanley Tucci).
Yup. We had a great pizza chain called Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza, that would cook the pizza "well done". Apparently, they had enough complaints that they now under-cook it by default, unless you explicitly ask them to "burn it". Unfortunately, the new ownership that made that change (that Anthony refused to make for years), also made some other changes that took them from "great" to just "good".
Palo Alto has (had?) a place called Amicis that would make pizzas right, and my sister in law knew how to order. My mother in law complained about it for months afterward.
I wonder how these techniques reconcile with the 24h dough method. He suggests that the warm rise method is more difficult to do effectively, but seems to bank it on a 6h timeline, and this is what he's comparing to a 1-2 day cold-rise. I expect this uses a particularly warm environment for rapid rise.
I just leave dough on the counter for 22-24 hours, room temperature, i.e. the Jim Lahey method. In rabid pizza forums the prevailing wisdom seems to be that cold-rise is inferior to that. However I'm not taking into account the other aspects of the technique.
Since I oven-bake at 550F my dough isn't nearly as wet. Still comes out quite flavorful. I don't autolyse before kneading however, and might endeavor to start doing so.
This is the secret, combined with stretching the gluten without tearing the dough, and giving the dough enough time to slowly rise (e.g in a fridge overnight).
(Basically make Pan Cristal dough for your pizza )
Very wet dough was the right thing for that time and place.
As noted below, cooking is much more like music than engineering. There isn't one right way, yet there is no upper limit on the quality of the result. A business depends on repeatable results, but that's business. True mastery includes creativity and adaptability to circumstances.
Once I had a pot of lentils that was almost done. I tasted it and it needed something... I spotted a bowl of fresh black cherries, and thought "that's it!". I quartered and added some, and it was exactly the right thing, right then. I later found a Martha Steward lentils recipe that called for cherries.
> cooking is much more like music than engineering. There isn't one right way, yet there is no upper limit on the quality of the result.
Absolutely agree, I didn’t mean to imply that this was some kind of patentable solution; more like
me discovering the intricacies of a new musical genre, and in my excitement, desperately trying to communicate what I (probably wrongly) think is the essential parts (to be mixed at your discretion)
Downvoted for missing the point, that the OP was EXPLICITLY ACKNOWLEDGING that every single component is suboptimal or "wrong" but that they still liked the result. So a response that an ingredient is wrong is not particularly useful.
I am obliged to admit that eating a pizza made in Waipio Valley makes it intrinsically more enjoyable.
My son, a harsh critic, agreed: he ate five of them.
Not making the pizzas because the ingredients at hand seemed to portend doom would have been a grave mistake. The pizzas were memorable, the lesson moreso.
Fantastic website. Far better than 98% of the sites I’ve visited this year. Far better than any site designed by a front-end engineer. Loaded fast despite all the pictures. No cookie warning. No doorslams. No static elements taking up half the viewport. The only thing it needs is a max-width to limit the line length.
Yes! I think before someone calls themself a "web developer" they should go view pages like that and bask in the instant load time. View source on that page and take a moment of silence to appreciate it. And then think about it every time they add a newsletter subscription call-to-action or auto-playing video.
At this point, I'm starting to think somebody could turn this into a viable business model. An app/site where extreme performance is literally the unique selling point.
"It's like $POPULAR_APPLICATION, except it loads fast like Craigslist"
Sorry for any personal offense; I was partly exaggerating for effect. If you’ve been able create, for a company or organization, a site that eschews all the abuse and annoyances of the modern web, I’d genuinely love to see it. Please supply a link.
No, I havn’t been able, and that’s the source of my frustration.
In a medium or large company, it’s very difficult to get this opinion heard. Layers of decision-making and power plan this out months before hands-on devs get to do much good. In small companies, speed and cost-limiting almost demands we make bad decisions.
yes, poor me for being the odd one out for not having to bend my neck over reading a 4" screen. i much prefer having my screens at a height that does not require me to look down like i'm a hunchback. the only time i see people holding a phone up to their face is on video calls, but that's just vanity not wanting that up angle look.
honestly, it's one of the things I've always hated about reading books. i've just never found a comfortable way to read. it definitely has to do with why it takes me longer to read a book than other people.
The comment I was replying to described the website as “perfect”, so I expect the website to be accessible. Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter where I decide to read it and on what device I decide to read it on.
HN people praising 90s web design like this as the epitome of design is comedy.
I had a friend who read books regularly on the iPod Touch I gave him (3.5" screen). For a while he was flying multiple times a week so he binged through all the LOTR books and then all the Harry Potter books.
2. It's easy to forget that the original HTML spec was meant for end-users to use directly to author documents. It was originally designed to function like markdown, because a lot of the DOS-based word processing editors at the time also had similarities that end-users could grok.
The current reality of technical literacy, despite the information on html being accessible, is so far from that original ideal.
I dunno, I like a cooked sauce sometimes. Lucali cooks it and it adds a nice caramelized flavor to the pizza. Part of the beauty with pizza are the many different ways to make it. I also like the Difara/Lucali etc. way of adding multiple cheeses, usually a low moisture mozzarella and a Parmesan, sometimes also a fresh, wet mozzarella. Doesn't mean pizzas with only mozzarella are bad.
it definitely had to have come after '98, as it had a solid background. in '98, we were still fascinated by animated gif tiles repeated to fill the background or some other pattern only slightly less annoying than animated.
This has been my go to pizza recipe for years. Super stoked to see it on the front page of HN.
My favorite step is “jailbreaking” your home oven with a pair of bolt cutters to use the cleaning cycle to get pizza oven temps.
> I've cook good pizzas at temps under 725F, but never a great one. 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.
Lots of US ovens will hit 550°F without modification, and with a stone your pizza's cooked in ~7 minutes at that temp. It'll still be damn good. Fancy and gourmet and authentic-anything? No, but damn good. It'll even come out looking nice.
I just don't want people reading this thread to think you can't make really good pizza at home without buying a bunch of stuff or resorting to modding your stove. You can even make pan pizzas, so you don't have to buy a stone or any of that. More steps[0] but it works, and makes a better pizza than any major chain, with no special equipment whatsoever and very little mess.
[0] Pre-heat oven, lightly oil pan, build pizza in cold pan, heat pan on stove top until oil's been sizzling for a minute or so, cook in oven for ~5-10 minutes, turn on the broiler to finish the top when it's almost done—or hit the top with an electric heat gun or butane torch from your garage while it's heating on the stove top at the beginning, for finer control and to save time by skipping the broiler.
Agreed. Another option is to use a stone or steel on the grill (or put the dough straight on the grate, which I’ve heard works well but have never personally tried). The setup I’ve ended up with through lots of experimentation is to put a stone on a steel on a full blast gas grill and then set a sheet pan on the top rack to reflect some of the hear back down. This gets me really good pizza in a about 6 minutes on a shitty home depot grill.
For anyone thinking to try this on induction: don't. A pizza steel will work on an induction stove, but it'll also bend. Stick to the oven, and leave it an hour to heat up.
Another common trick is to use two stones, spaced apart with (1 inch) steel nuts. Stone at the bottom acts as a heat deflector and nuts prevent the top one from overheating.
Well, I don’t think most people who read that page are the sort willing to go to that effort. But it’s a good read for people who have cooking experience. You see the temps required and quickly realise, you can’t duplicate that style at home without a lot of effort and some risk.
This really changed my approach to making home pizza.
I have baking stone and think it’s a waste of money.
My recommendations are:
Get a perforated pizza pan instead of a stone and bake on the lowest rung at the highest heat.
Use a basic bread recipe with and add yeast AND baking powder (or baking soda and cream of tartar in a 1:2 ratio). You can ensure the big bubbles and create texture differences.
Perforated cutter pans (e.g. Pizza Hut thin'n'crispy) pans or screens (like $3 at restaurant supply stores) on a well heated stone, combined with a low moisture dough will make a great cracker crust @ just 550F, too.
I guess pizza preferences are derived from where one grows up, but Neapolitan is way over-represented in the DIY pizza-making scene. "Less popular" thick crust styles like Detroit are super easy to make and you don't need an Ooni/Breville or anything special besides a cake pan.
The pan method works really well in a cast-iron pan. Start with the pan on the stove top, then put it in the oven. We're using a fajita pan and you get a really nice crust with it.
This. I don't even use my pizza stone anymore. Cast iron all the way. Preheat the pan, build the pizza in the pan on the stove top (about one minute), get it under the broiler 2-2.5 minutes) and enjoy a great pizza in about 3.5 minutes.
If you have two pans you can start making the second when the first has about a minute left - then the can finish a pie every 2.5 minutes!
I've not tried a straight broiler method—I do stovetop start, then a few minutes of straight bake, then just a little broiler—but when I do pan pizza I tend to make a thicker crust and pile things a bit higher. Bet if I made a pizza only on the flat, not running up the sides, that'd work just fine. Have to try that next time. I'd love to replace my pizza stone with more large cast iron pans, since they're more versatile.
I have a 3/8" dough joe baking steel slab and even preheating it to 550 for an hour in a "regular" oven never turns out as good as my Roccbox was capable of. I can never get my crust and cheese to match in baking times at 550 degrees. Either the crust isn't cooked enough for my liking or I end up cooking the cheese more than I'd prefer. The only times I've been able to make perfect pizza with my baking steel is when I used it in a friend's professional kitchen with an industrial convection oven that could go up to I think 700 degrees.
stones need 10-15 minutes between bakes to regain their heat. steel is better but takes a different kind of bake to not burn the bottom. high temp ovens offer a good balance between them but need a lot of care to not burn and be cooked through
i use all 3 and it’s nice to have options. my most common is a basic stone in the oven
With this weird form of temp surfing I have been able to
make good pizza:
.25” steel at second from
top position, 550 warmup, turn off oven and open oven for a second, switch on to hi broil, pop in pizza after a few minutes. Steel gets to 650 but I think it’s thin enough to exhaust some of it’s heat.
I've not noticed trouble with stones and a fast turnaround—bigger problem's the loss of heat in the air, in the time it takes to remove one and put another in—but may be that I'm just not watching close enough. I'll keep an eye on that, thanks for the pointer.
> My favorite step is “jailbreaking” your home oven with a pair of bolt cutters to use the cleaning cycle to get pizza oven temps.
If you have a baking steel, you can trick your oven into heating it well above the temperatures it normally allows. Place the steel very close to the broiler (leaving as little space as you can squeeze your pizza in) and leave the door slightly ajar. That little space will heat up high enough to make a "Neapolitan style" pizza in a home oven a possibility.
P.S. I've successfully done this; use this advice at your own risk :)
1. Like he said, put tin foil over the glass. At those temps a wet piece of dough, or ingredients, will shatter the glass. In the article he said to cut the lever on the oven with pruning sheers. Use a file, or hacksaw. (I'm thinking about using hvac foil tape to tape the foil over the glass. Not using foil tape directly on the glass, but on the sides holding the loose foil in place. I'm assuming that tape will take high temps? If I gave the nerve to do this?
2. If I owned a cooking school, this guy would get an honorary degree. It's more enlightening than most PhD theses. Just kidding professional students. Kinda? I had an ex whom killed hundreds of lab rats validating an experiment that has been validated 40 times. She killed the rats by banging their heads onto a granite stone. She got mad when I didn't want to know more. She is now a vegetarian, but eats Salmon because it's good for her hair. I made the mistake of telling her she easen't technically a vegetarian over a "romantic" dinner. She didn't want to be just friends? She was out of my league thankfully. Meaning I wasen't worthy, and I agreed. (Sorry--reminiscing.)
3. If I read everything correctly, keeping the dough similar to stiff cake batter is what most of us have been doing wrong, along with the long wet mix in the mixer? This makes sence. I've heard a lot of bakers say to keep all dough wet, or as wet as possible.
I don't think I actually trust most lowest bidder ranges you find in your average modern apartment to successfully self-clean without damaging either itself or it's surroundings. The top of mine gets hot enough to be uncomfortable just from normal 400 temperatures, and that's after passing through a hollow cavity where my eternally soiled and flammable grease traps sit.
I've been using an Ooni pizza oven (gas) weekly for almost a year, it's amazing! You do need to rotate the pizza a couple of times, but the oven reaches 800F in no time, and it's very portable too. Previously I tried a metal plate on a bbq, and a few other bbq implements (ceramic box), but the Ooni is by far the best.
Regarding recipes, Margarita is my go-to, more or less same sauce recipe, but I add a full ball of Burratta once out of the oven (too soft to even need to cook it).
Which version of it do you own? Have you found it useful for anything else? They seem to advertise cooking steak on it... Which I am skeptical of compared to a pan.
Never used my Ooni Koda 16 for any other food besides other bread products like Pita or whatever. It's been fun, but real issue w/ pizza when dealing with friends is trying to get them to put only a little bit of stuff.
Load it up with 10 wet items and you get soggy pizza no matter what the oven temp is.
Don't overload with toppings and try to parcook stuff that's high on water. For example, mushrooms should never go on a pizza fresh, they should be reduced on a dry skillet (and optionally seasoned).
I have the Ooni Koda 16. I’ll sear a steak on it occasionally in a cast iron pan. I heat the pan in the oven and then pull it out and sear while on a trivet. I find putting the pan in the oven while cooking isn’t needed.
The pan will hit more than 1,000° so it will sear off the seasoning as well. So you’ll need to reseason it afterwards. That is why I don’t do it often.
The ovens here in Brazil don't hold heat on the top, so I use our roccbox to broil cauliflower and broccoli in a cast iron pan, and when I make a pan pizza, or Mac and cheese, to finish broil the top. It's lovely to have a tool that can do this.
> Regarding recipes, Margarita is my go-to, more or less same sauce recipe, but I add a full ball of Burratta once out of the oven (too soft to even need to cook it).
This is all well and good, but given that it's mostly carbs (bread), how are you not hungry a short time later? Or do you have it for lunch, so you only have to last a few hours until supper/dinner?
I find that unless I have some protein/meat (which takes longer to digest?), my satiety doesn't last.
What an oddly biased list for something purporting to be "the best pizzerias in the world". :-( A zillion NY pizzerias, but only a handful from Naples and not a *single* non-Naples Italian place, much less anything in Europe except London. It's as if Roman-style pizza didn't even exist, much less anything between the two cities. Al Taglio entirely missing. And the non-NY US cities are given short shrift. Speaking from personal experience, the only listing in DC is for the extraordinary 2Amys, a Neapolitan shop in a class of its own compared to nearly all NY listings: but there are now many DC Neapolitan pizzerias of very high grade. No mention.
To be fair this is a very very old list dating back to 2006/2008 and these were the pizza names that came up constantly at that time - it's also only rating the shops that he personally traveled to which were predominantly NY/Neapolitan because that's likely what he was benchmarking his own restaurant against.
Can someone from Yelp or Google Maps weigh in here? I'll bet 2006 is not that old on the distribution of pizza places by age. probably not even right of median.
It's really wild, there was Varasano's and Antico in Atlanta. Antico was huge, it was like the pizza interloper sneaking in on the best restaruants list. Now, I can't even count how many Neapolitan-style spots there are down here. And most of them are really good too!
"The best $FOOD in the world" is going to be an inherently biased list, no matter how you dice it. Any time you see something like that, mentally append ", according to the taste and experiences of the author" to the title, if that lowers your blood pressure.
Personally, I tend to agree with Varasano: I've never been to Naples, but I have been to Rome, and to my tastebuds, even US-cooked Neapolitan pizza is better than Roman pizza. But that's just it: that's just my opinion, based on my taste. Take it or leave it. You'll choose to leave it, no doubt, and that's ok.
> there are now many DC Neapolitan pizzerias of very high grade
This was written in 2008, so more recent establishments of course won't be listed.
There's a lot to this article beyond his personal taste in pizzerias. I think if you look past that part, you'll find a lot that's interesting about it.
Where "NY style" means really very "NY style": thin and charred. If that's your taste, go for it...
But for those more into the traditional original bread-like Neapolitan style I strongly suggest using a sourdough based dough, like Tartine's[0]
Bear in mind: this is cooking, not engineering, not math. And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs.
Wherever there are Italian immigrants there are variations in pizza all over the world, from Chicago (deep dish) to Sao Paulo (stuffed border, "coroa de pizza"), from Liguria (piscialandrea) to Sicily (sfincione), from Rome (al taglio) to Naples, etc.
A simple & lazy bread machine dough (they have dough settings) will produce a damn good pie, given quality toppings. Best if you can rest it at room temp for a few hours after the machine's cycle finishes, but also OK if you can't. I've done fancier doughs, and it is better, but I mostly just do that these days. With that, you can either get some pizza-specific tools (peel, stone—you need the peel) or you can just make pan pizzas in a cast iron pan, no extra stuff needed—and that method's lower-mess. The down side is it's harder to do multiple pizzas quickly in a row, unless you have multiple cast iron pans, since you can't construct a second one while the first is using the pan, and when it comes out the pan is no fun to work on for a while, as it'll be quite hot.
Getting started making decent pizza at home is as simple and easy as a bread machine and a cast iron pan (or two).
(pro tip: get small cans of tomato sauce or crushed tomato [yes, use canned] and mix salt, way more black pepper than seems right, and some oregano [fresh is great if you have it, but dried is fine], directly in the can. Boom, nearly zero mess [one spoon, perhaps] sauce, on the cheap, and it's good. You don't need to pre-cook it, just put it directly on as is. You won't be able to beat this cheap, lazy method by too much unless you've got garden-grown sauce tomatoes)
[EDIT] other pro tip: you can build a pizza on your peel while another's in the oven provided you have a large cutting board. The pizza coming off the stone will be stiff enough that you can just shove it onto the cutting board. A peel provides little benefit for taking a pizza off a stone in a normal home oven, though it is very nice for putting it on. Further pro tip: avoid pretty, finished wood peels. Smooth-finished wood makes the dough stick way worse.
That's a weird recipe. '1 cup flour; 1 tbsp flour', '1 tbsp salt; 1 tsp salt', 'bread, 00, or all-purpose flour if neither of those are available'...
I somewhat understand the first, knowing that America has an aversion to mass-based (or even standard volumetric) measurements in recipes, so the alternative really is either an unreasonable number of tablespoons, or an unreasonably precise number of cups.
The latter however is pure nonsense. 'Bread flour', aka 'strong', is so named for relatively high protein content (gluten-producing capability). '00 flour' aka 'super-fine' refers to how finely it's milled; used particularly for pasta and has its proponents for pizza.
Orthogonal concepts. As a substitution chain it basically just reads 'flour' but in a way that implies any speciality is better than plain/'AP'.
> And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs.
Um, yeah. As a life long New Yorker I, and most anyone I know, are well aware of the origins of pizza. We just happen to have had a large Italian population so we have a lot of pizza.
> And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs
Which version of pizza are you talking about? Apple didn't technically invent the first smartphone, and yet it did create and popularize the smartphone as the world knows it today.
The US also didn't actually invent putting cooked beef between two slices of bread. It popularized and spread the hamburger globally. What the world came to know as a hamburger, came from the US.
Pizza, as with so many commercialized things, was popularized around the globe by the US, not by Italy. That's not something up for debate, it's not subtly the case, the US massively popularized pizza as the world knows it today. It wasn't the classic, bland Italian version of 'pizza' that stormed around the world, it was the amped up commercialized US approach to pizza: which involved an epic explosion of variation of every possible sort, delivered by chains. That's what rapidly spread pizza to every corner of the globe post WW2. The US created the modern pizza chain and spread it globally, using its vast economic reach and capital, introducing pizza to billions of people in the process. Pizza was popularized globally by the US in exactly the same way the US popularized hamburgers.
> The US also didn't actually invent putting cooked beef between two slices of bread.
If you're talking about ground beef, yes, they invented. The original prussian tartare steak was uncooked, made with horse meat and not served on bread. The american "Hamburguer steak" was invented in the Port of NY inspired but radically different from the dish served to immigrants coming from the Hamburg port.
> was popularized around the globe by the US, not by Italy.
Just no. São Paulo, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina, already had pizza before Americans "popularized" it, because they have Italian immigrants since the 19th century. And to this day their pizza is closer to the original than to the NY style.
> classic, bland Italian version of 'pizza'
Go to Italy. Go to Sicily, Basilicata, Liguria, Lazio, Sardinia, ... their pizza is very far away from "bland".
> Pizza, as with so many commercialized things, was popularized around the globe by the US, not by Italy. That's not something up for debate, it's not subtly the case, the US massively popularized pizza as the world knows it today
You need to back this up. It is far from obvious.
Do you have any idea how prevalent "chain-pizza" is compared with "locally owned", in countries throughout the world? I hardly believe it was US that spread pizza throughout Europe. It was much more likely migration.
There’s a word for this effect which slips my mind. But in essence it’s a phenomenon where something is made in a place and it’s just considered ordinary or unremarkable by them. Then that thing finds in a new life in another place which finds it extraordinary and the place it came from picks up on that and then finds it extraordinary too.
Pizza is thought to be one of those things. Italians had it, New Yorkers went insane for it, and then Italians followed suit and made it a significant cultural identifier.
I don't know about around the world, but it seems like Italian migrants brought pizza to Germany[1]. Apocryphally, the first Italian restaurant which had pizza on the menu was initially serving mostly GIs, however they mostly requested spaghetti with meatballs.
I don't think many people here would associate pizza with the US, aside from pan pizza. If asked, people would probably say America invented the cheese-filled crust.
Chains exist, including Pizza Hut and Dominos and a few local ones, but the vast majority of sales are done by small, independent restaurants. Overall, the chain restaurant concept -- thankfully -- hasn't been working out in Germany, beyond bottom tier fast food.
His method of making sauce made a HUUGE difference in my own pizza making.
I don't do quite all the way as removing all the seeds, but I immersion blend canned San Marzano tomatoes and then strain all the liquid out of it, keeping only the pulp.
I just use a bit of purée, at most passata. I don't see why the end result would be much different (if you were saying blend fresh, sure, but canned whole/chopped vs. already puréed/passata'd?) and it's less work.
After a quick image search, I think there might be a regional difference, and we don't mean the same thing by purée; I mean something fairly viscous that comes in small jars or tubes, like this:
I can't immediately find an image squirting any, but it's about the consistency of toothpaste. Thicker than pesto. Much thicker than passata or anything sold as a 'pasta sauce'.
That's the stuff. Add a bit of olive oil and it can be spread, and is IMO perfect for doing so over a pizza base. ('course you'd spread it round the other way, but it probably tastes the same.)
Probably yes. I think it's sold here (UK) under that name too - for some reason (not sure if justified) I imagine that being a jar rather than a tube.
But anyway, yes, a tomato by any name ~would smell as sweet~ reduced that much to a sort of jam-like consistency.
If anything it's too thick for pizza - but oil's going on anyway right, so I just mix it with a bit (and usually some chopped chillies) and it's perfectly spreadable without being too saucy.
Yes I would say the ones I typically get are too (in the UK). The colouring is a bit off there - I was just glad to find one showing the consistency roughly.
Also check out https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php which is a treasure trove of pizza experiments. Varasano himself was active on the forum back in the day (~2005) and a few members actually started their own pizzerias.
There is something to admire when a person goes all-in on trying to perfect a method or recipe.
Conversely, I also think a lot of people completely lose themselves in the process and forget when to say "enough is enough". It's just pizza, not some priceless work of art.
I've found a pretty good recipe for pizza in a home oven, it's closer to Pizza Tonda Romana than Neapolitan, hence also similar to NY style pizza.
In baker's percentages, it's high gluten flour and 60-65% water, 1-3% salt, 1-2% olive oil and 0.2-0.5% instant dry yeast. Play around with how wet/dry you think it should be.
The important parts are the olive oil (which helps browning in an ordinary oven), kneading until you can windowpane the dough, and letting it rest portioned and covered at least 12 hours in the fridge.
Shape, top and bake at the highest temp your oven can go, a pizza stone or steel is nice, but not mandatory. A sheet tray or a cast iron pan turned upside down also both work great.
I like making pizza baking a social activity, everyone in the kitchen, selecting toppings and eating the super hot pizza straight out of the oven, while preparing the next one.
Like many things in life, it can be worth it to take a step back and a simpler approach, with a better effort:result factor.
Isn't that highly reductionist? People derive pleasure from immersion and mastery of all sorts of things. I'd argue that food can make you feel just as much, and probably a lot more emotion than typical art does.
Sure, and that's why I try to get at by expressing my admiration for people who dedicate themselves to a craft.
But just because you've mastered making a Neapolitan pizza exactly to the specifications and definitions, does not necessarily mean you've succeeded in creating a good pizza.
My point is that some people get so bogged down in minutiae and details, that they completely forget that the entire point was to make something delicious for people to enjoy.
Yea. His legal disclaimer is necessary. Modding your oven interlocks for pizza..
There are good small high-temp pizza oven options. If you care enough about the quality you're heading to something in that space, or building out a brick furnace in the backyard.
I think home pizza is great. I love making it, but its nothing on the stuff i get from the two italian joints up the road, professionals get better results.
Same with coffee: I'd rather pay a competent barista.. But if I lived in the woods in vermont I might feel different: and I'd have room to make a pizza oven too!
If you live in a unit with a wired in oven, and you mod your oven to cook on the clean cycle.. your home insurance is probably void. If you rent: you're probably now in breach of your rental agreement.
Not getting his results, we pre-heat some ceramic (we use a plate but friends went to the hardware store and got a large clay floortile) and this, combined with direct radiant heat from the elements, gets a pretty good outcome: fast cook base and crispy finish on the toppings.
Also: this americanism to refer to Pizza PIE. Thats Chicago, and is abhorrent sloppy nonsense. I've had one. its tomato sauce in a piecrust. its like eating lukewarm dense tomato soup with cheese topping. I can't imagine why people do this except I also gross out on dirty fries so I kind-of get it, its comfort food for the locals. But anywhere else, pizza means thin crust, and arguments about how much beyond basil and cheese goes on it.
(I am australian. I do not put pineapple on pizza. Tandoori Lamb is pretty good mind you.)
I don't know what you're referring to, but that absolutely does not describe any Chicago pizza. And while I'm sure some do, I can't think of many Chicagoans who call it "pie". At all. I dare you to go to Pequod's or Burt's Place or Labriola and tell me it isn't as good as any pizza you've had anywhere. If you think of deepdish as "soup" the you had an unfortunate experience. And Lou Malnati's buttercrust is...everything. There are astonishingly good Chicago-style hole in the walls all around Chicago. So many. But what you described...I think you're talking about something else.
I'm talking about the kind of sit-down joint you find off wacker drive, as a tourist of IETF attendee, in a clutch of other people none of whom are local. Probably the mistake was allowing somebody to say "lets do pizza" instead of sampling the richer food choices beyond the tourism hub.
I've had many fine meals in Chicago. "deep dish" Pizza isn't one of them.
His pizzas look better than any homemade pizza (NY style) I have ever seen by far.
I got ok at making pizza, but not on this guy's level.
He said it, and it's true; it's about the crust.
I have almost completely given up on good bread though. I once heard that the book Julia Child's really valued--La Bonne--didn't have a chapter on making bread. The author said something like the best bread is bought from a good bakery. (It's basically sourdough bread I gave up on.)
I've decided good bread at home is too much damn work. I've done the sourdough thing, I've done Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast, I've done baguettes the slow & hard, correct way. I've put a lot of time into it. Results far too mixed, and never amazing. I still make bread but I don't bother with fancy shit anymore. Just mix up a simple ratio dough in the standing mixer, rest it, and bake. I use lame dry-instant yeast—I've discovered, after much trying, that I hate basically everything about keeping sourdough starters. The space they take up in the fridge, the mess, the way they look, having to "feed" them, the waste (don't listen to hip eco-conscious mommy bloggers, you can't use excess starter to make pancakes—I'm still haunted by that one). The care require in prepping it to even maybe get a half-decent rise. Nope, never again.
> I hate basically everything about keeping sourdough starters. The space they take up in the fridge, the mess, the way they look, having to "feed" them, the waste
After a few months you don't need to feed it anymore. I just put 50 grams in the fridge and forget about it until I run out of bread or decide to bake a loaf for friends. 50 grams makes enough levain for two loaves; I just take 10 grams out of the levain and mix it with 20 grams water and 20 grams flour, let it rise for a day, put it back in the fridge and then forget about it again... Rinse and repeat, no waste.
And I can't eat store bought bread anymore, even the artisan stuff. Which kind of figures, I spend about 30 minutes of actual work on 2 loaves and there's no way a professional operation would spend that much time on theirs.
> Also: this americanism to refer to Pizza PIE. Thats Chicago, and is abhorrent sloppy nonsense.
First person I knew IRL who regularly referred to it as "pie" (to the amusement of the midwesterners he was working with—that's rare usage here) was a born & bred New Yorker. Americanism, yes, but AFAIK it's not at all confined to, or even resulting from, either of Chicago's major pizza styles.
I've made two brick ovens in totally different places with very different types of bricks. The thing that surprised me was how similar baked goods come out of each. It's kinda magical.
I've often wondered what it is that does the trick and I'm not entirely sure anyone's theories are quite right. It's probably a few things: high heat for a toasting/char effect, with radiant heat providing some kind of specific heating mechanism. But I also have started wondering if there's something about the humidity that's different in most wood-fired brick ovens.
I'd love to try one of those tabletop pizza ovens but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Those pictures make me want to go out and start churning out pizzas.
> arguments about how much beyond basil and cheese goes on it.
Perhaps my most controversial stance is not thinking cheese is all that important as a pizza topping.
My favourite pizza to make is a big mound of spinach (however much you think is way too much will shrink down to nothing) and dollops of ricotta. But if they're not available, I have some grilled vegetables (whatever really) and then find myself grating some cheese on for no reason other than that's what pizza is 'supposed to be like'.
One subtle hack I picked up on was "stealing" yeast from a pizzeria you like. I envision someone subtly coming in with a paper cup of the same kind the pizza joint uses, but it's filled with flour water, leaving it next to them as they eat, trying not to accidentally drink it by mistake, and going home with their prized culture.
From what I understand it's a common misconception that wild yeast is just floating there in the air in sufficient quantities to get a starter going. That, if you think about it for a moment, sounds like a complete load of bull. In reality the vast majority of wild yeast that forms a starter comes from the flour. That's what gets the party started, not the mysterious airborne yeast.
TIL: "There is no need to dissolve the yeast in warm water or feed it sugar. 'Proofing' the yeast was probably required decades ago, but I've never had yeast that didn't activate. The yeast feeds on the flour so you don't need to put in sugar. The proofing step that you see in many recipes is really an old wives tale at this point."
Don't listen to it, it's bad advice. You should always proof your yeast because most people are not baking every day. People will get yeast out of the cupboard that has been there for a few weeks or months and it will be dead. If you proof your yeast, you will find out immediately and can go to the store to buy some fresh. If you don't proof it then you will find out hours later and waste time and flour. This is especially a problem for active dry yeast which has a relatively short lifespan, but even instant yeast will die eventually.
If you are in a restaurant kitchen or you know your yeast is good because you bought it recently then yes you don't need to proof your yeast.
Yeah, those are the kind of people who need to proof the yeast. What is it doing in the cupboard?
Proofing can't hurt and is good advise, but at some point you learn you can get away without.
I haven't bothered to proof yeast in a decade. I'm no pro, but we do make all of our pizza, bread, buns, rolls, pretzels, etc.
I buy big compressed blocks and store them in the freezer. When one is opened, some goes in a small jar in the refrigerator and the rest in a large jar in the freezer.
I've had yeast stop working after a few months unrefrigerated, but refrigerated it seems to last for years, at least, that's my perception.
I'd only advise somebody to bother to proof if they know the yeast I'm using is older than a few months opened unrefrigerated, but I habitually check it anyway.
Yes if you are an enthusiast and you have experience working with a given yeast, then you can skip the proofing step based on your own judgement.
But if any home cook simply reads "you don't need to proof yeast" and interprets it as another one of those cooking myths like 'sealing' a steak, they are likely to make a catastrophic mistake one day.
From my understanding, activating active dry yeast also makes it equivalent to fresh yeast - useful when the recipe you're using calls for the latter. Otherwise you'd need to tweak the proof times in the recipe to account for the yeast dormancy.
Why? Your yeast still gets tested for the purpose so I don’t see how this applies. Especially if the end risk is that you go to the store and buy yeast which has a higher risk of working than stockpiled yeast.
I find deep dives like this fascinating. I am absolutely the kind of person who could get this 'into' something if it were what I really wanted to be into, at least for a time, so even though I'll probably never put in the effort to implement Jeff Varasano's recipe, I respect it. I'm absolutely glued to reading this. It seems like his restaurants are successful; I wish him luck.
I will say that personally, I treat Good pizza, like this or a "tomato pie" from a great place, as a fundamentally different thing from "Bad" pizza, the kind your cheap local chain sells. (Fast food pizza from Domino's or whomever is just not something I normally consume.) There is a place in the world for "bad", bready pizza with crazy toppings and whatever else. It just isn't what I want when I want the Good stuff.
For anyone interested in more of this type of pizza party, there's an excellent book called American Pie by Peter Reinhardt. Has an excellent overview of the scene at the time (the book is from 03) and a ton of theory/recipes for making perfect pizza.
One of his oven hacks I remember is getting plain tiles from a flooring wholesaler (be careful, you can't just get any kind and I don't have the book handy to look it up) and line the oven with them to retain heat and increase the temp.
> recipe on the net for making a true Pizza Napoletana
So, we are going to read and follow the recipe of endemic Naples, Italy pizza by some talented chef from New York? I don't get it, what's the point? Can we please have one from Naples, Italy chef?
I get the DIY spirit but with any thin crust pizza, I'm happy to yield to my local pizza shops. If I have the itch to make a pizza, I usually make a Sicilian style pizza which I think works better with the average home setup.
You don't need to clip the oven latch. Relatively easy to rewire the motor that operates it to run manually. Not sure this helps anyone, bit less destructive than snips
I've used this approach for years. Autolysing makes a huge difference. My best results, short of a wood fired oven, has been on a gas grill with a heavy stone.
People who want to make a pizza as good as Jeff's. I found this page over ten years ago and my pizzas are rightly famous among friends. I'm always happy to point them at the source for the information.
I did most of the stuff on this page (short of breaking my self-cleaning lock). It is all great advice, and if you follow it and practice a lot, you can make great pizzas and wow your guests.
BUT! After you have done that, you can also violate all the rules and still get great pizzas. Once, I was in Waipio Valley in Hawaii, with just Pillsbury white flour, bread yeast, a block of cheddar cheese, Wesson oil, tomato paste, fresh oregano, and spring water. To bake I had a gas oven with the rack out, a tall soup pot, inverted with a big skillet also inverted over it, close under the broiler. The pizzas came out fantastic! I could only make them 9" across, so I ended up making 30+ of them.
I had no peel. My dough was very, very wet; I scooped enough for each pizza with a big kitchen spoon, spread it out on parchment, drizzled Wesson, smeared tomato, sprinkled oregano, salt, and cheddar, slid it onto the skillet, and started on the next one.
The one thing you mustn't ever neglect is letting the flour and water proof for 40+ minutes before you work it.
To get decent pizza at almost any American restaurant, you have to insist "burn it!" or they will be afraid you will get mad about a little charring, and so undercook it the way Americans demand. You have to tell them that if it bends, it's not done enough.