The pies arrive literally smoking, with charred dough on one side or the other. I ate the standard Margherita, which shocked me with its $21 price tag, Sicilian sea salt or not. It was good, but a little too substantially charred for my taste, and the “bone” (the thickest part of the crust) was a little too doughy. Still, as an example of the Naples style, it was about 95% there.
The other pizza I tried, the bianca, was a white pie (well, duh!) with a heavy dose of buffalo mozzarella on top. To begin with, Naples pizzerias almost never use buffalo mozzarella, preferring the fiore di latte that is the equivalent of our Italian-American mozzarella. While I don’t usually argue with dairy generosity, this pie had too much cheese, lending a rubbery quality to the pie. In Naples, when they apply cheese, it is in small chunks....
"It hurts me, because they act as if I'm trying to get something over on them. I wish I had the nerve to charge $50, because that's what it's worth." —Anthony Mangieri
The pies there inspired him to talk to some of the acknowledged masters of pizza: Anthony Mangieri (Una Pizza Napoletana, New York), Chris Bianco (Pizzeria Bianco, Phoenix), and Nancy Silverton (Mozza).
Not only that, but readers hungry for San Francisco pies will be pleased to note that Mr. Bauer is launching "Pizza Friday" on his blog; it promises to be a "multimedia feature" that will document his quest to find the Bay Area's best pizzas.
Some choice excerpts from the pizza feature, after the jump.
You: A hot, shapely Italian number that I can place my burning wood in.
Me: An eager young pizzaiolo used to playing with fire. I've played around most of my life; now looking to settle down with the right oven.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, champion pizza-maker Tony Gemignani hopes to open a wood-burning pizzeria with an oven worthy of his talent, according to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Gemignani, long known in the pizza world for his pizza-spinning techniques (he's been called "the Michael Jordan of pizza-tossing"), got tired of dough acrobatics a couple years ago and started to focus on making true Neapolitan-style pies.
After installing a portable Beehive oven in his backyard and practicing the craft, he went to Italy to compete in the Trofeo Citta de Napoli Championato Internationale per Pizzaioli in June. And he won.
"It was a big win," he said. "People are comparing it to Stag's Leap (Wine Cellars) going to Paris," and beating the best French Bordeaux makers in the 1976 tasting that put California Cabernet Sauvignon on the map.
Trouble is, strict air-quality standards in the Napa Valley usually don't allow for wood-burning ovens there.
But the Vera Pizza Napoletana association (aka "the Pizza Police") is going to allow Gemignani and his brothers to open a pizza school under its aegis. If so, Gemignani and family hope to talk the local government into making an exception. As the Chronicle says, "If that happens, they hope to start construction late this before year and move from their current location in a strip mall near Interstate 580."
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Michael Bauer, the food critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, 
