Lousy Beets

Thought I’d share some technical notes on product development at Apiece Apizza, for those interested.

Our primary flour at the pizzeria will be Laucke Euro, a medium-strength, roller-milled T-55. The closest American equivalent, performatively, would be either the Low-Gluten or Napoletana flours from Shepherd’s Grain in the Pacific Northwest, albeit with a much higher falling number. (Despite Laucke’s grain coming from “high rainfall” zones on the Australian mainland, it’s all relative. We correct for this by adding 0.5% freshly-milled malted barley flour to all our formulas.)

There isn’t an Australian equivalent of something like General Mills’ All Trumps (“the” flour traditionally used for tri-state-style pizza), either in terms of strength or milling quality. Even if there were, I don’t particularly like strong flours. Never have.

“Traditional” New York pizza dough is technically under-mixed, given about 10 minutes of low speed in a planetary mixer. (Planetary mixers rarely lead to adequate dough development. Their hook attachment has the wrong geometry and their bowl is fixed. Historically they were likely used due to their smaller footprint.)

Although a more-developed dough would be easier to stretch out, due to better aeration during fermentation, that’d be counterproductive to the principal aim of pizza made to order—maximising a dough’s use during service. There are several ways of extending the window for how long a dough can be ready.

Neapolitans traditionally solved this problem without the use of refrigeration. They did so by mixing less, and by using lower dough hydrations, high salt levels, and very little yeast*. Italian immigrants to the States brought pizza with them, where they faced new challenges, such as stronger flours and the lack of specialised beehive ovens normally used for pizza. So, they adapted, using what was around them.

The only available ovens at the time were those used for bread, over-sized and coal-fired. Leftover bread dough was used rather than making a specialised pizza dough. The size of pizza dough balls grew three times bigger, likely for two reasons. First, to bake better in the cavernous, drier bread ovens that had much greater thermal mass, and, second, for efficiency. (Bigger pizzas feed more people using less work.)

Refrigeration quickly became widely-available in a prosperous, post-war, industrial America, and pizzamakers in the tri-state area adapted their process using the technology. The rest is history: Italians became American, and so did their doughs.

Very little’s changed over three-quarters of a century. The average tri-state pizza is a no-nonsense, direct, yeasted formulation, with about 0.5% to 1% yeast, 2% salt, and 1% to 2% sugar and fat. Interestingly, despite stronger flour, similar hydrations to those found in Neapolitan pizza are used, 55% to 62%, probably owing to higher yeast and lower salt amounts.

It’s only in the past decade that younger pizzamakers have begun to explore what tri-state-style pizza can be, mostly by adopting techniques from bread baking. It started in New York City in 2016 with Scarr Pimental and in 2017 with L’Industrie Pizzeria. Neapolitan pizzaioli followed suit about five years later with their own contemporanea trend. (Note: There are always outliers. In the U.S., two such examples are Chris Bianco in Phoenix, Arizona, and Brian Spangler in Portland, Oregon.)

I’m focusing specifically on tri-state pizza, the large-format, thin-crust pies baked in bread ovens, often sold by the slice. (That’s what we’ll make at Apiece Apizza.)

Pimental, owner of the eponymous Scarr’s, uses a traditional New York pizza dough formula and process. However, he kickstarted this movement by focusing on ingredient sourcing and by freshly-milling (a portion) of his dough’s flour. L’Industrie, widely viewed as the best slice shop in New York City, went further, pulling widely from the baker’s bag of tricks: bassinage, complex flour blends, multiple preferment types, improved mixing method, and baking at a higher heat. What’s more, they also think like chefs in creative choice of toppings and how slices are topped and handled.

Today, we can divide these new-wave tri-state pizzerias into one of two camps based upon their bake profile.

The first group hews closer to tradition, opting for the more even, longer bake of old-school joints that used gas-fired deck ovens. The temperature range is (most often) between 290° to 315°C with power to the top and bottom elements set at about equal values (40% to 50%). Examples include Ceres, Lucia (after expansion), Scarr’s, Apizza Scholls, Garlic Breath, and many, many more. Depending upon the flour, recipe, and process, this bake results in a crust that’s bready, chewy, balanced, and potentially crispy.

The second camp opts for a hotter, top-down bake, using temperatures around 340°C and most of the power asymmetrically diverted to the top set of elements (70% to 100%) and almost none to the bottom (0% to 30%). Apiece Apizza belongs to this group. Examples of this style include F&F Pizzeria, L’Industrie, Scottie’s Pizza Parlour, and Philomena’s. In order to handle the more intense heat and shorter bake time, the dough used needs to be either hydrated and/or mixed more. Of these pizzerias, Apiece Apizza most resembles L’Industrie, using moderately high hydrations (65% to 70%) coupled with more in-bowl development.

It’s hard to find tri-state pizzerias that use sourdough as the sole leavening agent. (Some of the more famous shops claiming to do so are rumoured to also use yeast. I will not name names. One, Philomena’s, at least admits the use of yeast, despite being labeled as sourdough by popular media.) That’s understandable, since pizza dough that’s processed in a service environment must maximise a dough’s window of readiness. Contrast this with bread dough made in a production environment, where there’s only one time point that matters.

Bakers, given the know-how, can time dough to enter the oven at a planned peak of fermentation and rheology; in other words, flavour and texture can be maximised as needed. Pizzamakers don’t have that certainty; orders arrive when they arrive.

In production, bread targets some desired endpoint, whereas pizza manages a window. There’s no endpoint maximisation in a service environment, only kinetic control to hold a long, usable plateau that skimps on fermentation or rheology, or both, to keep a dough continually “ready now.” You see this compromise in pizzas from Scottie’s or F&F (most often as under-fermentation), two shops using only sourdough and open continuously for 8 to 10 hours a day.

Pizzas made with yeast don’t—or, rather, shouldn’t—have the same problems due to much higher dough pH and effective cell density. If using only sourdough, there are two primary strategies for slowing kinetics, either through formulation (e.g., prefermenting less flour, using more salt, etc.) or processing (lowering fermentation temperature).

I generally don’t like prefermenting less flour (< 10%). You get a pizza dough that whimpers, with more total acid and less gassing power. That’s less of a concern for Neapolitan applications, since you can get significant lift when using oven temperatures above 450°C and can curb acidity by using higher salt levels.

However, extremely low levels of prefermented flour, when combined with refrigeration temperatures (< 8°C) , can significantly attenuate the effects of lag. (I most often see this fault in Scottie’s dough, and the countless sourdough “Neapolitan” pizzerias in the new world.)

A good middle ground and workaround to the above would be the use of slow-proofing fermentation temperatures (10° to 18°C) and moderate sourdough amounts (7.5% to 12.5% prefermented flour). Even then, I’m not sure I’d personally love the results.

I prefer bread doughs that are fresh, using only ambient fermentation. I’ve never seen (or tasted) a convincing argument for why “slower” fermentation is better, either by using lower fermentation temperatures or leavening amounts.

For my (admittedly simple) tastes, it’s hard to beat the use of moderate fermentation temperatures (24° to 28°C) and leavening amounts (for fresh yeast, 0.5% to 1%; for a single-stage sourdough, 15% to 20% prefermented flour) for ambient wheat doughs. The texture, lightness, and flavour profile is unmatched in yeast- or sourdough-only applications.

That’s what makes Di Fara Pizza in Brooklyn, one of my inspirations, so great. Their pizza dough’s a simple, yeasted affair. It rises in a couple of hours. But they never refrigerate it. Instead, they just mix new batches as needed.

At Apiece Apizza we’ll use a naturally-leavened dough with 16.66% prefermented flour. At 28°C such a dough takes 5 to 5½ hours from bowl to bake, dough development and hydration depending. In my first trial run, the results were fantastic. (To be fair, I developed this dough quite some time ago. I’ve continuously worked on pizza for a long time, longer than any other product.) Thing is, I wasn’t facing a service environment. That’s what I’ll work on next, how to increase the readiness of our dough.

Our opening hours (for whole pizzas made to order) will be short, around 4 hours a day. Even then, figuring out how to increase the usage window of our dough without compromising its flavour or texture will be tricky.

I put half of my first trial run into a large, empty fridge at the 3-hour mark. Just to see. The pizza balls still spilled out over their stackable pizza cans two hours later. We’re using the largest-sized dough cans available, a volume at which most yeasted dough balls of similar weight do not escape.

We’ll only do pizza by the slice (along with fresh sandwiches and other items) during the day, regenning in a deck set to medium heat and topping each to order. My goal will be to only mix one batch of pizza dough per day. That means using refrigeration, or mixing more than one batch per day. I’m not sure what the answer is yet but I know I’ll figure it out. I always have.

*I describe the goal of traditional Neapolitan pizza thus: To use as little leavening agent and as much salt as possible without noticing the presence of either in the final, baked product. Contemporanea Neapolitan pizza, as a movement, seems more about giving a facelift to a tradition it views as staid. For reasons I cannot explain, it does so by increasing dough hydration (with ranges between 70% to 110%, with the average around 75% to 80%), exclusively by relying on the use of refrigeration and more specialist, technical flours. Almost without exception, contemporary Neapolitan pizza is yeasted.