New York-style White Pizza
I spent long hours in the darkroom as a photo major in college, and often eating was a practice of speed because getting back to developing was paramount. This made the closest pizza shop—the now defunct Pizza Mercato on Waverly—a top choice for students and it was pretty early on that I began to subside heavily on their white pie. I'm sure their white pie wasn't the greatest out there in NYC, but it's so cemented in my brain that their slice is the one I judge all others against. So I was really stoked when I decided to try out a white pizza at home and what came out of my KettlePizza very closely resembled exactly what I was used it.
I already covered my journey with NY-style pizza extensively in a previous post, so I'm going to gloss over a lot of the specifics here, but my process began with combining the dry dough ingredients in a food processor and pulsing. My dough recipe and method was combo of what I felt were the most two most in depth and trusted sources—Serious Eats and Sip & Feast.
After adding the water and oil and processing until the dough formed, I had to do some hand kneading to get it into a smooth ball. I then divided the dough into balls that I thought would be big enough for roughly 13-inch pies, and then kneaded again before placing them in containers and letting them cold ferment in the fridge for a few days.
There isn't much to a white pie—just mozzarella, pecorino, and ricotta—so each one of those needed to be just right for the pie to taste the way I wanted it to. For the cheese, I found a store that had low moisture whole milk Polly-O, which was a popular choice for pizzerias when I was in school. Similarly, I chose a low moisture whole milk ricotta, which isn't the type I tend to buy these days, but is definitely what adorned white pies. Then I used real pecorino romano because I wanted to make sure that, even when used sparingly, the flavor would come through.
After assembling the pie, I slid it into my KettlePizza that I had running at around 600°F at the time. I got this temperature by using only charcoal arranged in a crescent moon shape along the back of the charcoal grate and not adding any hardwood logs. Since the heat on the KettlePizza was concentrated toward the back, I had to watch the pie and turn it occasionally to make sure it cooked evenly, a process that took about 6 minutes total.
If you'd have NYC pizza before, you know that you're normally picking slices that are sitting out, which are then reheated once ordered. So the second cook seemed really important in my mind, and the crust wasn't effectively crisp until I placed the individual slices back into the oven and let them sit until the cheese was melty again.
Once done, you usually have an option of three self-service toppings—garlic power, oregano, and red pepper. I only take the red pepper, which is what I did here and once I took my first bite I ran over to my wife in excitement because it tasted exactly how I remembered that white slice from Pizza Mercato did. I pushed the white slices on my fellow ex-New Yorkers in the crowd because I wanted to gauge whether it was just me or not, and everyone seemed to find a lot of comfort in this particular slice over all others that day. If you haven't had a NY-style white slice before, it's worth trying out this simple, but delicious topping combo, and I feel confident this recipe will get you pretty close to the real deal.
