Hungry yet?

Pistachio, Onion, and Hard cheeses – An uncommon combo, but a good one none the less.  This savory pizza is similar to a top-rated pizza at Pizza Bianco in Arizona, which considered by many to be the best pizzeria in the country.

Margherita – Fresh Mozzarella, fresh basil, crushed tomatoes, and our homemade herb oil.

Salami, roasted red peppers, and feta – This one is good…and just works together magically.

We’ve got others in the works, but this is just a sneak peek! 

And the first menu items to be revealed are:

Salami, Wild mushroom, and Blue Cheese – This is one of our richer pizzas and it may find more favor with men than women.  And when I say salami, I’m not talking about jimmy dean Italian flavored sausage.  I’m talking about good, quality salami:

Spicy Pesto Pepperoni – Not too spicy…just a little oomph. 

More to come!

You better cut the pizza into four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six...

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.

I’m Sweet on this Wine...

And…….. WE’RE BACK!  Sorry for the long delay in getting a new blog up.  My wife gave me a beautiful new ukulele for my birthday and really I’ve just been playing that.  Seriously.  I’ve managed to put it down for now but I still have sandy beaches and fruity drinks in my head.  And I’d like to keep it fruity by discussing sweetness today.  Sweet can mean so much in wine.  Examples:

This wine is sweet – slang for awesome

This wine is sweet – adjective for sugary

I’m sweet on this wine – Idiom for love

Have some more wine my sweetness – noun for person

This wine has so much flippin’ sugar in it, it’s practically a sweet – noun for thing/candy

She sipped her wine sweetly – adverb for the manner in which she sipped it

As you can see from this little grammar lesson, sweetness is very important in wine.  But what does it mean in practical terms?  Well, when wine starts out it is grape juice, and the sugar level is very high.  A pretty common sugar level, or brix as we in the biz call it, is 24.  So if your grapes are 24 brix, that means that in that in every 100 grams of weight, 24 of those grams are sugar.  The remaining 76 grams is most likely water.  When those grapes are pressed, it makes a sugary solution.  When yeast is added, it consumes the sugar and converts it to alcohol.  If a wine is fermented to dryness, that means the yeast ate the sugar until it was basically gone and yeast have basically died of starvation.  Fermenting to dryness is common in your chardonnays and red wines.  Your sweet wines like Riesling and Muscat are usually fermented to dryness as well, but sugar is added back in after fermentation.  With your really sweet, high alcohol dessert wines, there is a lot of sugar present before fermentation, and the yeast will convert that until the alcohol produced is too much for them to survive and they die from drunkenness (not really).  They die, maybe from drunkenness or maybe not, with a lot of residual sugar leftover which is why those wines can be so sweet. 

It’s tough to know just how sweet a bottle of wine is from the label.  If you are buying sparkling wine it may be easier.  You’ve probably heard brut or extra brut, but don’t know what it means exactly.  What that indicates is the sweetness of the wine.  Here is the chart, along with the grams of residual sugar per liter and % sugar.

Extra Brut 0.6% or less, 3 grams or less

Brut  1.5%, 6 grams or less

Extra Dry 1.2% - 2.0%, 15 grams or less

Sec 1.7% - 3.5%, 20 grams or less

Demi-Sec 3.3%-5.0%, 50 grams or less

Doux 5.0% - 10%, 100 grams or less

And for a quick comparison of some common beverages

Coke – 120 grams sugar per liter

Sprite – 100 grams sugar per liter

Orange Soda – 150 grams sugar per liter

Orange Juice – 100 grams sugar per liter

Milk – 50 grams sugar per liter

From these numbers you can see that even the sweetest sparkling wines are no sweeter than some common beverages you would not describe as sweet.  A sweet white wine like Riesling often contains around 20 grams per liter of sugar, whereas a dry wine like chardonnay is usually between 3-8 grams per liter.  Most red wines are relatively dry, so their sugar levels are in the 3-8 grams per liter area as well. 

Sweetness and people’s perception of sweet varies greatly.  I have learned through many wine tasting and detecting classes that people do actually taste things differently.  If someone hates onions, it’s not because they are lame, it’s because their tongue is weird, i.e. unlike yours.  My Four Daughters associate, Patrick, will choose a Bartles and James over a beer every time.  He’s a self proclaimed daiquiri man.  It’s possible that his taste buds are just geared towards sweet.  Taste is a very personal thing.  Now that you are all armed with this information, I don’t want anyone to go out and act like a humongous jerk to anyone that says “I don’t like Riesling, it’s too sweet.”  I know you’ll want to come back at them with “Milk is twice as sweet as Riesling, you wiener” but you won’t, cause you know better.