Our Dough

I came up in fine dining. Italian kitchens mostly, for years, working the line and then running it.

When I opened this place I wanted the best edible plate I could make to carry the best ingredients I could get. That's what sent me to Roman. Not thin and not thick. Somewhere in between, with enough chew that you know you're eating bread.

Teglia is the pan. The roasting pan. That's the whole name, and it tells you the method: the dough is proofed in the pan and baked in the pan, and it never touches a peel.

It's a younger style than people assume. Rome had pizza alla pala, the long oval baked straight on the oven floor, for a long time before anybody was making this. Pizza in teglia shows up in Rome around 1958, when a man named Gianni Giochi came down from Terni and started selling square pizzas with oil and rosemary out of a small shop on Viale delle Province. Low hydration, quick rise, lard in the dough. Street food. Cheap and good.

It stayed that way into the eighties, when the lard gave way to oil. Then in the nineties a baker named Angelo Iezzi did the thing that made the style what it is now. He stopped treating it like pizza and started treating it like bread. More water. Much longer fermentation. He worked it out alongside a miller and an oven builder, and in 1991 he won the teglia category at the first World Pizza Championship.

In 2003 Gabriele Bonci opened Pizzarium and pushed it the rest of the way. Soft and open inside, crisp on the bottom, toppings nobody had put on a teglia before. That's when it stopped being a cheap slice and started being something people travel for.

So when I say Roman pan pizza I'm talking about a style that's about seventy years old and got serious about thirty years ago. That's not a knock. It means the good version of it is still being figured out, and I'd rather work in that than in something finished.

What it isn't. It isn't al taglio. Al taglio means by the cut. You point, they cut it with scissors, they weigh it, you pay by weight. That's how it's sold in Rome, and it's a service style, not a dough style. Plenty of people use the two words interchangeably. I don't, because one of them describes the pan and the other describes the scale at the register, and we don't sell by weight.

It isn't alla pala either, which is the long one baked on the oven floor and served off a wooden board.

And it isn't Detroit. Detroit is its own thing out of Michigan, in a blued steel pan, with the cheese pushed out to the edges so it fries against the sides into a crust. Good pizza. Different pizza. Ours is about half the height and it goes for air, not for that fried cheese frame.

Whole pans or by the slice. A pan travels better than a round pie, because the crust has structure. It doesn't go limp on you in the car.

We have carried and used our mother dough starter from Sicily for over 20 years now.

I didn't build it from flour and water. I was handed something already alive and already old, and the job since has been simple. Feed it. Watch it. Don't let it die.

And I did start it as my own, because a starter changes with where it lives, what it eats, and how hard you work it. What's in my walk-in today is not what showed up in 2001. It moved with me through Semolina. It moved through Eleven South. Now it lives here, and I keep a little at home too, because you never keep all of anything in one place.

A sourdough mother is a colony. Wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria living together in flour and water. The yeast makes the gas that lifts the dough. The bacteria make the acid that gives it flavor and changes how it behaves.

Which acid you get depends on how you run it. Lactic is the round one, closer to yogurt or buttermilk. Acetic is the sharp one, closer to vinegar. A cold, slow ferment leans one way. A warm, fast one leans the other. That balance is what a baker is actually steering when he decides where the dough sits and for how long, and it's why the same mother makes a different loaf in two different kitchens.

Ours runs round, not sharp. That's on purpose. Nobody wants a slice that tastes like a San Francisco boule under tomato.

She's got a mind of her own. Hot week she runs fast and turns. Cold week she sulks and you nudge her along. She's strong and she doesn't quit. Like a hard-headed Italian grandmother.

That's the starter. That's mama.

Most pizza in this country is made the same day it's sold. Mix it, let it rest, use it. It works, and fast is the business.

We go four days. The dough gets made and then it sits cold and slow, working on itself. On the fifth day it goes in the pan and into the oven.

Three things happen in those four days, and none of them can be rushed.

It builds flavor. The bacteria and the yeast keep breaking down what's in the flour and leaving behind acids, alcohols and aromatic compounds that weren't there when you mixed it. A one-day dough tastes like bread that hasn't decided what it is. A four-day dough has a finish on it. You notice it after you swallow, not during.

It changes the dough itself. Acid softens the gluten network over time, and softer gluten is more extensible. It stretches instead of fighting you. That's part of how you get an open crumb with irregular holes instead of a uniform sponge, because a slack, extensible dough traps gas unevenly and that is exactly what you want here.

And it holds. Those same acids slow the process that makes bread go stale. It's part of why a pan of ours is still worth eating the next day if you heat it right.

What four days costs is planning. Today's mix is for Saturday. If I get Saturday wrong on Tuesday, there's no fixing it Saturday morning. Every mix is a bet placed four days out on how busy we're going to be, and I place it in a room where the weather moves the dough.

That's not a technique. It's a commitment.

I've made pizza without bromate since 2001. That was before anybody was arguing about it.

Potassium bromate is an oxidizer. It strengthens the gluten network, so the dough holds more gas through the proof and into the first minutes of the bake. A weaker dough stands up straighter. You get more lift with less time and less attention. One operator put it plainly in the trade press this year: it lets you take shortcuts you can't take without it.

It's still legal federally. It's banned in the European Union, in Canada, in China, and in California. New York has moved to ban it too.

I'm not going to tell you what to think about any of that, and I'm not making claims about anybody's health. Plenty of good pizzerias in this state use bromated flour today and make pizza I'd happily eat.

Bromate buys you what time and a strong culture already give me. I've got the four days. I've got the mother. Buying the shortcut on top of that is paying twice for the same thing, and the dough would stop being mine.

Working without it makes you work. It's less forgiving when your timing slips, and the dough tells on you faster. That's the job.

Bleaching is a different thing from bromating, and people mix them up. Flour straight from the mill is slightly yellow and takes a few weeks of sitting to age and settle down. Bleaching agents do that in an afternoon. I'd rather let flour be flour. I'll say straight out that this one is more about what we don't add than about some dramatic difference in the pan. It's a choice, not a miracle.

All natural. No GMOs. And a high-hydration dough that gets its structure from fermentation and handling, not from a conditioner.

Once you commit to a four-day dough, everything else has to answer to it. You can't put a four-day crust under a cheese that came off a truck in a bag and call the plate honest.

So the mozzarella is made here. The ricotta is made here. The stracciatella is made here.

On the stracciatella, since it's the one people ask about. The name comes from straccia, Italian for rag, because that's what it is. Fresh mozzarella curd pulled into shreds and loosened with cream. It comes out of Puglia, down in the heel, around Foggia and Andria. It's the same thing you find inside burrata, which was invented in Andria in the early twentieth century, where somebody wrapped the shreds and cream in a pouch of mozzarella to keep them.

It doesn't keep. That's the whole point of it and it's why it has to be made close to when it's eaten. Ours is not a garnish. It's the reason half the people come back.

Same kitchen makes the sandwiches, the salads, the soups and the pasta. I cook lamb, goat, sweetbreads, cuts people might not normally see or try. I want to give people a way into food. Something unfamiliar, and a reason to come back for it.

Olive oil in the pan. Imported extra virgin. Never seed oil. That's the part you taste on the bottom edge whether you can name it or not.

Small shop on Bloomfield Ave, a short walk from the Wellmont. Nothing about the way we run it is fast. That's not a flaw in the system. That is the system.

My kitchen is a hot basement. I pipe air conditioning down there and in July it still isn't enough.

So we run cold, on purpose, everywhere.

The water is cold and I know its temperature before I start. The bench gets cooled before I process. The tins go back into the walk-in after they're washed, so the dough never meets a warm pan. Even the oil is chilled. I pay attention to everything the dough touches, because a four-day dough that gets warm on day one isn't a four-day dough any more. It's a fast dough that took four days.

Mixing itself puts heat into dough. Speed, time, batch size, they all add warmth to something I intend to hold cold for days. So I watch what comes out of the mixer the same way I watch what comes out of the oven.

And here's the part that took me longest to learn. Fitting dough into a cooler and getting it cold are two different problems. Stack it tight to make it fit and the middle of the stack holds heat for hours. You leave room. You lose shelf space. You do it anyway.

That's what four days actually costs, day to day. It isn't a secret. It's attention.