Friday Pizza Box 7/16/21
Pepperocinio (sic) Edition
It’s been awhile since we’ve done a Friday pizza box here at Wordloaf, but I’ve got a backlog of cheesy links for ya this week.
But first (and relatedly), I wanted to share this email from a reader, which I hope they will not mind I share, and which made my day when I opened it:
I just wanted to thank you for this recipe.
I’ve been using it for months now and continue to try A/B blind taste test with other dough recipes (mostly from Pizza Camp and Elements of Pizza books). And this one continues to beat out the others. Most recently it beat out a 100% biga dough which I thought for sure would have more flavor, but nope, everyone still loves this one (with 48-72 hour cold ferment) It’s perfectly airy, able to be stretches thin without breaking, and great flavor.
I cook using a stone on a gas grill that gets to 600-700 degrees and it comes out great every time.
Thank you for sharing it and all your recipes!
Just goes to show you that testing a recipe several thousand times means it is bound to be good.
It’s also been ages since I’ve shared some pizza content here, and I wanted to tell you all that I’ve got a stack of recipes and posts in the works, and not only because I recently came into possession of one of these:
Pizza for Everyone
The Takeout contributor John Carruthers—who once famously electrocuted hot dogs for science—started a program called Crust Fund Pizza, where friends and other lucky Chicago folks get to get grab one of his homemade tavern pizzas in exchange for a donation to a worthy local cause. Because the number of pies he can make is limited, he’s decided to create a spiral-bound “church cookbook” of recipes for those who can’t manage to snag one but still want to contribute:
Originally, the book was only going to be available locally, but since I and others pestered him to offer it to the rest of the world, he’s now created a Kickstarter to drum up enough sales to make it worthwhile.
-> The Takeout’s Pizzadad wrote the book on pizza
-> Kickstarter: Pizza for Everyone
If you pay them they will come
So you hear all sorts of talk about how nobody wants to work anymore, now that we can all laze around at home in our underwear, cashing those good good government checks. As it turns out, that might not be the real reason people aren’t jumping to get back into the workforce just yet (never mind that there’s still a pandemic going around):
Business owners say they're struggling to find staff. Not so the CEO of &pizza, a restaurant chain in Washington, DC, who claims that he's been bombarded with job applications.
Michael Lastoria told Insider that business was booming at the pizza chain's 51 locations and all were fully staffed. He said that the secret was paying staff a proper wage.
Who knew that offering people enough money to pay for food and housing and stuff means they’ll want to work for you?
Keep it real you glorious bastards.
As someone who loves peppers in all forms except for green bell, I am in sympathy with this gentleman, whose recent pizzeria order has gone viral over on Reddit’s r/MadeMeSmile:
I have only one beef with this request: Banana peppers and pepperoncinis are not the same thing, though both are delightful on pizza. (And he does have a point about the easy pepperoncinipepperoni mix-up.)
-> Ayyyyyyye we got the pepperocinio guy again!!!!!!!
That’s it for this week’s pizza box. I hope you all have a peaceful/pizzaful weekend.
—Andrew
Yay for the Ooni!! We’ve been trying to perfect our pizza on it for a while now. Your bar pizza class helped a lot and I think we *almost* have it down. The problem we have is that myself and my children don’t like charred pizza crust, which is where the Ooni shines.
At this point my husband bakes the pizzas in the Ooni until it looks like how we want it, then he finishes it in the grill. That allows the bottom to really get nice and brown.
I’m very interested to hear how your tests come out!
Completely agree with the reader comment! Your NY style pizza crust recipe is the best. I’ve been making it for months now (since I was able to get my hands on some King Arthur high gluten flour from the bakers supply shop you pointed me to). I’ve been back there a few times to pick up 10 lb bags of that flour and I just keep flying through them making this pizza crust and your NY bagel recipe you have on ATK. My 14 year old nephew who’s obsessed with pizza says it’s the best pizza he’s had (i use my own sauce and cheese blend). Says it’s better than the pizza shops and I should open my own. Also tells his mom (my sister) about it, and when she offers to make pizza at home, he says “don’t bother, it won’t be as good” 😂 . I switched it up last week and made a Neapolitan pizza, which I haven’t done since I started making your NY crust recipe, with some King Arthur 00 flour. Still good, but yours is better!
P.S. loved that post about the peperoncini guy