Modernist Pizza

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We have been going through Modernist Pizza for a couple of months, and we love it. As pizza enthusiasts, as we are, we couldn't have found a better book for our passion. Cook the pizza until the crust turns brown and blisters, 2–4 minutes. Some of the larger bubbles should look almost burnt. A well-cooked pizza has scorched blisters on the bottom of the crust—although, pizza can also be delicious without a blistered crust. If you don’t see any blisters, your cooking surface is not hot enough. This is another reason why we recommend using our baking steel. A pizza in a wood-fired oven. All photographs by Nathan Myhrvold / The Cooking Lab, LLC. The surprising history of pizza The first Italian recipe for Pizza alla Napoletana came in 1904. There were two variations: one topped with anchovies and oil; the other with Swiss Cheese and oil. In 1911, a later Italian recipe came with more conventional toppings of anchovies, mozzarella and tomatoes. If I could fault it for one thing, I guess I’d say that I wish it showed more “failures” of experiments and intermediate results. For example, they tried varying olive oil in the NY style recipe presumably, show us and tell us about 1 vs 2 vs 5 percent, etc.

This is composed of their standard thin-crust pizza dough (today's was cold-proofed for a couple of hours then allowed to come to room temp before baking), their Thin-Crust Pizza Tomato Sauce (100% crushed tomatoes, 25% tomato puree, 1% dried oregano, 1.25% salt), low-moisture mozzarella, and Italian sausage (they provide a recipe, but I used a commercial product).In 1936 the second American recipe appeared, in an English edition of the Specialita Culinarie Italiane cookbook. It called for raised dough, tomatoes, olive oil, Parmesan cheese and ‘scamozza’ (perhaps a misspelling of scamorza, the southern Italian cow cheese.) We’ve loved making this book. First and foremost because pizza is undeniably delicious. Pizza was a compelling topic for us for a number of reasons. It’s multicultural, found in virtually every country around the world, and yet wherever pizza goes, it mutates and evolves into something local. Pizza is simultaneously the evolution of a 19th-century dish from Naples and a window into the culinary creativity of the people who modified the original pizzas into the many local styles we enjoy today. Over the last months, we have been making some of the 1000 recipes variations you can find in this collection. There are plenty of options to choose from traditional pizzas like Neapolitan Margherita and new twists on cult classics such as a Hawaiian pizza with Kalua pork. In Japan, there’s an emergence of Tokyo-style marinara, a 50/50 ratio of tomato sauce to olive oil, but what seems to be most important there, is the experience, or as they call it: ometanashi.

Nathan Myhrvold, founder of The Cooking Lab, has had a passion for science, cooking, and photography since he was a boy. By the age of 13, Nathan had already cooked the family Thanksgiving feast and transformed the household bathroom into a darkroom. In 1927, the Saturday Evening Post published America’s first pizza recipe. Its author, George Rector, included it in his Cook’s Tour column, describing the pizza as “part of a typical Tuscan meal.” Again, the toppings were tomatoes, anchovies, mozzarella and olive oil. We distilled our findings into three volumes. In the first volume, we share the history of pizza, the world of pizza at large, plus fundamentals to making pizza such as the ingredients that go into the dough and the role of heat in the pizza-making process. The chapters in volume 2 provide a comprehensive look at all the components of pizza—dough, sauce, cheese, and toppings—and present foundational recipes upon which the majority of our pizzas are built. The third and final volume is dedicated to both classic and innovative recipes for every pizza style we cover, including al taglio, Argentinean, bar/tavern, Brazilian thin-crust, deep-dish, Detroit, grandma/New York Square/Sicilian, Neapolitan, New York, New Haven, Old Forge, pizza fritta, and pizza gourmet. Volume 3 is also where you’ll find inventive flavor and topping combinations to help inspire your own pizza exploration. Guides to Top Pizza Destinations This is the La Quercia pepperoni -- it's a very thinly-sliced product, so by weight that's really not much pepperoni.Countless times during our research, we were asked where the best pizza can be found. (We aren’t shy about suggesting there are several pizzerias in Naples that would immediately deserve one, two, and even three Michelin stars.) Ultimately, we hope that our travel chapter will be a good starting point for mapping out your own pizza journey to help answer that question for yourself. More Pizza on the Horizon Volume 2: Techniques and Ingredients ("detailed information about pizza-making techniques and the fundamental components of pizza: dough, sauce, cheese, and toppings.") Each gorgeously illustrated chapter examines a different aspect of pizza, from its history and top travel destinations to dough, sauce, cheese, toppings, equipment, and more. Housed in a red stainless-steel case, Modernist Pizza contains over 1,000 traditional and avant-garde recipes to make pizza from around the globe, each carefully developed with both professional and home pizzaioli in mind. They still go rather deep into certain rabbit holes, and end up making their own imitated buffalo mozzarella, with cow's milk and cream (or mascarpone) to make an extra-creamy cows milk mozzarella, that they claim is just as luscious as buffalo mozzarella. I'm not sure I'm prepared to go that far, but it's interesting to read about.

Volume 3: Recipes ("foundational recipes for every pizza style in the book with both iconic pizzas and pizzas with innovative flavor themes. It wraps up with information on how to serve and store pizza.")The Modernist recipe for Artisan Pizza Dough is the one that Michael has been using and that we’ve been loving. As with everything that the Modernist team does, the directions are exact and there are notes. Just when you wonder about something, they’re there with an explanation. I love this about their recipes. It looked to me like it was going to be pretty low on sauce (and it is) but the proportion actually worked great on the finished pizza, so I guess one point to MP. The dough can be shaped a number of ways, I rolled mine:

consistently, plus lots of skill and attention. If you’re a pizza fan, even if you have no intention of making pizza, this book will describe your favorite food in an incredible way. If you hanker to make pizza at home or are even slightly intrigued, we encourage you to take the plunge. As his career developed, he still found time to explore the culinary world and photography. While working directly for Bill Gates as the first chief technology officer at Microsoft, Nathan was part of the team that won the Memphis World Championship Barbecue contest; he worked as a stagier at Chef Thierry Rautureau's restaurant Rover's, in Seattle; he then took a leave of absence to earn his culinary diploma from École de Cuisine La Varenne, in France. Myhrvold holds a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics as well as a master's degree in economics from Princeton University. He holds additional master's degrees in geophysics and space physics and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles. At Cambridge University, Myhrvold did postdoctoral work with Stephen Hawking in cosmology, quantum field theory in curved space-time, and quantum theories of gravitation, all before starting a software company that would be acquired by Microsoft. Season the pie with fresh basil, chili flakes, salt, and olive oil. Don’t forget to season the very edge of the crust, and give it a little drizzle of oil, too. Serve the pizza immediately. Michael says: With regular unbleached flour and our old but trusty KitchenAid K5A, it takes almost 30 minutes for the dough to pass the windowpane test.We’ll start with a trip to South America, by way of Argentina and Brazil … No, we’re not doing this alphabetically, but rather, chronologically. The first pizzas sold in Buenos Aires were by Don Agustin Banchero, at his bakery Olivarria in 1893, who, surprisingly, was a Genoan immigrant, not Neapolitan. Banchero, the standalone pizzeria, wasn’t opened until the 1930s in the La Boca port area.