New York Pizza Love: The bio-chemistry and immigrant history of an epic American success story

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.

So, the big question: Why is New York pizza so famous, and how did it get that way?
 
New York Pizza Love is a story of both biochemistry and sociology. New York-style pizza (and its spinoffs) begin to feel like one of the best things we get to do: bring the love by making friends and family happy with pizza.
 
Love, love, love!
 
Win, win, win!
 
To that end, meet Pizza Love and the Dazzling Dopamine Dancers.
 
You and I both know we don’t literally “love” pizza. We’re not going to mate with pizza. We won’t start a family together and put all our little slices through college.
 
But bringing up dopamine is important. It’s an unsung motivator in our pursuit of pizza joy.
 
 
A good place to begin this conversation is with the highly addictive cheese component.
 
As you may know, some controversial medical professionals will overstate a case in extreme terms in order to get us to pay attention.
 
One controversial medical doctor, who says we should not be eating cheese at all, has gone so far as to call it “dairy crack.”
 
That said, cheese is not—and should not be listed as—a narcotic. But we do enjoy the heck out of cheese for very clear and present reasons. (Please enjoy your cheeses in moderation.)
 
In milk, there’s a protein called casein. When we digest a milk product, the casein releases a protein fragment called casomorphin.
 
Get ready for the ghost of Nancy Reagan to come flying in, just saying, “No.” That casomorphin is chemically similar to opioids.
 
That similarity to opioids means casomorphin attaches itself to the same chemical receptors in our brains. As a result, we get a little hit of the neurotransmitter called dopamine.
 
That little hit of dopamine is like a dose of happy.
 
There are all kinds of things that get our brains to release dopamine—from Facebook likes to slot machine spins to love and sex.
 
And, apparently, cheese.
 
 
So yes, pizza and sex do have something in common. The dopamine is a biggie.
 
Milk also contains tyramine and phenethylamine, naturally occurring chemicals known for triggering feelings of happiness and love.
 
And let’s not forget the fat, glorious fat.
 
As an evolutionary imperative, we’re predisposed to enjoy eating fat. Eating fatty foods would help us humans survive famine during times like the Pliocene Age. These days, during the Pizza Hut Age, we don’t typically have that problem. But we still come with all the human being 1.0 programming. Bring on the fat!
 
Another important component of Pizza Love is refined white flour.
 
Our systems love glucose, which is a sugar. Eat a white flour product, and it almost immediately turns into glucose in your bloodstream. And can you guess what that glucose triggers?
 
You got it: dopamine.
 
 
Now, about those tomatoes.
 
We love tomatoes. There are people who hate the actual fruit of the tomato, but still find it possible to eat tomatoes on pizza.
 
So what’s the big attraction of tomatoes?
 
Holy galloping glutamate, Batman!
 
Glutamate is the amino acid that results in umami flavors. Glutamate is naturally occurring in tomatoes (as well as in mushrooms, sausage and anchovies, which often find their way onto pizza). And glutamate tastes really good. 
 
Additionally, tomatoes contain folate, magnesium, iron, tryptophan and vitamin B6—all of which our brains use to produce (you guessed it) dopamine!
 
Tomatoes also contain other important mood-lifting neurotransmitters like serotonin and norepinephrine. Yay, mood lifters!
 
Speaking of umami flavors, fermented foods are also big for umami. The fermented foods in pizza include those cheeses, some cured meats, and the kind of pizza crust you’re making when you follow the dough recipes in any of my books (which always require cold-fermentation).
 
When our pizza dough is thoroughly baked, especially if it’s baked to well done, it brings further umami into the picture. It’s also a showcase for caramelization and the Maillard reaction. These processes of browning the crust yield chemical changes that make the taste even more attractive.
 
 
When the crust is brown, it brings the ever-important, ever satisfying crunch.
 
Humans have a wiring for crunch. It signals that the food we’re eating is fresh, and might also be fatty. (Celery notwithstanding.) That brown crust brings a lot of tasty flavors of umami with it.
 
Another little secret about umami that nobody talks about is that it’s a chemical marker for protein. Protein is made up of amino acids, which are essential for life.
 
And since we’re programmed to enjoy umami, we ingest more protein and continue to thrive as a culture of dopamine-charged pizza freaks.
 
Well, the last part of that is my own theory. But it’s probably close enough.
 
We love pizza because we are biochemically programmed to love the things that make up a pizza. And we love dopamine.
 
 
That might also explain why there are pizzas we don’t love as much.
 
Like white pizza (no tomatoes), or Domino’s (little caramelization and no crunch), Neapolitan pizza (similar to Domino’s in the caramelization and crunch arena), or no-cheese pizzas (none of that sinister dairy crack).
 
I’m not knocking any of those things. I’m just saying that they lack some of the love-inducing chemistry, which is why you don’t hear people say they’re having a hankering for white, no-cheese pizza from a Domino’s in Naples.
 
(FACT: There was a Domino’s Pizza in Naples. It failed. So it goes.)
 
In the re-engineering of Neapolitan-style pizza into New York-style pizza, it seems that the evolutionary process for pizza increased pizza’s popularity for clearly chemical reasons.
 
New York pizza became a star.
 
For that stardom, we have one man to thank. He has also gone largely unrecognized: the late, great Frank Mastro.
 
 
A Brief Slice of History Regarding The Masterful Frank Mastro
 
Frank Mastro’s story is a classic immigrant tale of the early 20th century. Frank’s family immigrated to New York from Italy in 1906.
 
At age 16, young Frank Mastro lied about his age to enlist in the US Army so he could fight in World War I. Afterwards, he worked at various jobs in New York until he discovered his niche in the exciting world of restaurant equipment and supplies.
 
Frank is said to have been a gregarious wheeler-dealer. One area he served was used equipment. He’d buy equipment from restaurants going out of business, and resell the equipment in his store on the Bowery.
 
 
Frank Mastro also believed that pizza could become as commonplace in American food culture as the hot dog.
 
Not everyone believed him.
 
One day, Frank took in a small, used, coal-fired oven. He decided to experiment with the oven by running a gas line to it and making pizza.
 
At this point in the history of New York pizza, pizza ovens were different. We’re talking about places like the legendary Lombardi’s, which had a room-sized, coal-fired bread oven that heated to 900 degrees. Lombardi’s was turning out a very specific kind of pizza. The low-hydration pizza dough baked very quickly, and the resulting pizza, while tasty, didn’t reheat well.
 
By using a smaller oven (which was moveable, unlike a giant, built-in masonry oven), fueling the oven with gas (which is faster, easier and more convenient than coal), and firing the oven at a lower temperature (dropping the baking temp from 900 degrees to around 550—possibly the same temperature as your home oven), Frank Mastro developed a different kind of pizza.
 
One of the characteristics of Frank Mastro’s style of pizza is that it lent itself to reheating. With the lower oven temperature and the longer baking time, more of the moisture baked out of the pie. The resulting pizza was drier, giving it a longer shelf life. This is the pizza that helped create the unique “slice shop culture” of the New York pizza industry.
 
In Naples, there are no slice shops. Pizza in Naples is always sold by the whole pizza. The pizzas are mainly small, roughly 12 inches in diameter, and are sold as a meal for one to be eaten as soon as it’s baked. Any of the soft, floppy Neapolitan pizza left over does not reheat well.
 
A larger, drier pizza cut into slices lends itself to being sold as portions to be reheated and served hot.
 
Frank knew that a pizzeria model based on his ideas would be a boon for Italian families looking to own a business.
 
He convinced the G.S. Blodgett Company to build a gas-fired deck oven, along with a smaller, electric oven for taverns.
 
 
He even developed a business model for pizzerias—but still, there was resistance.
 
So he set up his Bowery store with an actual model pizzeria inside for anyone interested in what their new pizzeria would look and feel like.
 
He also developed a program for free set-up of new pizzerias, complete with written recipes and processes for the budding restaurant owner.
 
Frank even arranged financing and helped buyers cut through the red tape with the city.
 
While all this was clearly good for Frank’s business, for Frank himself it was a greater effort.
 
 
It was good for immigrant Italian families.
 
Historically in Italy, pizza had been a food for the poor. In depression-era New York, where so many were struggling, pizza remained a fresh, affordable food that could keep people nourished. It could also provide a living for Frank’s fellow new Americans.
 
Frank’s pizza model caught on.
 
But, in 1957, at age 60, Frank died of cancer. In obituaries, he was hailed as a “pizza king.” Fortunately for the business and his family, Frank’s son Vinnie, only in his 20s, was there to pick up where his father left off.
 
Vinnie developed a franchising plan for pizzerias, and took the New York pizzeria model into the 1964 New York World’s Fair with the Mastro Pizza Pavilion.
 
 
Vinnie Mastro was also the same kind of mover and shaker as father Frank.
 
He and his food-chemist brother-in-law developed the first viable frozen dough for pizza.
 
Vinnie secured distribution rights for Schlitz and Pepsi products. He sold franchises for more than a dozen restaurants called Pizza Plaza.
 
Unfortunately, young Vinnie had his own health challenges.
 
A victim of rheumatic fever, Vinnie had a history of heart attacks.
 
On the night of the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965, 80 million people over 80,000 square miles were left in the dark—including millions of New Yorkers. People were trapped in elevators and stuck in subway tunnels.
 
As this was happening, 33-year-old Vinnie died of a heart attack.
 
That same evening, Vinnie’s offices were ransacked by thieves who knew exactly what they were looking for. Along with a lot of cash, the thieves took important paperwork related to deals, company ownership, and trade secrets.
 
 
The resulting legal morass was crippling for the business.
 
In PMQ Pizza Media Magazine from December 21, 2019, editor Rick Hynum writes that the story has all the elements of a fascinating feature documentary: “A business genius and his equally brilliant son help create a billion-dollar industry, only to be cut down in their prime by illness while mysterious thieves plunder the company’s secrets, never to be caught…
 
“But [their family’s] legacy lives on in every mom-and-pop pizzeria in the country.”
 
And this is largely why we’re even talking about New York pizza, much less why we love it.
 
The tangible results of the story behind New York pizza makes us feel joy. Chemistry is involved. And it’s an indelibly American story. There are other players in other parts of the country. But Frank Mastro is unique. He was spearheading and packaging a business model for the immigrant entrepreneur. Without his effort, we might not even be talking about pizza and dopamine.
 
 
I’ve often joked, “Make the pizza and feel the love.”
 
Levity aside, I believe that Frank Mastro and his legacy are part of the reason we have so much pizza in which to find joy.
 
Additionally, the story of the Mastro family business speaks to the “better angels of our nature” as Americans. The entrepreneurial zeal of Frank Mastro is admirable and enviable.
 
And it’s possible that without Frank, we might not have the level of pizza love that brings so much joy to the table and—ever more frequently—into our homes from our own ovens.
 
Black Friday discounts not required. 

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