David has been in the restaurant industry since I was born. As a teenager, he was a cook in restaurants around Oklahoma City, where I grew up and he went to high school. After that, he went east to study at the Culinary Institute of America, and then on to Denver for a degree in hotel and restaurant management. Now he lives in Washington, D.C., where he and two longtime industry friends co-own seven restaurants. Most of their restaurants are big, handsome, polished places, the kind where you sign an important deal or go to brunch on Mother’s Day. They make you feel taken care of. The staff is impeccably trained and the food consistently excellent. David doesn’t sleep much, and it pays off. So Brandon called him up, and they talked shop.
David had good, sensible advice. Pick a location, he offered, where other businesses are already succeeding; don’t be the first gig on the block. Be sure that your concept mirrors the market, that it fits the location and the clientele. And make sure your debt base is broad by getting funding from a few different sources: a bank, investors, your own savings, and, of course, if possible, landlord construction funds. In short, Brandon and Carla had some decisions to make.
By now it was January of 2008. They planned another research trip, this time to Pizzeria Bianco, to see what it was, exactly, that they were trying to equal. Like the trip to Portland, the one to Phoenix would be quick, just twenty-four hours and a lot of pizza.
A week after they bought their tickets, Carla and Brandon met for lunch. She had some difficult news, she said. She’d been thinking about the trip, about how she could go about getting her station covered at the restaurant and who would take care of her kids. It felt too complicated, too hard. An occasional overnight trip was not the problem; it was what would come after, what the trip pointed toward. The project had barely begun, but already, her time and attention were divided among too many demands. She didn’t like shortchanging her family or her existing restaurant. Not only could she not go to Phoenix, she realized, but she couldn’t open a new restaurant.
I was at home when Brandon came back from lunch and slumped into one of the kitchen chairs, red-faced. I’d never seen him cry before, and it scared me.
“You should do it anyway,” I rushed to cheer. “You’ve already made it this far!”
“But I can’t do it by myself!” Brandon cried.
“You’ll figure it out. David will help you. You can do it, babe. You should do it!”
It’s not that I thought, I want you to open that restaurant! As far as I knew, the project was another hobby, another way for Brandon to occupy himself between classes and work shifts and sleep. He’d get tired of it before long, and that would be the end of it. I’d always been frustrated by that pattern, because it’s the opposite of my own. I rarely take on anything unless I’ve quietly and obsessively interrogated it, Vincent-D’Onofrio-on-Law-&-Order-style, and am certain that it will go the way I want it to. But all the same, I’d gotten used to Brandon, to who he is when he’s absorbed in the Next Big Plan. I liked him that way. I loved him that way. It made him happy, so it made me happy. If he wasn’t planning something, I wasn’t sure who he would be. So I didn’t think about what I was saying. I just said it.
Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I hadn’t urged him to go forward, if I hadn’t reassured him that he could do it. It’s easy to wonder if I made him do it. But there’s no use in speculating, because it’s done. And I know that if I were to go back and repeat that afternoon, even with full awareness of what would come after, I would respond the same way.
He’d lost his co-conspirator, his veteran business partner, and his possible investors. He was inside the bank with a pistol and an empty duffel bag. He was the only one wearing a Reagan mask, but he was going through with it.
RICOTTA
Brandon and Carla never mastered mozzarella. But ricotta, on the other hand, is easy to make, incredibly versatile, and a very handy thing to keep around. The following recipe was developed by Brandi Henderson—more on her in a bit—and it’s better than almost anything you can buy, particularly if you use the best-tasting milk and cream you can find. We use this ricotta most often on a white pizza, with fresh and shredded mozzarellas, slivers of garlic, and olive oil, but I also eat it frequently on toast, as an open-faced sandwich with roasted vegetables or stewed greens. When in need of a snack or quick hors d’oeuvre, I spoon ricotta onto crostini and then top it with a drizzle of honey, a pinch of lemon zest, crunchy salt, and black pepper. Another favorite crostino is ricotta topped with a small spoonful of marmalade and freshly ground black pepper. And for dessert, I like to roast rhubarb—a couple of pounds, cut into 3-inch lengths and tossed in a baking dish with half a cup of sugar, half a cup of wine (white or red), and a split vanilla bean, baked at 350°F for about 30 minutes—and serve it in bowls with a big spoonful of soft, cold ricotta.
If you plan to use your homemade ricotta on pizza, drain it only until it’s still very soft and spoonable. If you’d like to use it on crostini or a sandwich, you’ll want to drain it so that it’s a little more firm but still spoonable.
6 1/2 cups whole milk
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
2 cups buttermilk
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
* * *
In a Dutch oven (or other heavy pot with a capacity of about 5 quarts), combine the milk, cream, and buttermilk. Place over medium heat and cook, stirring occasionally to prevent scorching. Check the temperature of the mixture frequently with a candy thermometer, and when it reaches 180°F, stop stirring. Continue to cook until the curds and whey separate; the curds are the white clumps and the whey is the clear liquid. (You can gently drag a spoon through the pot, if needed, to see how the curds are coming along.) Remove from the heat, and set aside at room temperature for 30 minutes to allow the curds to strengthen.
Set a wide strainer over a large bowl or in the sink, and line the strainer with two layers of cheesecloth. Ladle the curds into the cheesecloth. (Do not press down on the curds, though I know it’s tempting.) When all of the visible whey has drained out, the ricotta is likely the right texture for pizza: soft and creamy, but not soupy. If you’d like a thicker ricotta, continue to drain until it reaches your desired thickness. Stir in the salt; then taste, and add more as needed. Transfer the ricotta to a storage container, and refrigerate. Homemade ricotta will last for a week, but it tastes best within the first 3 days.
Yield: about 1 pound
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Brandon developed his pizza with help, in a manner of speaking, from a composer who died two years before he was born. Her name was Nadia Boulanger—fitting, since boulanger is French for “baker”—and she was arguably the twentieth century’s most influential teacher of music composition. Boulanger was famous for her memory: her students say that she had memorized every significant piece by every significant composer, from ancient to contemporary. She taught greats like Aaron Copland and Philip Glass, and one of Brandon’s teachers at Oberlin Conservatory was a student of a student of hers. It was from this teacher that Brandon received a particular bit of advice, supposedly distilled from Mlle Boulanger.
It went like this: When you’re looking to write a piece of music for, let’s say, violin, you must first listen to as many other pieces for violin as you possibly can. You don’t just sit down, tune in to your inner artiste, commune with your Muse, and write; you research. You study, asking why a given piece works the way it does, why the instrument itself works the way it does. Then, later, when you go to write your own piece, you have within you a library of sorts. You will know what is possible, where limits lie and possibilities exist, where you might fit in.
Even before Brandon and Carla hatched their big plan, he’d been doing informal research, searching for pizza that could equal what he grew up with on the East Coast. In Seattle, we ate pizza everywhere we could find it: Tutta Bella, Via Tribunali, Serious Pie, Pagliacci, Zagi’s Pizza (now defunct), A New York Pizza Place (also defunct), general Italian restaurants with pizza on the menu.
We’d gone to Portland, to Apizza Scholls and Ken’s Artisan Pizza. We both have family in the Bay Area, so we drove down the coast and ate pizza at Pizzetta 211, Pizzaiolo, Zuni Café, the Café at Chez Panisse, and, in Santa Rosa, Rosso. In the summer of 2007, a few weeks before we got married, Brandon’s uncle Tom asked if Brandon might be willing to fly to San Antonio on his behalf, pick up a car, and drive it to Los Angeles, and Brandon immediately said yes, because it meant that he could eat at Pizzeria Mozza, the much-lauded restaurant opened in late 2006 by Nancy Silverton and Mario Batali. Whenever we went to visit his parents in New Jersey, we’d sneak out for a weekend in the city, sleeping on an air mattress in a friend’s studio apartment and spending the days racing from pizzeria to pizzeria: Totonno’s in Coney Island, where the coal-oven pies were handsomely charred and Cookie, the surly co-owner, ruled over the dining room in frosted lipstick and white nurse’s shoes; John’s of Bleecker Street, whose wooden booths are covered in etched initials and hearts; Franny’s, where the clam pie with chiles and parsley is a small-scale legend; Una Pizza Napoletana, where you could pay a hefty $21 for a twelve-inch Margherita pizza; and I could swear there were more than that, but you start to lose track at a certain point—unless you are Brandon, in which case, the time has now come to fly to Phoenix, to Pizzeria Bianco, to taste the most vaunted pizza in the country.
But Carla had pulled the plug on that, and now Brandon was on his own. He mentioned his disappointment to our friend Matthew Amster-Burton, and never one to miss an adventure that involves eating, Matthew invited himself along. “You can order more pizza this way,” Matthew explained. He bought Carla’s plane ticket, and on a late-January afternoon in 2008, they flew to Phoenix and went straight to Pizzeria Bianco, where a line was already forming out front.
Matthew was writing for Gourmet (R.I.P.) in those days, and he later wrote a short piece about their trip. “Like a martial arts student visiting the Shaolin Temple, my friend Brandon Pettit went to the mountaintop to gain wisdom from an acknowledged master of his discipline,” he wrote. “The discipline is pizza, the mountaintop is Phoenix, and the master is Chris Bianco, chef-owner of Pizzeria Bianco.”
They made the first seating at five o’clock and got seats at the bar, within view of the pizza oven, so that Brandon could study Bianco’s technique. When Bianco slid the first pizza into the oven, Brandon measured the cooking time on a stopwatch and jotted it on a slip of paper. When their pies came out, Brandon produced a tape measure and took note of their diameter. I remember reading Matthew’s story and thinking, What’s with all the details about Brandon taking notes? By now, I was accustomed to eating pizza with a tape measure on the table.
Bianco’s crust was crackly at the edges, with a moist, elastic crumb. Compared to Di Fara, the gold standard to this point, the crust at Pizzeria Bianco was finer, chewier, with more bubbles around the rim. Its flavor was more complex, sweet with a whiff of sourness. As they left, Brandon went to thank Bianco, and the two of them got talking pizza, and then Bianco offered to meet up the following morning to talk some more.
Chris Bianco, it turns out, is into talking. What he’s not into is trade secrets. His dough gets its flavor from a slow eighteen-hour fermentation, he offered. There’s no magic to it. You can make great pizza in any oven, as long as it’s hot enough. There are no pizza masters, he told Brandon. “I never set out to love pizza. I don’t love pizza. I have no passion for pizza. I only love and I only have passion, so you fuckin’ fill in the blank, I love it. If I was in Seattle I’d be smokin’ fuckin’ salmon or something.” I should probably clarify that Bianco isn’t originally from Phoenix; he’s from the Bronx. He’s true to a particularly earthy, New York City tradition of pizza—especially the part of that tradition that says, “Fuck tradition.”
* * *
The truth is, Brandon didn’t exactly do all of his research first, Boulanger-style. A person as thoroughly obsessed with pizza as he is will not be able to resist scratching the itch to make his own. Research and development happened in tandem, each feeding the other.
In the fall of 2006, a couple of months after we moved in together, I came home one evening to find him kneeling in front of the oven. He was trying, he said, to make it climb past its factory-set ceiling of 550°F to something more pizza-friendly, like 800°F. He’d set the oven to 550°F, and then he’d taken an old t-shirt, wet it under the tap, and draped it over the thermostat prong at the back of the oven, hoping to trick the machine into preheating longer. (He’d read about this trick from Jeffrey Steingarten, and yes, it came with a warning not to try it at home.) I arrived just as the high-heat grill thermometer he’d perched on one of the oven racks hit 700°F. The t-shirt began to give off an odor not unlike singed hair. I cringed. He looked at me like a kid who’s just been caught drawing a masterpiece with Sharpies on his bedroom wall.
A year later, in the first weeks of their partnership, Brandon and Carla began to tinker with doughs, testing them in her wood-burning oven. They started with her restaurant’s recipe—high-quality flour, water, salt, and yeast, fermented for about twelve hours—which yielded a very thin, crispy crust. But what they wanted was more bend and chew, something closer to Di Fara. They fiddled with the ingredients, adding and tweaking. Mozza uses a little rye flour for flavor, so they tried that. (They didn’t like it.) Ken’s Artisan Pizza uses flour from a Washington State cooperative called Shepherd’s Grain, so they tried substituting it for Carla’s usual flour. (They liked it, and Delancey still uses it today.) Christmas came, and we flew to New Jersey to see Brandon’s parents. We went into the city, of course, and had lunch one afternoon at Di Fara. On a whim, Brandon asked DeMarco if he might let him buy a ball of his raw dough. DeMarco agreed. That night, Brandon stood hunched over his parents’ kitchen counter, poking, stretching, dissecting, and finally tasting DeMarco’s dough. It was salty, saltier than any of the doughs he’d made. But with sauce and cheese, the salt receded and the flavors fell into balance. The same way that he’d been taught to parse music—to break it down to its component parts, to pick out and listen to a single instrument amidst the noise of an orchestra—he began to teach himself to parse dough. When we got home, he and Carla upped the salt in their recipe.
One night not long after, when he and Carla were mixing a new batch of test dough, they accidentally doubled the amount of water. The dough, if you could call it that, was more like wallpaper paste than a potential pizza. Carla wanted to throw it away, but Brandon suggested that they try baking it, just to see what would happen. After its twelve-hour rest, he shaped it and topped it as well as he could—it looked like Pizza the Hutt, from Spaceballs—and shoved it into Carla’s wood-burning oven. The result was still a mess, but one corner of it, one lone corner, puffed and browned and bubbled like the pies at Pizzeria Bianco, and when Brandon tasted it, the texture was better than anything they’d done yet. So now, instead of adding ingredients, he began subtracting water, dialing back from the doubled amount until there was just enough moisture to yield big bubbles and good chew, but not so much moisture that the pie would morph into a space gangster.
With Carla off the project, Brandon was left to interrogate the dough on his own. He had a recipe with good texture and flavor, but compared to Bianco’s, it lacked complexity. The charred spots on Bianco’s pies tasted sweet, while the char on Brandon’s tasted burnt, bitter. Remembering that Bianco’s dough rises for eighteen hours, Brandon decided to try mixing a new batch of dough with less yeast, so that it would rise more slowly. The longer fermentation, Brandon explained to me, gave more time for the flour’s starches to be converted to sugars, which meant that charred spots were actually tasty now, no longer reminiscent of blackened toast. He went on to explain seventeen other crucial facts about enzymes, microflora, and dough chemistry, which I will not share with you here. The upshot was, however, that the dough now had both a sweetness and a whispering sourness—a juxtaposition that could appeal to a composer or a dough chemist, and the kind of lasting fl
avor you find in a crusty loaf from a nice bakery. He had something he could work with.
Which is what he did. Spring and summer 2008 was the Season of Many Flatbreads. He made batch after batch of dough, jotting in a notebook each slight tweak in yeast amount and fermentation time. He watched YouTube videos on stretching and tossing pizzas and practiced in our kitchen, leaving every horizontal surface coated in a film of flour. He left the rounds of dough plain, with no toppings, so that he could taste their nuances, and he tried baking them in every oven, or makeshift oven, that he could get his hands on. He baked in our home oven—woefully still a mere 550°F—on a pizza stone that we’d been given as a wedding gift, on unglazed quarry tiles from Home Depot, and on the back of a large cast-iron skillet. He lined our gas grill outside with more quarry tiles, preheated it until it hit 750°F, and in half an hour of smoke and glory, succeeded in both baking a half-dozen spectacularly good flatbreads and completely draining the propane tank.
It became clear that he needed a proper wood-burning oven. So he put an ad on Craigslist, offering to exchange pizzas for the use of an oven. He got three responses, but when he went to check out the ovens, they were all too small, too haphazardly homemade, too Hobbit-like, to make for a good test. But Carla introduced Brandon to a woman named Ruth, and Ruth had a wood-burning oven in her backyard, which she offered up for his use. As it happened, her oven was made by the same company that Brandon had been considering for his eventual restaurant, which made it an ideal testing ground. Sometimes on Saturdays, after teaching his class of teens at the conservatory, he would spend the afternoon in Ruth’s backyard, making flatbreads and pizzas—by now, he was happy enough with the crust that he’d begun adding toppings, too—until it was too dark to see. He made a simple sauce from whole canned tomatoes, zizzed up with an immersion blender and seasoned with kosher salt, dried oregano, fresh garlic, and a pinch of sugar. He tested brands of mozzarella, fresh and aged, and Grana Padano, aiming for a cheese pie that tasted like Di Fara’s. Sometimes he even bought prosciutto. He didn’t want to limit his pizzeria by making it vegetarian, but he also wasn’t willing to serve something that he hadn’t tasted. He began eating more meat, little by little.
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