Bianco: Pizza, Pasta and Other Food I Like

Top the pizza as per the instructions in any of the recipes that follow.

PROOFING DOUGH

In our Pizza Dough recipe, you proof the dough for up to 2½ hours, then divide it into balls and let it proof for another hour before you bake it. It tastes good. No problems. But what happens if you proof it for 7 hours? What if you let it go for 24 hours? Or 36? Or 48? It will be different, and that difference might be more to your taste than the basic dough. At 3 to 5 hours for the first proof, you will have a dough that will brown more quickly than a dough that’s proofed for 14 hours, because the yeast will not have converted as many of the sugars. The longer the dough proofs, and the more sugars are converted, the more it will have that smell of fermentation, and the more the sour flavors will develop. Many people (including me) love those flavors—like in a good sourdough bread—but here I don’t necessarily want too many of them, because I don’t want them to dominate the flavors of the pizza toppings. That said, there is no wrong way to go here. Make the dough a few times, following the recipe, until you feel comfortable. Then start to play with it. Determine how long a proof you like.

Bear in mind that where you are in the world will also play its part. If you’re making the dough in Iceland, it’s going to be different from making it in Phoenix. The climate is different, so it may need to proof for a little longer than 3 to 5 hours to start. Your water will be different, and it will affect the flavor of your dough. Never forget, we’re dealing with only four ingredients, and each one brings its own flavors and qualities to the pizza. So record the process as you go. Work with your sense of taste and your broader sensibility of the things you like. This basic dough recipe is only an early survey of a journey you get to finish yourself. The possibilities are endless.

CRUSHED TOMATO SAUCE (#ulink_8fefd8c4-0fc4-548c-8de2-5ba91e09faaa)

This is the sauce we use the most at our restaurants. It couldn’t be simpler. People are often surprised when they find out the sauce is uncooked, but canning tomatoes partially cooks them, and the heat of the oven finishes the process. The next question we usually get is why we don’t use fresh tomatoes, especially when our restaurants focus on seasonal ingredients. But fresh tomatoes are not always the best choice for sauce. The window for perfect ripe tomatoes isn’t very long, and in winter, pallid grocery store tomatoes are going to give you a real bummer of a sauce. One of the many beauties of pizza is that it relies on ingredients you can always have on hand. You just need a well-stocked pantry.

Beautifully canned or jarred tomatoes, preferably organic and delicious, are a celebration of height-of-season produce, a moment captured in time and available to you long after summer has gone. My partner, Rob DiNapoli, and I have our own Bianco DiNapoli brand canned tomatoes that we use at our restaurants. The tomatoes are organic and harvested in peak season and packed within hours. They’re steam-peeled and then canned in tomato juice (about 3 ounces of juice per 28-ounce can).

We don’t add any stabilizers, but we do add a bit of sea salt, because we found that adding a pinch of salt at canning resulted in more depth of flavor. So, because our canned tomatoes contain a scant amount of salt, we don’t add salt when making this sauce. Be alert to the salt content of whatever canned tomatoes you use. Don’t just read the label—taste them before using them. Cooking will reduce the sauce and the saltiness will become more pronounced, so you want to be on the lighter side of salinity when you set out—on the road to perfection instead of already at the destination.

We also include four fresh basil leaves in every can. When you macerate the tomatoes as you make the sauce, you’ll infuse them with the basil. Not all canned tomatoes include basil. This recipe calls for adding fresh basil to the sauce. If your tomatoes already include the herb, taste them and see if you want to take it a step further or if you’re happy with them as is. We always add a few hand-bruised fresh leaves too.

Makes enough for four 10-inch pizzas

One 28-ounce can whole tomatoes

1 generous tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

4 or 5 fresh basil leaves, torn and bruised (optional if the canned tomatoes include basil; see headnote)

Fine sea salt (optional)

Empty the can of tomatoes, with their juice, into a large bowl. Add the olive oil with the basil and salt (if using) and using your hands, crush the tomatoes; discard any bits of skin or hard yellow “shoulders,” or cores. The better the tomato, the less likely you are to find shoulders and hard cores. You want to end up with a textured yet silky sauce. I like it when the sauce isn’t uniform, when there are still bits and pieces of tomato; I also don’t like using an immersion blender or food processor because these can bring out the bitterness of the seeds. A hand-crushed sauce has a better mouthfeel and won’t be so one-dimensional.

Time is the invisible ingredient here, so if you can, let the sauce sit for about an hour so the flavors can marry. Of course, in our restaurants, we don’t always have the luxury of that time, and the sauce is still great.

PIZZA MARGHERITA (#ulink_3350ff37-f563-5d94-9d4a-5cba3098374f)

Almost everyone knows a Margherita pizza, or at least a cheese pizza. For me, that widespread familiarity was an opportunity to exceed people’s expectations, to check off the requisite boxes but go above and beyond with optimal ingredients. The Margherita is the quintessential Neapolitan pizza—hell, let’s just say it is the quintessential pizza. Its much-debated origin is as much a tale of national identity as it is of pizza. The story goes that back in 1889, just twenty-eight years after Italy had been unified as a country. Queen Margherita of Savoy and her king, Umberto I, were touring the nation to encourage a sense of nationalism. In the south especially, people were still angry about the loss of their independence; they weren’t easy days. So it seems especially powerful that it was in Naples, stronghold of southern Italy, that the most emblematic style of the arguably most emblematic dish of Italy was born. Legend has it that Margherita had noticed people across the country eating pizza, and she wanted to try it. Whether she was just curious or was trying to align herself with the common people, we can’t know, but I love the idea of a queen drawing closer to her subjects through food. Neapolitan chef Raffaele Esposito presented her with a tomato, mozzarella, and basil pizza—the red, white, and green mirroring the colors of the new Italian flag—and named the pizza in her honor. To me, the beauty of this story is that it embodies my motivating belief that food is about so much more than physical sustenance or pleasure. It’s about identity and place and relationships—and how the best food happens when we begin with an intention and work from a place of attention, just as Raffaele did for his queen.

The Margherita is perfect as is, but it’s also a perfect canvas for other ingredients. Just remember that when you add or remove something from a pizza, you need to accommodate for that gain or loss, be it a matter of texture, moisture, flavor, or the like. For example, adding ricotta cheese could make your pizza more watery, so you’d want to use a little less tomato sauce to balance things out.

Makes one 10-inch pizza

One ball Pizza Dough (#ulink_3433f2de-175e-5a31-a2f7-2cf44c21ab42), rested and ready to shape

2 ounces fresh mozzarella, torn into cubes

6 tablespoons Crushed Tomato Sauce (#ulink_b5865456-7e91-5474-be97-c3f47109b61a), with an added glug of extra virgin olive oil

A pinch or two of finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano (optional)

Fine sea salt (optional)

Extra virgin olive oil, for drizzling

5 fresh basil leaves

Position a rack in the lower third of the oven (remove the rack above it) and place a pizza stone on it. Turn up your oven to its maximum setting, as high as it will go, and let that baby preheat for a solid hour. Don’t even bother putting together your pizza until the oven’s been going for an hour.

Once the oven is preheated, grab a pizza peel and give it a nice, light dusting of flour. This will help prevent the pizza from sticking when you slide it from peel to stone. (If you don’t have a peel, you can use a cookie sheet or an inverted baking sheet.)

Shape the dough (#ulink_682689d9-beac-5c7a-a2e6-ee6a4ca7faa1) as directed and set the prepared dough on the peel. Jerk the peel to make sure it’s not sticking. If it is, lift the dough and dust the underside with extra flour (or, if no one is looking, blow under it very gently). Tuck and shape it until it’s a happy circle.

Taste your mozzarella and your tomato sauce to see how salty they both are and make a mental note of this. Spoon the tomato sauce evenly over the pizza, using the back of the spoon to spread the sauce, starting from the center and stopping about ¾ inch—a fat thumb’s width—from the edges. (With a hand-crushed tomato sauce, the consistency of the sauce over the pizza’s surface will be uneven. It’s inevitable.) Sprinkle the Parmigiano, if using, over the sauce. Let the spots where the tomato sauce is thinner guide you as to the placement of the mozzarella—hit those drier spots with a bit more mozzarella. If when you tasted your sauce and cheese earlier you determined that the salinity wasn’t quite there yet, sprinkle the pizza with some salt. Then give it a very light drizzle of olive oil.

Open the oven and, tilting the peel just slightly, give it a quick shimmy-shake to slide the pizza onto the pizza stone. Bake the pizza for 10 to 15 minutes, until the crust is crisp and golden brown.

Remove the pizza with the peel and immediately add the basil leaves, laying them evenly across the top. The heat of the pizza will wilt the leaves slightly and release their heady fragrance. Enjoy immediately!

Note: This recipe is more detailed than the pizza recipes that follow—you can think of it as a master recipe for assembling and baking pizza.

BEFORE OR AFTER

Most traditional recipes call for basil to be cooked with the pizza, which is totally fine. I prefer tearing and rough-handling fresh basil leaves over the cooked pizza and letting the heat release the aroma. The essential oils from the basil provide a pleasing texture and flavor profile.

PIZZA MARINARA (#ulink_9967057d-c06e-5156-95f9-f36c7e993df3)

For me, the marinara is the most difficult pizza to make, but it is also without a doubt my favorite one. Its minimalism at first glance could easily belie its complexity. The difficulty lies in two factors: The first is a matter of chemistry. Unlike the Margherita, the marinara does not have the luxury of cheese; it’s just sauce, herbs, and garlic, twice as much sauce, in fact, as the Margherita. So it’s saucier than your usual pie, and there is a little bit of a dance involved. You want to hit that sweet spot with the cooking time where the pizza is still moist with sauce but not soggy. The second bit of difficulty also goes back to that no-cheese thing. In a marinara, there are no distractions—there is nowhere to hide. It is a study in minimalism.

And that’s why it is so near and dear to my heart. It is a pizza of ultimate nakedness, transparency, humility, and grace, made with the most humble of ingredients. It is about transforming a few pantry staples into a sublime whole so much greater than the sum of its parts, through an act of sustained focus and appreciation for the task at hand. If I had the pleasure of cooking for you and you said, “Chris, make anything!” this would be my go-to.

Makes one 10-inch pizza

One ball Pizza Dough (#ulink_3433f2de-175e-5a31-a2f7-2cf44c21ab42), rested and ready to shape

¾ cup Crushed Tomato Sauce (#ulink_b5865456-7e91-5474-be97-c3f47109b61a)

A pinch of dried oregano, preferably wild

2 garlic cloves, sliced paper-thin

1 or 2 fresh basil leaves

Extra virgin olive oil, for drizzling

Coarse sea salt

Crushed red pepper flakes (optional)

Position a rack in the lower third of the oven (remove the rack above it) and place a pizza stone on it. Turn up your oven to its maximum setting and let that baby preheat for a solid hour.

Once the oven is preheated, grab a pizza peel and give it a nice, light dusting of flour. Shape the dough (#ulink_682689d9-beac-5c7a-a2e6-ee6a4ca7faa1) as directed and set the prepared dough on the peel. Jerk the peel to make sure it’s not sticking. If it is, lift the dough and dust the underside with extra flour (or, if no one is looking, blow under it very gently). Tuck and shape it until it’s a happy circle.