Alia Akkam, photo by Andrea Weir
Serious about crafting restaurant-caliber pizza on your
home turf? Then you’ve probably already shunned the packaged shredded
mozz for creamy balls of the fresh stuff. But that’s just the first step
to a killer pie. Ensuring your pizza emerges from the oven with the
vibrant sauce, airy but charred crust, and brilliantly creative toppings
of the latest pizzerias is a lot harder than it looks. Fortunately, we
tapped the pizza experts (aka pizzaioli) from some of the newest pizza
destinations across the country for their expert advice.
Strategy #1: Go Thick, Go Low
At Marta, Danny Meyer’s latest New York project, inside the Martha
Washington Hotel, Nick Anderer mans the wood-burning ovens that elicit
paper thin, Roman-style pizzas. This technique is even more challenging
to master in the civilian kitchen devoid of 600-degree ovens, but the
ambitious should certainly try. “If the raw dough is too dry, it burns
before getting crispy. Higher hydration allows for more time on the
pizza stone without burning, and this extra time results in crispier
crust,” he explains. “But the bitch of it is that working with
high-hydration dough at home is tricky, usually because of the transfer
to the oven.”
Instead, Anderer points out, consider the pan pizza, or thicker,
focaccia-like pizza rustica: “You can cook it for a longer time, at a
lower temperature—closer to 450 or 500 degrees. It won’t be like
pizzeria pizza, but it will be crispy and delicious, albeit a touch
thicker and doughier.” Just roll out
the dough about twice as thick as usual, then bake in a well-oiled rimmed baking sheet instead of on a pizza peel.
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