Every aspect of building this pizzeria excites me: talking to my lenders, finishing my floor plan, choosing the lighting, developing the menu, purchasing the mixer. However, perhaps no singular aspect excites me more than purchasing my oven and yesterday, I sent my first wire to a bank in Naples, Italy.
[Photographs: Adam Kuban] This has got to be the shiniest pizza oven in NYC — maybe the world. Slice got a sneak peek at the oven and some of the pizza to come out of it last night at Donatella's, Donatella Arpaia's soon-to-open pizzeria on 19th and Eighth in Chelsea. We'll bring you pizza pics later today, but here are a few shots of the fire-breathing beauty for those of you obsessed with such things. Earlier ... Donatella's PIzza Oven: The Build-Out » Donatella's: The Oven Is Being Cured » Video: Neapolitans Talk Pizza (While Ed Levine Antagonizes Them!) »...
I recently got this email from Vinny, a self-described pizza freak and longtime Slice'r. I thought it'd be worth opening up to everyone out there for thoughts. —The Mgmt. Aside from the pizza making & eating madness (born & raised in Brooklyn doesn't help me break the addiction!!), I'm also longtime BBQ cook and competitor.There's a lot of similarities between great, traditional pizzas and BBQ.One thing I rarely see discussed in the pizza world is the types of wood used. So much focus is put on the flour/dough making process, origins of sauce & cheese, type of bricks used, temps...
Over the weekend Timothy Paul Perry (aka timotheos) started a thread in Serious Eats Talk about his DIY pizza oven. It was so intriguing—he uses an inverted wok as a dome in a hacked home oven—that people were pinging him for pictures and more info. I knew I had to put him in the hot seat for a My Pizza Oven interview. Whoomp, here it is.
Timotheos got creative and made a portable pizza oven that sounds ripe for tailgating: I started out searching craigslist and found a magic chef wall oven for free...I liked the idea since I was able to start with an oven..I gutted it and disassembled it then put it back together but repacking the insulation with kiln insulation..I put a inverted wok in the top to work as a dome and laid in a layer of fire-brick on the bottom where I placed a 10psi propane burner that is removable as are the firebricks..I used a corderite pizza insert for my...
Last week we mentioned that Donatella Arpaia was having a wood-fired pizza oven installed in her upcoming pizzeria, Donatella's. Yesterday, Slice was lucky enough to peep a part of the oven-building process.
Donatella Arpaia outside her upcoming restaurant, Donatella, with a ton (or more) of bricks for her oven. [Photograph: Joshua Bright/Diner's Journal] Looks like restaurateur and frequent Iron Chef America judge Donatella Arpaia is getting into the Neapolitan pizza game. According to this story on the New York Times's Diner's Journal blog, she's having bricks, sand, and cement all imported from Naples to build her oven and is bringing in the requisite Neapolitan oven-builders to construct it. But probably what's most interesting is that she's going to be studying pizza-making under Enzo Coccia of Pizzeria La Notizia in Naples for...
He appears in the evenings on the streets of San Francisco, mostly in the city's Mission District, with a heavily modified Weber kettle grill in tow. Into his "FrankenWeber" goes wood, though, not charcoal. And instead of burgers or hot dogs, the dish that Pizza Hacker cooks is, obviously, pizza. And while this scene sounds like it could veer toward "gimmick," it is anything but. Pizzahacker is the real deal, as this Q&A with him reveals. Get to know him and his craft!
I've been sleeping on this story for a while, and for that I must apologize to you, dear reader, and to the Pizza Hacker, a pizza street vendor who I've known about for a couple months but haven't yet blogged about. The Pizza Hacker, based in San Francisco, uses a modified 22.5-inch Weber kettle grill that he's fitted with fire bricks. To mimic a traditional pizza oven, whose shape is ideal for cooking a pizza, he used the original lid to mold an oven dome from refractory cement and perlite. Pizza Hacker shows up at various locations throughout SF...
