Bar Pie nos. 10, 11, 12: Trying out the new toaster oven

21 May

bar pizza

I *think* this is No. 12. Or maybe No. 13. I don’t know. I’ll have to go back and look at my notes and photos. Doesn’t matter so much the numbering, anyway. I have my notes and know what’s up. This one is topped with Salumeria Biellese hot soppressata.

Some people move to the country or the beach for the summer. Me? I move to baking pizza in a toaster oven.

Toaster oven!?! Yes, toaster oven. I bought a Breville Smart Oven so I could continue BP R&D. It was either that or NO bar-pie testing for the rest of summer. It simply gets too hot in our apartment when the oven is on for any amount of time.

Breville Smart Oven

Big enough to fit a smallish pizza in it. Big enough for me to continue my bar-pie research, since my bar pies were no bigger than 13″ anyway.

I did some research and talked to friends. This oven seemed like the best thing for what I was doing. Bonus is that we can now continue to do oven-roasted dishes for regular dinners, too. It’s fairly big for a toaster oven, but it has enough room to accommodate at 13″ pizza.

Anyway, I’ve done three pizzas in the toaster oven so far. It comes with a number of pans, one of them a 13″ pizza pan. I tried my first bar pie of this batch of dough on that. It was OK. It reached doneness but was very pale, not crisp. Continue reading →

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Weekly Pizza Lunch: American Flatbread TriBeCa Hearth

3 May

american flatbread nyc pizza

The Medicine Wheel consists of “house-made organic tomato sauce, whole-milk mozzarella, Blythedale Farm Cooksville Grana, Grana Padano,
and fresh herbs.”

American Flatbread TriBeCa Hearth is a Vermont mini-chain making its first inroads into NYC. Slice has detailed this particular location here and its loosely affiliated clones here, here, and here.

20130503-144957.jpg

Lunch today was a small “Medicine Wheel” pie, which is just a hippied-out name for “plain pie” or “cheese pizza”—ie, sauce and cheese. It tasted like what I imagine a chain pizza cooked in a wood-fired oven and made with good ingredients would. That’s because there was ample, gooey cheese on this thing but mostly because the crust was a little doughy, softer than what a typical New York–style pizza would be, even though visually it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of a New York–style pizza—or maybe a New Haven pie. The minor squishiness was not a deal-killer, though—my pizza had good flavor, thanks in part to just a good bit of light charring and from the generous shake of marjoram sprinkled on—a slight though welcome flippathascript.

Heck, I’d go back. In fact, I will, because I want to try the sausage pizza. The sausage is maple-flavored, something people either love or hate. I avoided it today because the Medicine Wheel photo on Slice looked so good.

American Flatbread TriBeCa Hearth

205 Hudson Street, New York NY 10013
212-776-1441 / americanflatbread.com/restaurants/tribeca-nyc / @AFNYCTribeca

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Weekly Pizza Lunch: Vezzo and Tappo

23 Apr

I’m combining two Weekly Pizza Lunch outings into one here. That’s because they’re practically the same place. —The Mgmt.

Vezzo Meatball Classic Pizza

Vezzo’s Meatball Classic pizza: tomato sauce, mozzarella, house-made meatballs, red onion, and basil. Pictured: small, $9.

There’s a pizzeria mini chain in the heart of Manhattan that I think doesn’t get enough attention or praise.* Part of the blame may lie in its unusual naming convention. I mean, did you know that the pizzerias Gruppo, Posto, Spunto, Vezzo, and Tappo are all related and are pretty much the same thing? I know! You’d think they would have settled on one name and stuck with it. (Think of the efficiencies gained by maintaining one single website!)

Then again, avoiding the appearance of a chain has a certain advantage as well. Continue reading →

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Bar pie No. 6: crust made with 100% AP flour

18 Apr

bar pizza

This one didn’t get as many pizza bubbles as the previous installment. I don’t know if that’s due to the dough formulation or a difference in temperature or both.

No. 6 was made with 100% all-purpose flour. After getting a fine crust with a 1:3 ratio of AP–semolina, I just had to try 100% AP to see if things could get even better. They didn’t.

Unfortunately, I don’t know if that’s because of the AP flour content or the fact that my oven may not have been as hot as previous pies. I didn’t preheat it or the Baking Steel as long as the others (due to more-pressing baby-rearing matters).

The dough was floppier than before and not very crisp. I’m going to go back to a 1:3 ratio for my next round, since that seemed to work well, and try some variations with sauce and cheese.

On another note: I’m thinking of getting a toaster oven now that it’s warming up outside. It will soon be too warm to fire up our oven. Since these pies I’ve been making are small, I figure I can get a larger toaster-broiler, see if Baking Steel will custom-cut a steel to fit it, and try that out.

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Bar pizza No. 5

9 Apr

bar-style pizza

Iteration No. 5 was made with less semolina flour. I believe that’s why there are more numerous “pizza bubbles.”

What’s different this time: I backed down on the amount of semolina flour in the dough. This time it’s a 3:1 ratio of AP flour to semolina flour. Still using Bob’s Red Mill SF.

pizza bubbles

Increased “pizza bubbles.” Not sure yet whether they’re desirable or to be avoided. I’ve always sort of loved them.

The change, I believe, is responsible for the “pizza bubbles,” as AP is a softer flour. The texture was softer overall yet still crisp enough to stand up with no “tip sag.” It was almost a little flakey or crackery in the way Midwestern/Chicago thin-crust can be.

What I want to test next time: I think my next iteration will be a 100% AP flour dough, just to see how that works. That’s the configuration J. Kenji Lopez-Alt uses in his bar pizza recipe. Continue reading →

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Bar Pie No. 4: shortened dough

5 Apr

bar pizza

Bar Pie No. 4 has a shortened dough. I replaced the oil I normally used with Crisco, to see if it would tenderize the dough.

Tried some shortening in the crust to see if that would tenderize it a bit. Didn’t really. Still chewy. Going to try backing down on the amount of semolina flour in the dough. This one was a touch thicker than No. 3, and it has some pizza bubbles, more than I’d gotten before. I kind of like them, but docking the dough is also an option to consider.

Also weighed the sauce for the first time in this series. Need to keep track to maintain consistency. This is the second time I weighed the cheese. I may bump up the amount of cheese. Though I do think that as-is, it’s got a decent enough amount.

I’ve been reading Ken Forkish’s “Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast” lately, though, and in it he talks about pushing bread-baking variables to the extremes and past them — to see how far you can take things before they break. Once you understand that, you can back down and adjust your techniques as needed. But it’s important to know how far you can take things so that you have the knowledge to tweak variables as needed. I may push some limits on cheese and sauce amounts, just to see how much of each make for a great-tasting pie.

Bar Pizza Notes

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Wow. Di Fara is opening a take-out restaurant to serve its old, classic nonpizza menu items

2 Apr

Di Fara's old menu

At one time, Di Fara served nonpizza menu items, including seafood, veal and chicken dishes, and all manner of baked spaghetti and zitis. This photo is from January 1, 2004.

This is pretty big, and not really pizza, but still: big news. From the Di Fara Facebook page:

[Di Fara Pizza] is happy to announce that several doors down we will be opening a tiny take out place offering all our old menu items that so many have been missing. We will have pasta, heros, salad and more. We expect to open mid April. All our products will use the finest and freshest ingredients as we always do at Difara….please, no questions at this time…Will update as we see fit! Thank you….Happy April!

Continue reading →

Bar pies: Third time’s a charm

1 Apr

trio of pizzas from Colony Grill

A trio of pizzas from Stamford, Connecticut’s Colony Grill. Clockwise from left: a hot oil pie, one with canned mushrooms, one with locally made sausage.

I don’t have all that much to say about my third attempt at bar pizza (first two attempts here) except that I’m getting closer to what I want in a pizza. For visual comparison I give you my target pie: Colony Grill’s pub pizza. That’s a trio of the joint’s pies above. What follows are more pictures of Colony before I reveal my own creation. Let’s go! Continue reading →

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