Zen of Pizza

I apologize in advance for the length of this page.  What can I say, we are obsessed with pizza.

Question.  Why do 95% of all children name Pizza as their favorite food?  Brainwashing? Peer Pressure? Parental Influence?  I think it is something deeper. 

Pizza, when done correctly, has a real history.  It is our connection to one of the most ancient foods in the world. 

Sound too deep?  Think about it.  How long has bread been around?  How long have meat, oil, and cheese been around?  Although there is no proof, I would suppose that as soon as the ingredients were there, pizza (in one form or another) was made.  Think about how many foods involve a flat piece of bread and toppings?  Pizza in its ancient form is the father of them all.

In the US, Italian (or Neapolitan) style pizza was brought to NYC by Gennaro Lombardi in 1905 and has been tweaked, mechanized, improved, worsened, and "Americanized" for good or evil.

At present day there are many different grades of Pizza in the US from grocery store frozen to "take and bake" to totally machine made to authentic old school and everything in between.  The Smokehouse pizza is what I like to call Neo-Neapolitan Old School.  We just want to make the best pizza that we can.

Following in the footsteps of great pizza hunters like Peter Reinhart, we consider the crust to be the most important part of the pizza, so naturally, it gets the most attention.  The perfect crust can make any pizza memorable and a crummy crust can make the best toppings taste flat.

We start with our (no joke) secret recipe pizza dough.  We use a special grade flour from a local flour mill and a select few ingredients.  It is then mixed and kneaded with very specific "rest" periods.  After all, yeast (and therefore dough) is a living thing that needs a balanced, controlled environment and time to reach its potential magic.  After it has aged for the appropriate time period it is "cold formed" into pizza rounds since heat at this stage would excite the yeast and change the crust.

We bake the dough twice (a trick we learned from DiFara's in NYC where the locals always buy a slice and not a whole pizza since the slices have been baked twice which makes the crust perfect).  We use Marsal stone deck ovens to give the pizza a tender yet "snappy" crust.

We top the pizza dough with garlic infused olive oil and then a whole milk mozzarella from Saputo cheese company in Wisconsin.  Saputo cheese is almost twice the price of the cheeses used by other pizzerias, but we are trying to be in the same league as the Neapolitan pizza icons of New Haven and NYC, so we have to use the same ingredients regardless of cost. 

You also may have noticed that the cheese goes on first instead of the sauce.  That is on purpose.  It not only allows us to put more cheese on the pizza, but it also intensifies the flavors of our toppings since the toppings are not coated in cheese when baked.  The heat of the oven essentially evaporates the water out of the toppings and concentrates the flavors.  Basically, our pizza is like a punch in the face.

Now the sauce.  We use Escalon Premier tomato products that are grown in California.  Again, they are expensive, but we are trying to make a pizza that stands toe to toe with the best pizzas in America.  Besides tomato sauce we also use home made alfredo sauce, pesto, and imported Thai chili sauce.

Toppings are all fresh and delicious (usually hand cut by our kitchen staff), but there is one advantage that we have over any other pizza place.  We have a 3000 pound smoker!  That means that when you get chicken on your pizza it was prepared fresh and slow smoked.  Same with our home made sausage which is made from the scraps of our lean rib meat and slow smoked.

All in all, we don't claim to be the best pizza in the world, we just claim to be making the best pizza that we can make.  We don't hold any punches or cheat on cheap ingredients.  After all, it will take some doing to win over the last 5% of those kids.