The Executive Chef at Pizzeria Ortica, Justin Miller, prepares a seasonal cotechino (a cooked holiday sausage) and cavolo nero (Tuscan kale) pizza with smoked mozzarella, spiced mascarpone, and curls of spring onion. It is a perfect balance of flavor and texture.
Pizza need not have sauce or cheese in order for it to be insanely delicious. Exhibit A: Pizza Bianca. The long, flat, lightly dimpled, flecked-with-coarse salt, crisp-on-the-outside, just barely chewy bread sold by the square in Rome (or Sullivan street, if you prefer). Jeffrey Steingarten wrote at length about finding the perfect slice of pizza bianca at Forno, a bakery in Rome's Campo de' Fiori. I've been there. It's f*&king phenomenal (just ask Ed—he tasted pretty much the whole menu last May. My goal this week at The Pizza Lab is to bring some of that crisp, chewy, olive-oil soaked magic into my own kitchen.
You know sometimes when you see something and you're like, WHOA, why didn't I think of that before?!? That happened when I saw this photo of the "pizza knots" at NYC sandwich shop Parm. These suckers are DEEP-FRIED. Like a mashup between garlic knots and that other old-school pizzeria staple, zeppole.
Ok, so after Adam posted about his awesome sounding garlic knot and sausage stuffing, we got to chatting a bit in the comments when it dawned on me that even though it takes it totally out of the realm of a Thanksgiving-ish stuffing, a pizza flavored stuffing made with tomatoes and mozzarella might be totally delicious in its own way.
From the earliest days of Slice, I've urged you pizza freaks to forgo the crusty, saucy, cheesy stuff on Thanksgiving in favor of gobbling the gobbler. But I know some of you are diehards, so here's a way to sneak our erstwhile favorite dish into the Turkey Day festivities: Garlic Knot and Sausage Stuffing. Yes, it's pizza-flavored stuffing for Thanksgiving.
Chef Jason Neroni's passion for pizza really comes out in his Osteria la Buca pie. Made with a crust fostered under the influence of the Acme Bread Company, he pairs homemade pickled jalapeños, fennel sausage, and ricotta for a truly outstanding pizza. Learn how to replicate it here.
What is better than pizza? Fried pizza. Or this is the thought that popped into my head when I took my first bite of the Montanara Pizza at Forcella in Williamsburg. It was one of those hit-you-over-the-head good, oh man I need more sort of reactions.
Giulio Adriani is the mad creator of the Montanara pizza at Forcella, which he deep fries in vegetable oil and then finishes in the oven to achieve a light and airy crust with the perfect chew, and a crispness only achieved by frying at 375 degrees. He tops the Montanara simply with crushed San Marzano tomatoes, mozzarella that he makes in house, Grana Padano cheese, and fresh basil leaves.
Have you ever fallen in love? If not, then you haven't tasted the Bianca. When the chefs at Pizzeria Mozza met the buttery, truffle-laced sottocenere, it was love at first bite. The rounds of delicate semi-soft cow's milk cheese, from the Veneto region in northern Italy, are aged in juniper and fennel ash rub, providing a subtle background for the overarching truffle flavor. Mozza's relatively long pizza cooking times (8-10 minutes) brings the high fat content of the sottocenere to its oily breaking point. So owner Nancy Sliverton and Executive Chef Matt Molina add a supporting cast of fontina and mozzarella to keep this consummate white pie velvety.
On the streets of Istanbul, Alex Sarkissian and Chef Matt Carpenter discovered the irresistible Etli Pide. This Turkish street food is practically non-existent in the US. For this edition of Top This, we learn how to make their Etli Pide, an open-faced calzone brimming with seasoned minced beef, kasseri cheese, organic farm egg and thyme spiked oven roasted tomatoes.
With beach views and fire pits, the Dining Deck of Santa Monica Place has quickly become a popular public space in Los Angeles. In this lovely setting sits Pizza Antica — not to be confused with Antica Pizzeria. With four locations in California, Executive Chef Gordon Drysdale's American-inspired Italian food is market-driven with a seasonal rotation of increasingly popular pizzas. Their Roman-style pies have a thin, crisp crust with absolutely no sag. For this edition of Top This, we learn how to make their addictive Broccoli Rabe, Caciocavalo, Burrata and Chili Oil pizza.
