New York Pizza Love: The bio-chemistry and immigrant history of an epic American success story11/29/2024  If you love New York pizza, and want to make a pizza you can love, it requires having more than just an oven. It helps to have chemistry and context. That’s why your Saturday Afternoon Pizza Post is a day early. It’s Black Friday, and there’s a lot of pizza oven lust going on out there. To alleviate the pain of pizza-oven big-sale FOMO, it seemed it might be useful and fun to share some of the context. I’ve always believed context helps us be better pizzamakers. Knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing is so much more satisfying than mere blind doing.
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 This past Thursday, we were having lunch in New Orleans. And you know what that means: Day drinking! We were in one of the town’s more famous dive bars. Inside, it’s small and dark and perpetually 9pm until you pay the tab and step out the door and go back into the sunlight which taunts you for your weekday misdeeds featuring alcohol involvement. Our bartender was an endless font of wisdom on everything, from stride piano (his professional specialty when he’s not tending bar), to the regional brewery scene, to sandwich preparation formats and techniques. I asked him if there’s any pizza in New Orleans that he likes. I asked because it's a very, very foodie town, but not really a pizza town. However, pizza is on the upswing.  Yesterday, I unwittingly wandered into the place where pizza joy goes to die: a group filled with self-assured social-media pizza experts. Trying to be useful, I ended up losing sleep. This particular group is dedicated to the secrets of a certain style of regional pizza. There’s lots of chest-thumping pizza chauvinism in there. People make statements like, “Yeah, maybe it’s tasty—but that’s not how they do it in [INSERT NAME OF CITY HERE].” I could name the city—but such things happen all over pizza social. There is discrimination against neither style nor geography. I don’t want to make it sound like this one pizza place online is unique. This special fervor is universal. It’s also easy to fall victim to absolutists spreading mythologies about elusive butterflies of pizza-making that are utter glibbertygok. (Don’t bother googling that word. I already tried. It doesn't exist.) Direct from the Garden State, tantalizing tomatoes for making your homemade pizza go "pop!"11/9/2024  It's Thursday morning. Outside, the sun is shining. Inside, this place is dimly lit and looks like a punk-rock nightclub. But I'm busy disappearing down a rabbit hole of bright tasting, sunlit pomodoro fantastico. We're in the City of Brotherly Love, inside the lobby of a storied, 1908 theater, now known as The Fillmore Philadelphia by Live Nation. And it's filled not with demi-monde nightcrawlers and leather-clad punks, but with middle-aged, coffee-swilling pizza professionals ready for networking and making deals. In my hand is a little white, paper sample cup. I have a tiny wooden spoon, and I'm greedily consuming Jersey Fresh tomatoes and thinking, "Wow." My tastebuds are enthralled. Good tomatoes should make your tastebuds sing. They should make you do a little dance. And I'm doing that little dance in this unlikely place because (as you know) I have a pizza problem.  Whatcha gonna do with leftover pizza dough? In my house, we just make more pizza. Breakfast pizza. Lunch pizza. Seriously. We work at home. If I decide I want lunch pizza, it takes about 10 minutes of active prep to make a pizza. The rest of it—like preheating the oven and warming the dough to room temp—that’s all passive time. |
AuthorBlaine Parker is the award-winning author of the bestselling, unusual and amusing how-to pizza book, Free The Pizza. Also known as The Pizza Geek and "Hey, Pizza Man!", Blaine is fanatical about the idea that true, pro-quality pizza can be made at home. His home. Your home. Anyone's home. After 20 years of honing his craft and making pizza in standard consumer ovens across the nation, he's sharing what he's learned with home cooks like you. Are you ready to pizza? Archives
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