Friday Pizza Box 1/27/23

Department of corrections

One of John Carruthers’ tavern-style dough balls, ready for deep sleep

Welcome to the Wordloaf Pie January Friday Pizza Box, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to pizza.

But before we dig into this week’s slices, I need to mention something about the tavern-style pizza recipe from John Carruthers that I published the other day: A small but important set of details was left out and has now been corrected, which is that the dough balls get put into the fridge once shaped and container-ed. And once it comes time to roll them out, the containers are left to sit on the counter for 2 to 3 hours to warm up first. Sorry about that, hope nobody has had doughs sitting out on the counter, overproofing all this time.

And now, the news:

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Bay watch

Wanted to alert my NorCal readers about this excellent SF Chronicle roundup of the Bay Area’s best pizza joints, and to make the rest of us jealous of the bounty of options they have. I especially liked this bit of detail on how to find Freewheel Pizza Co., a place I’d very much like to arrive at someday:

Located in a Clayton shopping center in a nondescript building behind a Safeway, Freewheel can be a bit of a challenge to find (its website instructs: “Go to Sherwin Williams make a left, we are at the end of the alley”). But know that your reward will be outstanding pizza. The low-key operation makes just 40 pies a day — styles span New York, grandma and Detroit — and only accepts online orders.

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Benjamin Harnett @benharnett

It’s a Utica thing…

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Deep dive

Photo credit: Brian Erst

It was news to me, but my friend Dennis Lee, of Food is Stupid fame (who just DEEP FRIED a black truffle), also has a newsletter about the Chicago food scene, apropos-ly named The Party Cut. And this week he published an excellent guest piece by Brian Erst, all about deep dish pizza:

The controversy outside the city is whether deep dish pizza is even pizza.  John Stewart and millions of New Yorkers dismissively call it a casserole. Eating pizza with a fork and knife is so déclassé that they universally mocked their own mayor when he did so.

The controversy inside the city is over which of the indigenous styles of pizza in Chicago deserves the term “Chicago style.” Chicago has at least five separate styles of pizza invented or popularized here (deep dish, deep pan with caramelized cheese, stuffed, thin crust, and double decker) and each has its own partisans. But the big, knockdown fights are between the thin crust aficionados and the deep dish lovers.

Take a (short) road trip for some deep dish

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Nate Wolff @proffwolff

I'm sure there's a way to teach the concept of literary genre without asking students if or if not increasingly upsetting things are "pizza" but I'm not interested in them.

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Pizza the hut

Jonathan Surratt, at the excellent sandwich blog Bounded by Buns (which I surely have already plugged here in the past), is spending all of January focusing on melty sandwichy things, a project he is calling Meltuary. This week he wrote all about Pizza Hut Melts, a hybrid between pizza and quesadillas:

A Pizza Hut Melt is very similar to a quesadilla but instead of using a flat flour tortilla, it’s using a yeast-leavened flatbread like naan, pita bread or more specifically a thin pizza crust. I don’t have inside knowledge, but the official Pizza Hut Melts are almost certainly Pizza Hut’s Thin ‘N Crispy pizza dough cut in half for each melt.

It’s thin crust, but it’s thicker and crunchier than a tortilla typically used in a quesadilla. Each Pizza Hut Melt is stuffed with toppings—now fillings—and mozzarella cheese.

As Jonathan mentions, the PHM is one of those things that ends up being better in theory than in practice, which is why he also included a recipe for a homemade version that actually lives up to its promise.

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That’s it for this week’s pizza box. May you all have a peaceful/pizzaful weekend.

—Andrew