Los Angeles Pizza…

…is not necessarily a contradiction in terms.

The vastly overwhelming majority of what is here is, admittedly, barely edible, and in some cases downright disgusting, but there are three places in three areas of the city where I’ve found something to keep down.

The first place could be on any corner in any town in New Jersey, Eastern PA or Southern NY. It’s called Village Pizza and it’s in downtown Larchmont. The pies are 16″, made with high-quality dry mozzarella and are an excellent example of how good [American pizza](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/334) can be. It’s a thin but bready crust, at once crispy and chewy, imminently foldable and delicious.

The sauce is a little flat, but salt is always a matter of taste. I give it 4 stars out of 5 for an American pie.

Village Pizza
131 N. Larchmont @ Beverly Blvd.
Phone: 323-465-5566

They have a Hollywood location, but I can’t vouch for it. Maybe this week…

Pizza Series: Shaping

Last time in the world of pizza, we talked about [crust, what we want from the crust and how to make dough](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/339). Today, let’s talk about shaping the dough.

You’ve all seen the pizzaiolo (pizza guy) tossing pies in the air. There are hundreds of ways to shape pizza, some very showy, some not. They all have advantages and disadvantages, to home use and to commercial use. As usual, I will try to provide you with enough information for you to make a decision on your own.

Before we get too far into shaping, though, I want to talk a minute about the Tools of the Trade. As always, you don’t need much besides your hands and a stove to make decent food, but there are some things that I really need to stress are important to the making of great pizza. The one thing that will have the greatest effect on the overall taste and texture of your pie is without a doubt some kind of stone on which to bake it. There are pizza or bread stones available in cookware shops that yield good results, but they are often expensive and prone to breakage and usually too small to do much on. Commercial pizza ovens have a kind of composite ceramic material and if you go to a used restaurant supply house, you may be able to get a broken piece of “oven floor” that will fit in your oven, or can be cut (or smashed) to fit. Old school wood-fired ovens have soapstone floors, I am told, but I’ve never worked on one. Another inexpensive alternative is unglazed quarry tiles, which Home Depot used to carry (and may still, but I switched to Lowe’s, who definitely does not carry them) but you can get at any tile shop for about 20 cents apiece. Bread ovens are often made of firebrick, which is the material the interior of fireplaces are made of, and you can buy enough firebrick to line your oven for about $10 at any block yard.

Whatever you use, you’ll want to put your oven rack on the lowest position and cover it with whatever stone medium you choose. If you use tiles, cover as much of the rack as you like, but leave yourself a couple of inches around the perimeter of the stone to allow air to circulate around it. You’ll want to preheat your stone for at least an hour before trying to bake on it. At home, you will probably just want to set your oven to the highest setting it will allow. My oven goes to 550 and produces decent results, but higher would be better. Commercial American ovens are usually run around 600-650, sometimes higher depending on the style of pie. Wood-fired dome ovens are usually kept at ambient temperatures of about 800 degrees, though the floor remains much cooler.

You will often see recipes telling you to bake at a more conservative 450 or even 400, but this won’t create a blisteringly hot surface to crisp up your crust properly, and will necessitate too much time in the oven, making sauce, dough and, especially, cheese very unhappy.

The other piece of equipment I’d encourage you to invest in is a small peel, which is the flat shovel you use to slide the pies on and off the stone. Aluminum ones are easier to care for, and perhaps to use to a novice. They don’t perform as well as wood, but you can get into trouble more easily with wood as I’ll explain later. You can find a cheap, generic peel at any restaurant supply for about twenty bucks, or you could get one [here](https://www.surfasonline.com/products/4146.cfm). You can use a cookie sheet as a peel as well, or even an upside-down jelly-roll pan, but the operation of raw pie to stone will never be easier than with a peel.

**Shaping a pie**

No, we do not start out tossing the dough in the air, cool your jets. A pizza at home, a nice 10-12” pie should come from a piece of dough that’s around 6-7 ounces. If you’re metric, this would be about 200g. The [previous post](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/339) tells you how to get the dough ready. After its 24 hours in the fridge, here’s how to proceed.

Handle it carefully. You will deflate it eventually, but you want it to happen evenly. Dunk the dough in bench flour on each side, and tap it gently in the air to dust off excess.

Working on a smooth surface (like marble or formica), dimple the dough evenly with your fingertips all over, but avoid the very center. You generally avoid pushing the center because as the circular movements happen, then center of the dough gets stretched whether you press on it or not. Press on it from the beginning, and the dough becomes unevenly thin in the center.

At this point, you could punt with a rolling pin, and pinch up the sides a little to make an edge to your crust. But if you want to go pro…

Some people- in italy and here- will continue to pat with their fingers and stretch at the sides until the dough has reached the desired diameter. Some people “scratch” pies. This means placing your hands flat on the dough, side by side in a quasi pyramid shape. Holding one hand still (your left if you’re right-handed), gently providing a grip on the dough, move the other hand away and ever-so-slightly down, stretching that quadrant of dough. If you move your scratching hand in a continuous circular motion, you will be able to rotate the dough between stretching by lifting your static hand and lowering it again when you’ve rotated the dough sufficiently.

That’s a terrible description, but that’s all I got. I promise there will be photos and videos soon, we just need to migrate out of this drupal wilderness.

After a revolution or two of scratching, lay the dough over one hand on the counter. Make a fist, but then hinge your fingers slightly forward again. That’s how you want to have both hands for the next step. Lift the dough up off the counter with your not-quite-fists and gently stretch it by moving your fists apart. Almost simultaneously, spin the dough slightly across your hands so you’re turning and stretching in a continuous motion. Be mindful of places where the dough is thicker or thinner. Even is important.

This is the point at which you would throw the dough in the air, allowing centrifugal force to stretch the pie for you.

Now you’re headed for the peel, and I could write a whole article on the topic of what to put on the peel. Some people say there absolutely must be cornmeal on the peel. Some people say whole wheat flour. Some people say as little as possible, and I agree with them. When I’m eating pizza, I don’t like my tongue encountering a bunch of foreign nibs along the bottom. At the same time, too much flour and you will be eating raw flour on the surface of your pizza – also not enjoyable.

Here’s the issue, though. The moment the sauce goes on the pizza, the pizza wants to stick to the peel. The best way to avoid this is to work quickly, which isn’t much comfort when you’re new at something. There is a trick, though, to come in a minute.

So, just as a safety, put your peel or cookie sheet on top of your pizza stone and make sure that you’ll be able to fit your pizza on it. If the stone is smaller, take a pencil and just scratch some reference lines on it.

Next, lightly dust your peel with flour and arrange the dough over it. Put about a half a cup of sauce – ish, judge as you go – and starting from the center gently press a ladle or the bowl of a deep spoon to the top of the dough and swirl a vortex out to the sides of the pie creating an even layer of sauce.

Quickly scatter the cheese over the pie, though not too much, you should still be able to see sauce, and then tear a few basil leaves over the top. There’s your margherita.

Now take the handle of the peel and gently flick it to one side or the other. Ideally, the peel will move but the pie will stay more or less still. If it doesn’t, here’s what to do: get your face up close to the pie, pick up one edge just slightly, and blow air underneath it. A giant, crazy air bubble will move around between the dough and the peel. Once it’s traveled around, pick up an edge to dispel it, and you’re ready for the oven. (You can accomplish the same thing by lifting one edge of the pie somewhat high and quickly flicking it back down, but it’s not as easy.)

Place the edge of the peel on the far corner of your stone. Very gently begin shaking the peel back and forth, walking the dough off of the peel and onto the stone. Go slowly and forgive yourself if your first pie bunches up here or there. Once it’s on the stone, it’s there, so don’t try to adjust it. That stone is hot and you **will** burn yourself.

Once you’ve got it in, get the oven door closed ASAP- you’re losing heat. After six minutes, take a peek. If you’re not browning evenly, reach in with the peel and spin her around. If it looks even, leave it, until the top of the pie is golden and the bottom is well browned.

Give yourself a few minutes between pies, since the stone will need some time to heat up. All in all, in a home oven at 550, I’d plan on 8-10 minutes for your pie. I guess next time we’ll have to cover sauce.

Listening: The birds. The movers come tomorrow, so I’m enjoying it while I can.

La Crosta

[*Last time on Omnivorous Fish*](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/334)

Crust is a tough thing to pin down because different people want different things from it. Some want a splintering black crust, some want a chewy morsel. Some want to taste the crust prominently; some want it to hide in the background while they relish the sauce, cheese and toppings. I’ll tell you what I want from it: I want it to be pliable, not splintery, but I still want some break-through when I bite into it, something to chew. I want it to have a very light salt and yeast flavor, maybe not as sour as a baguette, but noticeable. The edges may be blackened slightly, but the whole bottom of the pie should be a deep golden brown, mottled here and there with chestnut. Likewise, the top of the pie should take on a little golden edge.

What goes into pizza dough? Well, if your pizza dough is good, you don’t need anything in it other than flour, water, salt and yeast. Someone recently told me that “what you should do in cooking is to take the original and improve upon it.” What a load of bullshit that is. If you’re cooking really well, you won’t be able to improve on it.

The dough for a pizza is a little drier than what you might be used to for bread. I start making pizza at about 32% water by weight. That means 3-1/2 cups of flour to a cup of water. For that much flour, I would use a teaspoon of yeast, either active dry or a scant teaspoon instant (this just means a little less than a teaspoon, I leave a visible ring of metal in my measuring spoon when I want to do this). I don’t recommend using fresh cake yeast unless you make it yourself or you buy it in a place that you know has very high turnover. This may come as a shock to you, but I don’t believe that the kind of yeast you use has an appreciable effect on flavor *if you are using commercial yeast*. If you’re harvesting grapes and dusting them with flour to grow your starter, that’s obviously a whole other ballgame.

The flavor of yeast doughs comes mainly from time, especially in a small batch like this. With 50 lbs of flour, 20 oz of yeast will have a much bigger impact on flavor, but even then, premium instant yeast is not only usually a better performer as a leavener, but it has a clean flavor that never goes sour. I use SAF-instant yeast for everything I bake. Red for most things, and gold for high-sugar doughs (you can use Red, but use somewhat less, instant yeast is like a pot-smoking teenager: if there’s food around, it’ll go nuts).

Of course, like any dough, the amount of water and flour will vary with your water, flour, area of the country, temperature, humidity and mood. [You have to get a feel for it](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/211).

So let’s write out a recipe, for those of you who must have it:

**Pizza Dough**
15 oz (3 cups) (plus more) AP Flour (unbleached king arthur, gold medal or heckers, in descending order of preference)

1-1/2 teaspoons salt

1 scant teaspoon SAF-instant RED dry yeast (or one teaspoon active dry, preferably Red Star or Fleischman’s)

8 oz (1 cup) water (room temperature if using instant yeast, 115 degrees if using active dry)

**If using active dry yeast**
Stir a teaspoon of flour into the water and sprinkle the yeast over the top, cover loosely with plastic and allow it to proof, or soften and get a little foamy. It will get to be a kind of sludge in ten minutes or so. Proceed as below. **DO NOT DO THIS WITH INSTANT YEAST**

**If using an electric mixer**
Stir together the flour and salt until well combined. Stir in the yeast. You don’t want the yeast and salt to come into direct contact because salt will inhibit its growth. Make a little well in the center. Set the bowl on the stand, pour all the water into the well and mix with the dough hook until the dough just comes together. It will not be a cohesive mass, that’s ok.

Dough just coming together

Take the shaggy mass out of the mixer bowl and knead it on a floured surface enough to make it into a coherent dough, adding flour to keep the surface of the dough dry, perhaps another ½ cup. When the dough is mixed, put it back in the mixer and knead it at low speed for another 5-10 minutes, until it’s homogenous and fairly smooth. If the dough doesn’t seem to be mixing properly, or if it’s “scarring”, let it rest for 5 minutes, then knead it by hand until it seems it’s in the mood. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes, covered with plastic, before dividing.

Scarring dough

**If mixing by hand**
Stir together the flour and salt until well combined. Stir in the yeast. You don’t want the yeast and salt to come into direct contact because salt will inhibit its growth.

Pour the water into a mixing bowl. Stir the flour mixture into it slowly with a wooden spoon or your fingers, a little at a time, until a dough forms and it’s too thick to stir. Scrape it out of the bowl and knead it on a floured surface enough to make it into a coherent dough, adding flour to keep the surface of the dough dry, perhaps another ½ cup. Continue to knead for another 5-10 minutes, until it’s homogenous and fairly smooth. If the dough doesn’t seem to be mixing properly, or if it’s “scarring”, let it rest for 5 minutes, then continue to knead until it seems it’s in the mood. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes, covered with plastic, before dividing.

**Divide the dough**
This dough will weigh about 26 ounces. A 16” pie- a large in an American Pizzeria- is made with 24 ounces of dough. A 14”- a medium- is made with a pound. A calzone is made with half a pound (8 ounces). If you have a little home-cook pizza stone, you’ll want to make a 10-12” pie, with about 6-7 ounces of dough. For sicilian pizza, just divide the dough in half for an 8 or 9 inch pie.

The best thing to do, if you have a decent scale, is to weigh your whole dough, then divide that number by four and cut your dough to that size. If you don’t, eyeball it as best you can.

Let the cut pieces rest, covered with plastic, for about 10 minutes, then roll them into balls by pinching the corners continuously towards the center. When it’s become a sort of mushroom of dough, pinch the stem of the mushroom into a point while twisting its cap. Does that make any sense? It doesn’t to me, exactly, but I know how to do it… here’s a photo.

Dough balls for neapolitan pizza

**Retard the dough**
Retarding the dough simply means- most of the time- to refrigerate it. You’re retarding the growth of yeast, or slowing the rise. You’re also developing flavor.

Space the pieces out in something you can seal up, like a big tupperware lunchmeat keeper or a roasting pan you can tightly cover with plastic wrap. In a pizzeria they have plastic or fiberglass dough boxes which interlock, keeping the air out and keeping the dough moist all over. However you package it, put it in the refrigerator for about 24 hours.

For a sicilian pizza, put the balls into well-oiled 8 or 9 inch square or round pans of cast iron, thick aluminum, or even a cast iron skillet. They should rise for about 20 hours before being pressed into the whole width of the pan, then let to rise for another four hours or so, again in the refrigerator.

Listening: Tortoise TNT “The Suspension Bridge at San Iguazu Falls”

Na Pizz!

We’ve known each other long enough that you’ve probably observed that I go on tangents. Pasta one week, then gnocchi, then squash, guazzetti, ravioli, fish, whatever. Well, I’ve been on another. *Na pizza!*

First, we need to disambiguate: there is pizza, and then there is Pizza. To develop our taxonomy, we need to isolate pizza into constituent groups, the two largest being, of course, Italian Pizza and American Pizza. Italian pizza can then be further divided into Neapolitan Pizza, Sicilian Pizza and Everything Else- the myriad of focaccie, panzanelle, farinate and, well, everything else that’s flat and gets topped. (I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere.)

American pizza is a little trickier to divide, but let’s try. The two largest groups of American pizza are Garbage and Not Garbage. Garbage divides further, but we needn’t spend too much time on it. Basically, Garbage subdivides into Chains, which includes anything you get a circular for: Papa John’s, Domino’s, Little Caesar’s, Pat’s and a thousand others; and also Ghetto Pizza, which are run by the slum lords of pizza. In New York they are the countless nameless places with Coke signs open way later than any pizzeria should be, shoveling out scrap pies that I wouldn’t eat no matter how drunk I was, and yet people throw themselves in front of traffic to defend them on message boards because “the pizza guy has a mohawk” or “you can get two slices for $1.49.”

Not Garbage is tricky territory, and pulses run high on the subject. First let’s subdivide into Like Italian Pizza and Not Like Italian Pizza. Not Like Italian Pizza includes a lot of things familiar to you, like California Pizza Kitchen, Chicago-Style Pizza and that stuff so common on the west coast with the chewy, brown hammertone crust, usually dusted with breadcrumbs or coarse cornmeal. These things aren’t pizza exactly, but they are a tangential course on the topics of dough, sauce and cheese. Like Italian Pizza brings us to the neighborhood pizza shops of the Northeast, and many of the newer sit-down places of the West Coast.

Let’s isolate the most important element of what makes that pizza Like Italian Pizza: a thin and crispy crust. This does not mean paper-thin crackery crust, but it does mean pizza baked on a stone, not in a pan or on a screen, that is thick enough to have a top, middle and bottom, but not thick enough that you could separate the layers. The thin, raw sauce and mozzarella that go with it are supporting to characters in the Drama of Crust. This is still a very broad category. In Italy, pizzas are individually sized and come unsliced to the table. They’re eaten with a beer and a knife and fork. In America, a pizza may be 16” wide or wider, and come sliced on a big aluminum tray or corrugated paper box for everyone to share. It could also come in the Italian style. It could also come in any way in between.

So, Like Italian Pizza is then divided into Just Like Italian Pizza, A Lot Like Italian Pizza, and Recognizable As Italian Pizza. These are what we are mainly interested in and all these things have the same major constituent elements, so we can discuss them as one.

Next time, **The Crust**

Listening: The Mars Volta Frances the Mute “Cassandra Gemini: E. Sarcophagi”