(upbeat music)
- The style of pizza that I make is rooted in Neapolitan,
but it definitely has evolved over 27 years.
I started making pizza when I was 15 and I'm 51.
This is a life's work.
(upbeat music)
I've used a lot of different flours.
Today we're going to use some of this flour
from north of Italy.
I'm constantly changing my techniques.
The idea's set on where I'm trying to go,
but the recipe is changing, the flour percentage mixtures.
I mix a lot of different flours every day.
So here's the mother, the madre.
I have a starter, a mother in Italian, it's called a madre,
and that's just flour and water.
And we refresh that every 12 hours.
This is what's going to make the flour-water become pizza.
This is what helps raise it.
You can see it's super healthy.
Look at that dough structure in there.
Those starters evolve into becoming wherever they live.
It's alive and it's always changing.
Now it's starting to settle, so we're losing it.
You can see it's kinda now sticking together.
Now that we've gone into it, we made it collapse.
So this needs to be refreshed for tomorrow.
This is going to go in the dough.
This is going to get mixed throughout the raw flour
and then we're going to add water.
And those three things together will start to spread around
and create the gluten.
Right now, all we've been using
is New York tap water, unfiltered.
The water's important,
but it's also a little bit of a myth where people are like,
"Oh New York bagels."
All this, all that.
There's so many other components.
The water is definitely a part of it,
but it's only one part of it.
This is Sicilian sea salt.
It's the only salt that I've been using for 27 years.
If you add this in the beginning of the dough,
it doesn't come out the same way.
The secret is to add more water
in like the last five minutes of the mix.
For many years, no pizza makers were doing this.
This is rooted in ancient French bread-baking techniques.
I spent like my youth
reading every single book I could about baking,
and there weren't really any great books
about pizza-making then,
so I was reading books about bread-baking
and French bread baking and Italian bread-baking,
creating my own techniques
on what I thought would make the most awesome dough.
Look at how wet this dough is.
Look at this.
Using dough this hydrated and then not putting it
in a refrigerator really makes it very sticky.
It's very temperamental, but I think when it works,
that's where some of the magic lies in what we do here.
I started trying to make naturally leavened bread and dough
since the beginning,
like when I was like, you know, probably 12 or 13 years old.
I had been going to Naples with my family,
I fell in love with it.
It's where my family's from.
I had never tasted anything like it in America
because the ones in Naples were so different in taste
that I just was like,
"Oh my god, I have to figure out a way to make this."
(exciting music)
I've had this same scale since I started.
Yeah, it's like duct-taped together.
And now I'm cutting and weighing it.
I just started to go to Italy and just be obsessed with it,
with every detail.
And I grew up in an era where there was no internet,
and so there was no, everything you wanted to learn,
you had to read and you had to research.
I used to have all these photographs on my wall.
So me with like my mom, like you know,
with like different pizza makers in Naples.
People were like, secretive about stuff
and that also is something that turned me on about it.
You know?
I don't know.
I just started slowly becoming like obsessed
with baking all day, all night at home
and eating bread like a maniac.
So this is the folding.
It's another old kind of baking technique,
where you fold the dough over
to kind of stall it for a second
before I go back in and ball them into the actual shape.
(gentle music)
It's easy to make one good pizza,
but do it day after day, year after year.
I mean, I still make every single dough ball
in the restaurant, 27 years of being in business.
Every day it's slightly different.
You constantly have to be aware
and paying attention to what it needs.
They need different things to still come out good
and sort of be consistent from when we started to the end.
So it's muscle memory,
but it's also really being present and being aware.
I think what's so intimate about making pizza
is that every day you can just like do one little thing
and you have a completely different product.
To get to be in a place where you understand those micros
that go from "this is a good pizza" to "this is magic"
is years and years of work.
So these guys we're going to let live somewhere
to raise for us.
After we dump out what we need
to make the pizza for the evening,
we leave some mother starter left.
Now I'm going to refresh that with more flour and water.
Right now it's on a cycle of about every 12 hours.
And then I'm going to add some fresh water.
And I'm going to break up the mother that's in there.
You see, there it is there.
This is like partially what's going to give,
like, everybody their own, you know,
beautiful unique taste to their product.
The natural sugar that's in wheat and the protein
and then the water is the catalyst
that kinda makes it all come together and work.
Now it's going to sit here at room temp for about 12 hours.
Here it is.
And then in 12 hours it'll hopefully be here.
Maybe not, and then we have a problem.
You never really know.
There is an element to this that's always kinda like,
"Dear God, I hope it works."
All the old bread when they would have it proofing,
they would cut the cross in it with a razor blade.
That was to let the gas escape,
but also they did it in the sign of the cross for good luck.
So I'm definitely superstitious.
I mean, you know, I got it all over the place.
Anything we can do for a little good luck.
(upbeat music)
We just got our buffalo mozzarella for the week.
We're the biggest purchaser
of buffalo mozzarella in the whole city.
I've been using this mozzarella
from this family outside of Naples for 25 years.
For me, on pizza, the way that buffalo mozzarella melts
and the flavor profile is second to none.
If all we have on a pizza is tomatoes, basil,
garlic and mozzarella and olive oil,
all of them need to be as good as they can be.
You're going to see if there's a weak link in that mix.
The base sauce that we use, we use San Marzano from a can.
There's a flavor that only is found grown in San Marzano.
It's not overly sweet, it's more acidic.
We drain all of our San Marzanos.
I only want to use the tomato.
This brand, Casa Marrazzo,
the area that they can grow these tomatoes in is so small,
just south of Naples.
The ground there is very rich because of the volcanic soil
from Vesuvius and they also don't over-water the product.
Some of the reasons why the tomato
has such an incredible flavor.
And then we take the ends off.
And it's just another step
to try to make things as good as we can.
How do we get this tomato to be as close
to a fresh summer taste experience as possible?
This is all you need to do.
You just drain them, cut the ends off and go like this.
And here's your tomato sauce for pizza.
The less that things are manipulated, the better they taste.
(upbeat music)
This oven is made in Naples, they're handmade.
This is called an Acunto.
Every little inch inside that oven
makes the pizza cook differently.
You see the interior is all white?
Tomorrow when we start the oven back up,
as soon as we start the oven,
it's going to get covered in soot.
So then what you do is you fire the oven
until the interior is white.
Once it burns all the soot off,
then you know that it's hot enough to cook in.
That was like a really, really ancient technique.
That's how you would do it
'cause they didn't have thermostats.
So then we keep the fire going in the center like that.
And then little by little we move it over.
We always have the fire on the left side.
These ovens were designed basically like you know,
over 2000 years ago, and they still are,
like there's nothing to change on them.
They're perfect.
What we're using at Una right now is,
I would say 70% oak,
and the rest is a mix of birch, apple, cherry, maple.
The wood doesn't really add that much flavor to it
because the flame and the smoke kinda circulate like this,
which is what you want it to do,
but it always stays like this high above the floor.
It's not like we're smoking it.
The main thing for me with the wood choice
is finding wood that burns really good.
As years have gone on and the dough gets more hydration,
I have to cook it a little bit slower each time.
(cheerful music)
Here's the dough.
How much bigger these have gotten.
Very delicate to work with.
You see?
Oh my god, these are so light.
This dough today that we made is super,
super easy to open and super loose.
I mean, look at that.
It's basically raising and adjusting itself
as it's sitting there before I even top it.
I'm going to make us some Margherita.
So we're using those San Marzano tomatoes.
We like to have everything equally balanced
and every flavor to come through.
And then some course sea salt.
Some fresh basil.
Olive oil.
(cheerful music)
So this is the shavings.
Something that's very, very actually traditional,
only in the city of Naples.
You don't want to like, add wood every time you bake pizza
because then you're going to overheat the oven.
It gives a big burst of temperature, a big burst of flame,
but it's only for a few seconds.
Making pizza the way we do it
is such a fleeting moment of happiness and perfection.
And the more you do it,
the more you're aware of all the imperfections in it.
And so there's this constant,
like, the next shot is going to be maybe the one
that's like going to make me feel like, "Woo, we did it."
Pushing it too far and then we end up with a dough
that's too wet or it's ripping
or it's baking wrong because it's so hydrated.
But when it works and it comes out the way it should,
I think that's what creates the special taste
that we have here.
(upbeat music)
There's the crust.
Look at the inside.
It's a good one today.
So this time we'll do a Filetti,
another one of our pizzas that we've been doing for years.
This one is buffalo mozzarella,
fresh garlic,
our house olive oil.
And there it goes.
(upbeat music)
It's very rhythmic, making pizza.
The micro adjustments that make it magical are all rhythmic.
Just these tiny, tiny little things
that go from being okay to great.
The only way there's oxygen going into this baking area
is through this little mouth opening.
Occasionally going like this
keeps pushing up the fire a little bit.
You're like, forcing air underneath the wood
and you're getting it to light up more.
The balance that we're always looking for
is to not overheat the oven, but ride right at that line.
We need the floor to be hot, we need the air to be hot,
we need the wall to be hot,
and we need an actual flame burning,
which puts some of the char marks around the dough.
So it's just this constant,
like, variation that we're riding through.
This is the one that I love probably the most
and it's the Cosacca,
the one that allows the beauty of the tomato and the dough
to come through.
A nice amount of sauce.
This spoon was my grandmother's
and every single pizza that I've made since I'm 15 years old
has been made with this spoon.
Some coarse sea salt and fresh basil.
I've been making dough throughout every part of my life.
I've been married, divorced,
had a child, both parents passed away,
and the one consistency through that life to this point
is that every week you know where I'll be.
This is where I feel my best and what my purpose in life is.
So this one just gets Pecorino Romano.
This is my favorite pizza.
This is what I would feed a newborn baby or myself,
which I'm kind of like a baby.
My goal is not to open 10 restaurants.
My goal is to have one restaurant
and keep making it better and better and better.
If you spend 30 years of your life doing something,
you're going to start to find your own voice within that.
It's like a real gift in a sense
to be like, doing the same work for 30 years and be like,
"This is so exciting.
I can't wait to try to make today better."
'Cause I'm not stopping.
I'm going to keep fighting to be good 'til I drop dead.
(gentle music)