New York-style Pizza
If you're looking for the latest and greatest, super in-depth testing of New York-style pizza, this post is not that. My need to make NY-style pizza was not born from an obsession of getting every detail just right, but instead, a need to feed 40 or so folks pizza at once. Since NY-style pizza is actually at its best after its been reheated, the ability to cook a massive amount of pies ahead of time and being able to easily toss some slices back in the oven to quickly reheat as needed was key to my success. It also presented a new challenge for me because I most commonly use my KettlePizza to cook pies at a blazing hot 900°F, but NY-style pizza calls for a cooler temperature of around 600°F in order for it to come out right. While this write-up in not the one-stop shop for everything about NY-style pizza, it is a great read for anyone anyone trying to replicate the conditions I was cooking in because they were pretty unique, and the pizzas ended up being pretty damn awesome.
Since pizza baking isn't a primary area of concentration of mine, whenever I need to do it, I rely on some trusted resources. To get me started with NY-style pizzas dough, I took a combination of the baker's percentages from Sip & Feast and Serious Eats' method for making the dough which had me using the food processor to quickly get things started. I tried to make enough dough for four pies in each batch, which ended up being a bit too much for my 14-cup food processor as the motor began to struggle once the dough came together.
This just meant a little extra hand-kneading though to first get the initial dough ball into shape. then kneading once again after I split the dough into the four portions for individual pies. Once I had each batch of dough done, I placed the balls in covered containers and placed those in the fridge for a few days to cold ferment. It's during this time that the dough develops its flavor, so at minimum you want to let your dough sit in the fridge for a day, but three or four days is even better.
I've always used cooked sauce for my pies, and that was my plan again until I started to realize that uncooked sauce is much more common in New York pizza shops. I've never done an uncooked sauce before, so I bought a few different cans of tomatoes and found that a couple were so watery that the tomatoes had to be drained to get a sauce thick enough. I used my immersion blender to puree the tomatoes, and after that the sauce creation merely was adding sugar, oregano, and salt.
My plan was to make fifteen pies total, so I prepped a variety of different ingredients beforehand from sweet Italian sausage to sautéed mushrooms, and the always required pepperoni. I highly recommend buying whole pepperoni sticks and slicing the sausage yourself because, in my experience, the pepperoni sticks have a much deeper and better flavor and then you also get that cupping action due to the natural casing.
Beyond trying to cook so many pizzas in a short amount of time, my biggest challenge of the day was how to set-up the KettlePizza for lower heat cooking than I'm used to. I began by dumping out one lit chimney of charcoal in a crescent shape along the coal grate, then topping that with another chimney worth of unlit charcoal. I then set the KettlePizza with the stone in place and put my baking steel on the top rack above the stone and waited for the coals to be all lit. About 30 minutes or so later, the oven was at 650°F and I got to pizza making.
I had removed the dough from the fridge a couple hours prior, so it was pliable enough to stretch easily by rotating it in my hands, allowing gravity to stretch it out, then doing a final stretch into as round of a shape as I could manage once the dough was on a lightly floured cutting board. I was hoping to make roughly fourteen-inch pies, but each piece of dough ended up only stretching to a little under thirteen inches. After stretching, I applied a sauce layer and cheese combo of low-moisture mozzarella (I used Polly-O) and a sprinkling of Pecorino Romano.
I'm not good at launching pizzas, so I use the Super Peel to get them into the oven in one piece and in shape. Once there, I kept a close eye on cooking because the pies needed to be turned regularly for even cooking since the heat is concentrated mainly in the back on a KettlePIzza. Even with doing that, I was still able to make the next pie while the current one cooked, which took between five to six minutes at first, then a little longer once the fire started to lose some steam. After eight pies, the temp dipped below 500°F and I had to refuel in order to keep going.
I was so focused on massive pie production that I forgot to take even a single photo of a whole pie after being cooked, and I eventually had fifteen sitting around in any place I could fit a pizza. It was only once my friends arrived that I sliced each pie into six pieces and then started to stick those pieces back into the KettlePizza that I had gotten back up to 600*F. It took a couple minutes for the cheese to melt again and for the crust to crisp up, but once that was done, these tasted like true New York pizza, just with slices significantly smaller than what you get from a slice shop.
No slice was as perfect as the white slice, which tasted exactly how I remember the white slices tasting during my eighteen years living in the city. I loved it so much that I'm going to write a separate post as an ode to it. All the pizzas were pretty great though, with a sauce and cheese flavor that you would expect, and the crust was spot on. It got perfect crisp during the reheat with the right amount of browning on the bottom. The edges had a ton of flavor, and while some pies got a little char, which is not a stamp of NY-style pizza, those were the most delicious slices in my opinion. Now that I have tried my hand successfully at New York pies on the KettlePIzza, it's definitely going into my repertoire because it solves my biggest qualm of pizza production—I"m always stuck by the grill having to assemble and cook all the pies while everyone else is eating, but with NY-pizza, I was able to eat alongside everyone else.
