What exactly makes me qualified to talk to you about pizza? Well, I’m a sicilian-american east coast transplant to the bay area who now misses the pizza of my childhood with fervent intensity. Is that good enough for you? Look, I’m fully aware that the East Coast is not Italy, but it is a place that’s generally thought to have pretty good pizza, whereas almost every single slice of pizza I’ve eaten since moving to California has been sorely disappointing. The worst part is - it’s simple stuff! The pizza here sucks because of simple little flaws stemming from stupid misconceptions about what a pizza is supposed to be like. So, I’m offering some guidance in the form of a rant, from someone who takes their pizza much, much too seriously.
1. Pizza should not be burnt.
I’m willing to bet you money that every single pizza chef in the Bay Area has a friend from the East Coast (or maybe even from Italy if they’re really cool) who loves to wax poetic about how much they love the burnt bits on their wood-fired pizza. The part that they all seem to be missing is that their friend is talking about the burnt bits. The bits. Not the whole freaking thing!!!
I get that pizza ovens are hot, and I get that it can be difficult not to burn the thing, and impossible not to burn at least a little of it, but that’s what makes pizza such a miracle! The fact that it emerges from unthinkably high heat with such a minimal amount of damage. Do you like burnt cake? How about burnt coffee? What about burnt pasta? No? Then why would anyone on earth want to eat a burnt pizza?!
2. Real Pizza is not sour.
I’m looking at you Cheeseboard! That thing you make that has people lining up down the block is NOT a pizza. No matter impossibly delicious it may be, it’s not a pizza. Pizza dough tastes like flour and sometimes olive oil and not at all like the sour, damp, foggy, yeasty bay. So please, please for the love of god, call your cheesy concoction something else. Perhaps a sourdough flatbread? Then I can actually enjoy it instead of constantly dwelling on how wrong it is.
3. Thinner is not always better.
There’s a word for what happens when you mix a dough without enough yeast to rise and then bake it - a cracker! Or for those of us who will be celebrating passover tomorrow - a matzoh. Only when the Jews made matzoh, they did it out of a dire necessity, because their lives were in danger. And when they eat it now, they do so out of religious reverence, as a sacrifice. So, Bay Area pizza-makers, I beg you, please stop feeding me matzoh with sauce and cheese on top and trying to pass it off as pizza!
Now, my favorite pizza, my holy-grail of pizza, the best pizza I’ve ever had (Wooster St., New Haven, CT - NOT Pepe’s) is often referred to as a “thin-crust” pizza. But it’s not that thin. It’s not whisper-thin. Or paper-thin. It’s not impossibly thin. It’s just thin, like a pizza’s supposed to be thin and then at the edge, it’s kind of thicker and even a bit chewy, like how pizza crust is supposed to be.
Another prime example of a not-so-thin crust that puts every single pizza I’ve ever eaten in the Bay Area to shame is DiFarra’s. That little hole-in-the-wall off the J train in Brooklyn that food bloggers loooove to write about? That place I trudged through snow for hours to get to in a blizzard while I was in New York in January because I simply had to have real East Coast pizza after being deprived for months on end? They make a thin-crust pizza, yes. And supposedly it’s pretty good. But I didn’t try it. I was too transfixed by the sight of their sicilian pizza.
I mean, look at that thing! Have you ever seen a more appetizing (or photogenic) example of exactly everything that a pizza should be? Cheesy, gooey, melty, fabulous. And I assure you that underneath all that cheesy, gooey, melty, fabulousness was a very thick, but perfectly crunchy and almost-not-burnt-at-all pizza crust. Bay Area chefs take note - this is what a pizza is supposed to look like:
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