It's worth taking the time to really enjoy this amazing recounting of an effort to duplicate the recipe for Patsy's pizza. It's great for a few reasons: Good food is always worth taking the time to explore, chronicles of geeky obsessiveness are what the web was created for, and of course the history of New York Pizza is a source of endless fascination.
The part that really got me, though, was how much of the quality of a pizza was determined by the yeast cultures used in the dough. Jeff covers this well:
There are lots of kinds of yeast in the air in your kitchen right now and one of them will set up shop eventually in your flour water and begin growing. What will it taste like? Well, it's like setting a trap for an animal and waiting for dinner. It could be a pheasant. It could be a rat. You have no way of knowing. Do yourself a favor and skip this part and just buy or obtain a known high quality starter...
I've seen many bogus things about the use of starters. A classic is that you can start a wild culture by setting out some flour, water and baker's yeast and the baker's yeast will 'attract' other yeasts. This is alchemy. It's like saying I put out dandelions and they attracted peaches. It makes no sense. Another myth is that you can get the same flavor out of packaged yeast as you can out of a sourdough culture if you handle it right. This is also alchemy. Can you get parsley to taste like thyme if you handle it right? These are distinct organism, like spices, that all have a different flavor. If you use a starter, and you should, then learn from Ed Wood.
The Ed Wood that he refers to is Dr. Edward Wood, a pathologist who realized while working in Saudi Arabia that he wanted to master the history and variety of sourdough yeasts that people all over the world use to make dough. sourdo.com is the home for his book, a source for buying starter cultures, and a fascinating testament to his passion for a subject most would consider arcane.
I've been trying to master a good New York-style pizza at home for years. It's been steadily improving, but still nowhere near the level of even the average brick-oven place in the city. So what did I take away from the recipe? The key to getting good results is understanding the importance of the variety of cultures available.
And naturally, I was going to send the link to Adam for Slice last night, but this morning it was already up on the site. That guy knows his stuff, too.
Rats! When you said "Ed Wood" I was hoping you were about to take a U-turn into the pizza-making talents of cross-dressing Z-movie directors.
I've been baking sourdough for about 15 years now, and my aha moment came while reading "The Bread Baker's Apprentice". The science made a huge difference. However, I will say my attempt at sourdough chocolate cake was a total bust -- my daughter said, "why would you want to ruin chocolate w/ sourdough?!!!" :)
My Japanese grandmother made these great pickled vegetables. Long, skinny Japanese cucumbers, eggplant, carrots, and radish - it was the cucumbers I liked best and the secret was in the culture she would use to pickle the veggies overnight. The taste was amazing and, as with your NYC pizza, I've never had pickles quite like those my grandmother made.
The culture has to be "fed" every now and then to keep it alive. I don't know the details around this but I remember that my mom's culture (which she "forked" off my grandmother's strain) died once and she made a special trip to my grandmother's to get some more. I think my mother once told me that my grandmother's culture has been in the family for a couple generations - a living organism that's been keeping the family in pickles through the years.
I've been enjoying Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential" as my, uhhh, privvy reading. By turns hilarious and disgusting, edifying and titillating. One chapter has a maniac bread maker (Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown). He calls into the kitchen, bleary from drink and coke, instructing Tony to "feed the bitch." That being the enormous starter blob that Adam keeps alive in the kitchen.
I suppose the idea of having some weird science experiment in the back of the fridge appealed to the kid in me, and I've been doing some research on starter cultures, which brought me to sourdo.com. The idea of just rolling out some pizza dough from starter sounds fun, since I also enjoy cooking.
I was wondering if anyone had any comments on the cultures from sourdo, or if there were other good sources... Plus any general tips are welcome. Graci!