I have to start this posting with a shout out to my talented and lovely wife. If it weren’t for her, our pizzas would be, ummm, less good. She is the crust master, and the crust is probably 50% of what makes a good pizza. She wasn’t always the crust master though, so I’ll give myself a shout out here for eating all the experimental crusts that weren’t good enough for human consumption, only husbandry consumption. I’ll also give one last shout out to our friends Ron and Melissa, who were over for dinner when we served them the single worst pizza we have ever made in our entire lives. That was a long time ago and we’ve found our champion crust since them, refined our toppings, and have been eating pretty high on the pizza pie hog for many months now.
Sidenote about the child - Most 20 month old kids probably get to lick frosting beaters or cake beaters, but not mine. He’s actually licking a pizza dough beater right now. He’s had many of those. Never once had a frosting beater. I wonder if this is related to his refusal to eat hot dogs and chicken nuggets and his insistence on eating expensive cured Italian meats and stilton cheese. Deep down I am proud that he likes those things, but if he would just take a hot dog once in a while, it’d be so much easier and cheaper.
Most people have heard of neopolitan pizza. Neopolitan pizza is actually a Traditional Specialty Guaranteed product in Europe, which means it is like Champagne, Port Wine, Parmesan cheese, Chianti wine, etc etc. So no one except those in Naples and maybe Sicily can make an actual “Neopolitan pizza,” and no one else can claim to even make a neopolitan pizza. To make one, you need mozzarella from a special herd of water buffalo, San Marzano tomatoes from Mt Vesuvius, and an oven heated to 905 degrees F (using oak as the fuel). So it’s pretty tough to replicate, but the high quality and deliciousness are also the reason you see so many “neopolitan-style” pizzas out there. Our pizza is a neo-neopolitan style of pizza, which originated in New England. The big difference is in the crust; we use high gluten flour and they do not.
The reason I wanted to write about pizza this week is that I had two experiences with other pizza chains recently. Last Friday the wife, kid, and I were looking for a place to eat. The wife wanted to try the new hooters spinoff called Canz. I did not want to go there but she seemed intent (a joke), so I suggested Punch Pizza. I knew she would go for that because she rarely gets Punch, on account of most of them being in close proximity to Chipotle. Despite the gastrointestinal destruction, Chipotle usually wins out for me. So we went to Punch pizza for some neopolitan-style pizza. They were both good, but I swear that there was no real difference in taste between the two. The overwhelming taste was wood fired crust, and that was it. I thought to myself, this is good, but it’s not what I really want in a pizza. It also seemed like a cop out to me; no deep thought into topping combinations was necessary. And it just wasn’t the flavor sensation I was looking for.
My second pizza experience was a ZPizza menu that was delivered to my door recently. ZPizza is in university square in Rochester. I looked through the menu and almost every ‘za was some kind of deluxe “featuring” 6 or more toppings. Most salads I eat don’t have 6 ingredients in them, so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get from a half a dozen or more toppings. Sure, if you shove a lot of things into my mouth at once, it may taste kind of good, but I’m not going to know or appreciate what I’m eating. It’s more of a pizza smoothie at that point.
Our pizza philosophy is as such – we make a great crust, give it a little of our homemade pizza sauce, put 2-3 authentic toppings on (which make each pizza distinctive), and then finish with interesting and unique cheeses. We want to put just enough toppings on that you have to look at your pizza before each bite so that you get and taste a little of each ingredient every time. These pizzas are not bathing in cheese either. The cheese is an ingredient as well, flavorful and high quality. Not everyone will like every pizza, but we hope that everyone will find a few pizzas that they LOVE.
Over the next week, we're going to release information on some of the pizzas we have been working on. You'll be getting an unauthorized peek at our menu! Stay tuned.
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