JP Eats Food Blog. Welcome to my food (and wine) blog. I am very lucky to enjoy good food and wine pretty frequently. I also spend a good deal of time learning and experimenting with both. The point of this blog is to share some of that with you as well as help me remember foods, wines, and little bits and pieces of information I pick up along the way. I rarely take pictures in nice restaurants, so most of what you see here comes from my kitchen, my friends' kitchens, or various casual and local hot spots. You can hit the archive, or never miss a post with rss.
You're viewing posts tagged "pizza". You can also return home.
A couple of small home-made pizzas, made cast iron skillet style. Another wonderful part of the arrival of fall is that it’s finally cool enough to blast the oven at full blast for a few hours to properly make pizza. Plus, the greenmarkets still have plenty of great cherry tomatoes and basil.
The amazing Fresca pizza from Rubirosa. I can’t say enough good things about Rubirosa… My favorite pizza in the city right now. The classic cheese pizza is still my favorite, but this was a really, really good fresca with their delicious tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, and basil. I bring all out of town visitors looking for NY pizza here, and this week’s visitor from Connecticut, a Frank Pepe devotee, was quickly converted.
Sausage, broccoli rabe, and fresh mozzarella pizza at Rubirosa on Mulberry by Prince in NYC. Rubirosa is my favorite pizza by the slice in the city—and also some of my favorite NY style pizza over all. Normally, I don’t stray from the basic cheese slice, but a friend was in town and wanted this concoction. Luckily, it was delicious. So were the mozzarella sticks in the background, actually. I highly recommend Rubirosa for any and all of the above. Looks like Serious Eats does too.
Pizza Port Carlsbad. Port Brewing is one of my favorite breweries, and when I lived in San Diego I would visit their Carlsbad pizza joint/ brewery quite regularly. The pizzas are interesting and good enough, but the array of excellent beer on tap and overall fun atmosphere makes the place a winner. I highly recommend going, getting some pizza, and trying any of their IPAs, although I doubt there’s a bad beer in their lineup.
Basic pizza at home. I’ve seen the pizza dough at Whole Foods, and I’ve read of people’s love for it. But, I enjoy making my own dough and do a pretty good job with it, so I had never given a try. Last night, I suddenly really wanted a pizza, but I don’t live close enough to any pizza joint I trust, I didn’t have a lot of time, and even if I did, my craving hit too late to make a proper dough. So, I swung through Whole Foods on my way home and bought $4 worth of dough and some mozzarella. I let the dough rise at room temperature for two hours, then went about making pies using the cast iron skillet method with left over marinara from weekend cooking and mozzarella.
The dough was actually pretty good and very easy to work with. It wasn’t quite as flavorful as a good 2-3-day old home made dough, but that’s not surprising. My only other complaint is that in the amount of time it took to cook the dough through and get good bubbling and char, there was a lot more overall browning than say with these two pies. Maybe there’s more sugar in their recipe than I’m used to. Regardless, I can definitely recommend this if you don’t have time or don’t feel like making your own dough.
Finally made it to the San Francisco reincarnation of Una Pizza Napoletana. It was too dark to get a picture of the perfect Filetti pizza to see how it compared to mine, so you’ll just take to take my word for it that it’s a bit better. OK, a lot better. Still my favorite pizza anywhere.
Another crappy picture of really good home pizza. Same as last week’s Filetti, but with prosciutto. I love adding little folds of good prosciutto to this style of pizza, although it doesn’t look very nice.
I’m having a hard time not making pizza these days. It’s finally cooled off enough that I don’t mind blasting the oven, the NFL has started, and the fresh cherry tomatoes are so good this time of year. Homemade pizza like this can’t be that bad for you, right?
Apparently I’m pretty pedestrian as far as my fan-hood for Una Pizza goes.
Homemade pizza in the style of Una Pizza Napoletana’s Filetti. As I mentioned the other day, my favorite pizza place recently up and moved to San Francisco. When I still had access to Una Pizza, the Filetti, a pizza with mozzarella di bufala, cherry tomatoes, basil, olive oil, and course sea salt, was the best of the best.
The home version can’t compare for many reasons, but taking some cues from Jeff Varasano (an unbelievable pizza resource), and kind of following the cast iron skillet that’s been making rounds, you can actually do pretty well. A Serious Eats Pizza Lab article actually gets pretty close to what I do, which is put the dough directly into a heated skillet, then assemble the pizza (mostly because it’s impossible to have thin, wet dough, load it with ingredients, and transfer it to a pan). Then throw the skillet under the broiler for a few minutes, and if the skillet was heated thoroughly ahead of time, you’re done. If not, put it back onto a high burner until the bottom is charred.
Note: when I want to make a bigger pizza on my pizza stone, I heat the stone for an hour, switch the broiler on for 5 minutes, then slide in the assembled pizza. It’s almost as good.
Sorry for the poor photo, I’ll get a better one someday when I’m not as hungry.
If I lived in the Bay Area, I know where I would be on Sept 15. Not too long ago, Anthony Mangieri and Una Pizza were making by far my favorite pizza in NYC. Then one day a little over a year ago, Una Pizza was gone (and for the record, it was just some dirt that flew into my eyes, OK?). Mangieri said at the time he was moving to the west coast and would likely open another pizzeria in SF, and it’s finally happening. As if I needed more reasons to move back to the west coast myself? Anyway, I wish them the best of luck, and I hope everyone in the bay area appreciates their little coup in the world of pizza.
