- We're here at Ops in Bushwick, with our good bud Mike.
We're gonna make some pizzas today.
- We're here because, A, we love pizza,
and specifically your pizza,
and second, because not all meat goes well on pizzas.
How can you use meat where it's not the center of the plate,
but it's actually part of something larger?
- That's what we're always thinking about is
how to get something finished that's like,
totally-balanced and hitting all these little things.
We want fat, acidity, not too dry.
We do a square pie, that's a little bit of a thicker dough.
Maybe like a Neapolitan-style dough that's super thin.
- Brent, would you like to show us
what we have brought today?
(mimics angel noise)
- Our smoked jowl bacon.
Guanciale, fennel, and garlic sausage.
Pepperoni!
- Man, you crushed it.
- Capicola, mortadella, lamb bacon,
and our porchetta di testa.
- So you essentially have the jowl bacon right there,
but then you have like, the ear,
the tongue right there, the cheek.
It's the whole head,
de-boned, seasoned, rolled, and then cooked.
- I guess let's just think about, you know,
how these things are gonna go together.
The fat, the spice.
How we're gonna balance that
with other ingredients on the pizza.
- I think we should do pepperoni pizza as our baseline.
It's delicious, and I wanna eat it.
- I'm pretty excited to also just do a lamb bacon.
It's not everyday you see lamb bacon.
I've never even heard of it going on a pizza.
I've never heard of lamb really on a pizza before.
- Well, it's a strong flavor, it's like,
when you taste lamb, it's like, that's lamb.
That's only lamb.
- How long does it take to cook your Neapolitan-style pie?
- Two minutes.
- So I think we should probably do these really, really thin
to make sure they crisp up and really cook.
- You know, the main difference between our pizza dough
and most other pizza doughs is that we don't use yeast.
We use a starter culture
that we feed and kind of develop here,
so you just have to be a little more delicate
than we usually would be with pizza dough.
We start the dough-making process around 3PM the day before,
and then we are open at 5PM the next day.
- [Ben] Do you find a taste difference or a benefit,
structural benefit,
to letting it go longer than that eight hours?
- Again, it's more of, like, a stability issue.
We want it to be really good at 5PM and still really good
at midnight, when we're still open.
We got sauce on there, I've got a cheese here,
we call mozzarella.
- Ooh. You heard of that?
- No. What is it?
- I just thought it tasted so good on pizza.
I thought we'd use it.
- Huh.
Why is pepperoni the ubiquitous meat topping?
I have no, I guess,
I feel like it's fatty.
Even a bad pepperoni is pretty good.
- Yeah, and you can find it anywhere.
Shimmy it off, pull back fast.
- What he's doing now is he's cookin' the pizza.
It's in the oven.
Just hanging out.
Whoa.
So what next?
- I'm super excited about the porchetta di testa,
'cause I feel like, kind of like pepperoni,
it's a thing that can merge the world of charcuterie
and pizza, and make something that's like,
better on a pizza than it would be on its own.
- [Mike] Di testa would be cool to make a white pizza.
We have this provolone.
And maybe mushrooms would be cool with it.
Would just go really well with the spice
and everything on the di testa.
A little fattiness, a little spice.
- I already don't like how this is going.
Mike! Fix it!
And then I took the pizza off of the peel.
- Whoa. Holy (bleep).
That looks amazing.
- I was thinking the lamb bacon might be cool
on a red pizza.
Onions, I think you mentioned.
- [Ben] Yeah.
- The onions which I think makes a lot of sense,
like the sweetness is gonna be really nice
to kind of offset the strong flavor of the lamb.
Maybe even some olives.
- [Ben] You're crazy.
- [Brent] I love olives. Let's do it.
- [Mike] I was thinking just cheese post on this one.
- [Ben And Brent] I like it.
- [Mike] I don't think anyone would complain
if there was cheese on it.
I just think it'd be cool to try without.
We're gonna use a little bit of olive oil.
It's gonna be really tasty.
- Shimmy and a shake!
(whistles)
- The lamb bacon just kind of, almost disintegrated
into the tomato.
That's great.
We're hungry!
Trying the pepperoni first.
- It's been sitting here for a while.
- Viewer, stop judging us.
- We had to make a couple more pizzas, but.
- Wow, that pepperoni has so much flavor.
- It's almost too much flavor I would say.
I think it'd need to be even thinner than that.
To like really, really blend in.
- I love our pepperoni but, (bleep) that's a lot of flavor.
- [Mike] So this is the porchetta di testa
white pie with mushrooms.
- That one I feel like the meat is more,
the cheese, the funkiness of the provolone that you used,
like really, really works well.
- That's great, that's balanced.
You taste all of the ingredients.
The fat is really round-tasting but works well
with the funky provolone.
- Yeah, it's interesting.
It's like, sometimes you don't wanna do like,
funk on funk on funk,
but like, sometimes it really works.
- Different funks can work together in harmony.
- So I thought maybe
the salami would disintegrate a little more,
but it really is staying true to character.
- [Ben] Alright, so we got lamb bacon, olive, onion, and,
what was the cheese?
- [Mike] Pecorino Romano. And tomato.
- Delicious, but I already think we could've done
more lamb.
- It could've maybe been a little thicker,
which might've given that, you know, more.
The olive has so much flavor to it.
- We still have all these meats over here.
We need to go gonezo and make a meat-lover's pie.
- I also feel like we should do a meat-lover's
how much is too much pizza.
- But we're thinking about making it kind of like a,
almost like a deli Italian combo too right?
- Yeah.
- So, I think capicola, mortadella.
- Can you Italian sub a pizza?
- Exactly.
- So this is the square pie.
As is traditional in New York with grandma pizzas like this,
the dough itself was pre-baked.
A little bit of wild oregano.
- You wouldn't put sausage on an Italian sub.
- But it will offer a different texture
than all of the sliced-up just layered.
That's true.
- That's true, Ben.
(laughs)
So we have right here mortadella.
- Great.
- Capicola.
- [Mike] This is the one I don't know what it's called.
- [Ben] Salami cotto! Salami cotto yeah!
- [Mike] So these three, plus we're gonna do pepperoni,
and we're gonna do sausage.
Is that right?
- [Ben] Oh man. Can you pitch it a little bit more?
- Yeah, like that.
- [Ben] No, not like that. Like that!
- You guys think we should put shredded lettuce on it?
- I actually do think.
- [Mike] Maybe some red wine vinegar, raw onion,
which we already have, dried oregano or anything like that.
[Ben] I'm gonna go ahead and call it,
that we are like, reinventing the wheel on square pies.
On meat-lover's pies.
- We've just been reinventing the wheel in general.
- Yeah.
- We just made the wheel a square... pie.
- [Ben] Went kinda heavy on the acid, because,
I don't know if you guys noticed,
but there are five meats on that pizza.
(wincing noises)
- [Brent] Yeah yeah yeah!
(jazzy music)
- [Brent] Holy (bleep) that's delicious.
- The salad really brings it all home.
- I thought it would be too much.
It's really not.
- [Mike] The meat stock is kind of awesome.
- It tastes like a fried Italian hoagie.
- If it's so many vegetables, like five vegetables,
or five meat items, they start diminishing each other
a little bit.
But these are actually doing really well,
and holding up together very well.
- And maybe the thicker the toppings,
the thicker the dough you wanna try to use.
- I didn't come here thinking, like,
let's put lettuce on a pizza,
but I'm really really happy we did.
- You should keep making pizza Mike.
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