Scott's Pizza Tour Pizza News

This ad was spotted in Paris by my homeslice Jasmine.

PEOPLE OF FRANCE: This pizza does not exist in Brooklyn.

It’s official, Jeff Varasano of Varasano’s Pizzeria in Atlanta, GA is the coolest dude on the planet. He grows, harvests and dries his own oregano. I need to get to Atlanta to try his pizza STAT!

Calling all vegans, vegetarians and food explorers:

I’ll be hosting a very special pizza tour on Saturday, June 2 that will visit four pizzerias in Manhattan and Brooklyn for slices of 100% animal-free pizza. Our stops include Neapolitan, Roman and New York style pizzerias. We’ll talk all about pizza history (including how some of the earliest pizzas were actually vegan) as we cruise around in the Big Yellow Pizza Bus. It is going to be insane!!!

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WHEN: Saturday, June 2
WHERE: Starts and ends in Greenwich Village
HOW: $60 tickets available online through Zerve or by phone at 800-979-3370
WHAT: All pizza and animal-free goody bags are included; 4 pizzeria stops by bus
WHY: Because everybody deserves good pizza

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This vegan pizza tour isn’t just about finding places that offer cheese alternatives, it’s about well-made dough topped with deliciousness that doesn’t need cheese to have a good time. I am not personally vegan, so I’m going to take you out for pizza that tastes great without compromising. Some of these pizzas aren’t overtly vegan, they just happen to not have cheese, meat, honey, eggs, etc on the ingredient list. The idea of the tour is for both vegans and non-vegans to share the same pizza because it’s the ultimate communal food!

I started doing it for my vegan brother when he would come for a visit and we found a solid lineup of pizzerias that both of us loved! I run this tour just about every six months, so join us for a special afternoon packed with animal-free flavor.

 
Sauce first, then cheese first. Completely different results. Both delicious.

I made these two pies over the weekend with the exact same ingredients yet the first was topped with sauce followed by cheese and the second started with cheese and sauce came last. They look and taste completely different! Starting with sauce makes sense because pizza began as a peasant food and the high cost of cheese made it more of a garnish than a main event. As costs decreased, cheese proportions increased and became what we see today as a typical “New York Style” pizza. But cheese is a great base because it protects the crust from getting gummy.

I love doing cheese first because it melts right onto the crust and you get little to no cheese drag: when your bite pulls a blanket of hot molten mozzarella off the slippery surface of a saucy pie directly onto your clean face and shirt. It also means that the surface sauce is more susceptible to evaporation, so it tends to thicken and sweeten. This order is sometimes referred to as tomato pie, as at Delorenzo’s in Trenton, NJ, but it’s also the preferred method at New York joints like John’s on Bleecker Street, Sam’s Restaurant in Brooklyn, Arturo’s in Greenwich Village and Totonno’s on Coney Island.

RECIPE TIME
600g flour (I used Pillsbury bread flour for this batch)
396g water
13g salt
6g dry yeast

Starting with the water (room temp), add yeast then flour. Mix in salt and fully incorporate all ingredients. Give it a few minutes to rest while you check the mail and then knead it until smooth and springy. Cut into 4 even pieces and round into balls. Store for 1-3 days in sealed container inside refrigerator. I used mine after 2 days and it was lovely but I bet it would last 5 if push came to shove.

PRE-FERMENTATION TRICK
If you want to get a bit more depth, you can mix together 50g or flour and 50g water plus a pinch of yeast (~1g) 10-12 hours before making your dough. I did that before heading out to do a pizza tour, then when I came back 10 hours later the mixture had more than doubled in size. (Room was 71 degrees F so a warmer room will rise faster, cooler room rises slower.) I added this mixture to the remaining ingredients in the recipe (550g more flour, 346g more water, 5g yeast) and continued with the process. This allows for some fermentation to occur in advance with just about a minute of prep time. There’s no salt in the preferment because it slows down yeast fermentation. I did this preferment for the crust you see in these photos. It would be more effective if you could have tasted it. Not as much flavor as using a starter, but still really tasty. 

[Photographs: John Arena]

Walking behind the counter at a pizzeria always seems a bit dangerous. This is where the action happens and customers certainly have no business getting in the way. But for one glorious three-day span I wasn’t a customer; a white chef’s coat scored me access to the inner sanctum of a busy family pizzeria in Henderson, NV. I was there to experience the realities of working the make line (and hopefully not give anybody food poisoning).

Metro Pizza is consistently given top honors in the local press as well as a recent Food Network Magazine credit as having the best pie in Nevada (photo #28). Metro Pizza stands as a shrine to all American pizzerias, with a huge map on the wall indicating the country’s most significant pizzerias. They’ll even give you a $25 credit if you bring in a photo of yourself standing in front of one of the mapped locations! This is the perfect place to start my journey behind-the-scenes of the pizza industry.

Day 1: Playing With Dough
My first day began with a test: I was given a piece of dough and asked to open it into a skin. Much to my relief, the dough was about the size I’m used to working with at home. I did what I could to delicately coax the dough into a usable shape but apparently it wasn’t enough. The result was too small and uneven to be sold to a customer, so I was shown the house method for stretching.

At Metro, they begin by forming a ring of indentation about 1 cm from the dough’s outer edge, followed by gentle pressing from the center toward the newly formed barrier. Next came a few back-and-forths between the hands to warm and extend the diameter, followed by a slight stretch over the back of the hands to finish the job.The result was an even thickness and an untouched border.

Of course there’s more than one way to open dough, but I wanted to forget any prior approaches and start from scratch to get the full Metro experience, so I stuck with the prescribed method for all the doughs I stretched during my short tenure. Oddly enough, this wasn’t so much the case with the other employees. As my shifts progressed, it became apparent that everyone had their own twist on the method. I suppose they’ve become comfortable enough with the dough to modify their approach depending on texture and temperature. Still, it’s amazing how consistent these pies came out even with so much technique variation.

I started on a Saturday night, not exactly the best night to take things slowly. John Arena, one of Metro’s founders and my personal pizza guide through this experience, set up a table behind the make line and both of us spent the night opening doughs for the pizzaiolo. While not your average Saturday night on vacation in Las Vegas, I honestly had no desire to be anywhere else. The orders came in like crazy and it seemed like we were constantly pushing out dough skins for the entire 3+ hour rush.

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I had the opportunity to emcee a pizza competition for Vesuvio Foods in Atlantic City last week and it was amazing! There were 16 competitors from 16 different pizzerias throughout New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and even one from Ohio. I got to talk on stage about pizza for over 6 hours. Fun!


I’m stalling as the scored are tabulated for this round of competition.

Commentating about the entry from Goodfella’s in Manhattan / Victory Blvd in Staten Island / Bayonne.

I even got a special delivery from Mike Hauke, Pizza Tour alum and owner of Tony Baloney’s in Atlantic City. He brought me a fresh Reuben Pizza!

Last month I had the incredible opportunity to judge at the largest culinary pizza competition in the USA. The International Pizza Expo has been an annual event in Las Vegas for the past 27 years and it’s seriously wall-to-wall pizza insanity. The competition categories change every year as different styles evolve, but this year I was asked to judge preliminary rounds and finals for both the traditional and non-traditional categories. The five pizzas I’m about to show you are the least traditional of the non-traditional round.

This Japanese pizza started with a rice flour dough topped with dried seaweed, sliced mochi cakes, soy sauce, Japanese mayonnaise, corn, dried-fermented-smoked tuna flakes and a blend of mozzarella and gouda. That’s pretty dang non-traditional! It was actually one of my favorites in the category but execution in the final round wasn’t so hot.

I first saw this pie at a competition in Orlando a few years back and even though I have never personally judged it, Dave Smith III from Smith’s Pizza Palace Plus in Emporium, PA definitely deserves points for pizza insanity. The thing looks like a ninja star! Dave snips the crust and gives the dough skin a quick toss to create these little spikes. Truly amazing.

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The Bari Restaurant Supply store on Bowery and Prince is a magical place. I take tours there all the time to check out pizzeria equipment in a place where actual pizzeria operators are buying it. The centerpiece of the showroom is a brand new oven, which was on location in the store’s manufacturing department. That makes Bari the only remaining pizza oven manufacturer in New York City.

I take pizza tours into the manufacturing area whenever it’s safe (and whenever the door is unlocked) so we can see the process from frame to finish. It’s amazing. I’ve been noticing scraps laying around recently — pieces of marble and stone destined for dough stretching tables and ovens, respectively. When I asked Patsy (the manufacturing honcho) about the bits, he said the stone was heading for the trash. WHAT!?!?!?! So I asked him to chop it down so I could fit it in my home oven and sure enough he did.

This thing is huge. It’s 1.5 inches thick, much larger than the average 0.25 - 0.5 inches of pizza stones made for the home. There’s a good reason nobody sells domestic stones this thick - it would take forever to heat it up. Most pizza stone users don’t realize that it takes at least 45 minutes to preheat a baking stone before it’s ready for use.  A quick 20 minute preheat only results in surface heat, which disappears immediately upon releasing a dough onto it. The whole point of a stone is to be saturated with heat in order to conduct directly into the dough.

This stone, which is called FibraMent-D, is going to take forever to preheat in my home oven. The manufacturer actually requires users to pre-dry the stone for 7 hours before first use. YOWZA! So it’s going to be a while before I can really test this thing out. Still, I’m pretty stoked to have it in my possession. Now if only I could track down some older pizza oven hearth materials to test them head-to-head my life would be complete. Too bad the “good” ones are illegal to manufacture because of asbestos issues. Anybody got pre-1980s transite?

I made an interesting discovery last week while doing a bunch of laundry. Looks like I have at least 34 pizza t-shirts.

Just wrapped 3 glorious days at the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas!