Bianco: Pizza, Pasta and Other Food I Like

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.) Add the oregano, pinching it firmly as you sprinkle it over the sauce to activate its aroma. Scatter the sliced garlic evenly over the top. Finally, bruise the basil leaves, tear them (for little nuggets of brightness), and place them in the center of the pizza. Drizzle on a little extra virgin 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. This is a fairly wet pizza, so it may take a little longer than others.

Remove the pizza with the peel, drizzle on a little olive oil, and finish with a sprinkle of coarse sea salt. You could even dust it with a crumble of red pepper flakes for a slight quickening of its cadence in your mouth. Enjoy immediately!

WILD OREGANO

We use dried local wild oregano in a range of dishes. It’s dried on the stem, and we just crumble the leaves into the pot (or over a pizza), releasing all the intense fragrance and the flavorful oil. Dried wild oregano on the stem from Greece and other areas of the Mediterranean is available from some gourmet markets and online spice purveyors. If you can’t get it, use good-quality dried oregano, but be sure to crush the leaves between your fingertips as you add them to whatever you are cooking.

PIZZA BIANCOVERDE (#ulink_7820c24c-946a-52d0-9937-2c970a466b9d)

At the pizzeria, when I sat down to write out the final menu, I wanted there to be a balance of three pies with tomato sauce and three without. At the time, white pies weren’t really common in the States, at least outside the East Coast, where white pizza—typically a rubbery stretch of overcooked mozzarella pocked with scoops of deli ricotta—was a standard in most slice joints. But I had had beautiful white pies in Rome, and had a lasting memory of a particularly killer quattro formaggi—the classic four-cheese pizza—that was rich but not heavy. So at first I thought I’d do a quattro formaggi too. But after thinking about my setup—How much room did I have on my line? How many of the cheeses could I reach quickly as I cooked? And how many great, high-quality Italian cheeses were readily available in Phoenix back then?—I settled on a three-cheese pizza with mozzarella, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and fresh ricotta. Three Italian classics, but familiar to Americans. Three significant textures that work well together and taste delicious: the pliant quality of the mozzarella, the fatty sharpness of the Parmigiano, and the yielding creaminess of ricotta. Then I’d offset the buttery dairy goodness of the cheeses with barely wilted peppery arugula—a bright hit of something green and fresh.

With this pizza—with all white pies, really—the cut of the cheese is of paramount importance, because how you break down your cheese will determine its texture once it is cooked. This pie is all about the subtle textural differences among the cheeses, which underscore the differences in their flavors. You want to tear the mozzarella into cubes that will melt into shreds of cheese that have some chew. For the Parmesan, use the large holes on a box grater; if the cheese is finely grated, it will break down too quickly and toughen. For the ricotta, you don’t need to break it down, of course, but you do want to think about the size of the spoon you use to dollop it on the pizza. I like to use a teaspoon so there are substantial but not overwhelming moments of creaminess.

For the Biancoverde, I like a younger Parmigiano, in the 24-to-36-month range. A Parmigiano aged for 2 years has a great maturity and all that awesome developed flavor, but it also still has good moisture content. I love older Parms—don’t get me wrong—but I think they’re better for straight-up eating rather than cooking.

Makes one 10-inch pizza

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

1 ounce Parmigiano-Reggiano, coarsely grated

1 ounce fresh mozzarella, torn into cubes

2 tablespoons whole-milk ricotta, drained of whey

A good handful of wild or baby arugula

Extra virgin olive oil, for drizzling

Coarse sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

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 dough on the floured 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.

Scatter the Parmigiano evenly over the surface of the dough, stopping about ¾ inch—a fat thumb’s width—from the edges. Scatter the mozzarella over the Parmigiano. Finally, gently spoon on the ricotta in small dollops, aiming for a nice even balance.

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. White pizzas like this have a tendency to set more quickly, so this may take slightly less time in the oven than most pizzas.

Remove the pizza with the peel and immediately scatter the arugula evenly over the top. The heat of the pizza will wilt the greens just enough to make them tender, but they will still hold their shape. Finish the pizza with a drizzle of beautiful olive oil and a few pinches of coarse salt and turns of black pepper. Enjoy immediately!

PIZZA ROSA (#ulink_bc17d8f9-5f63-5a86-9431-2181574b8598)

Over the years, a number of people have asked me how I invented this pizza. The thing is, to my mind, a chef laying claim to invention is a rejection of inspiration, of influence, of history. The Rosa is entirely me paying homage to an inspiration. Almost thirty years ago, I spent an afternoon in Finale Ligure, an old port town in Liguria. I had lunch at a little focacceria. For Ligurians, focaccia—specifically focaccia Genovese—is what pizza is to Neapolitans, and Liguria is known throughout Italy as the home of the best focaccia in the country. The focacceria in question was next door to a salumeria, and it turned out that a father-son duo ran the two shops. The menu at the focacceria was short and sweet. I ordered a simple but unusual Parmesan and sesame seed focaccia. The son brought it out on a small plate, on which were nestled a few delicate shavings of cured meat from the salumeria. As I ate, I would drape a bit of meat on a bite of the bread and follow that with a cold sip of a white wine from Veneto. The whole thing was transcendent. It was way better than it had any right to be.

As soon as I got home, I tried replicating it. No dice. First of all, my pop didn’t run a salumeria next door to me. I attempted to get it right a few more times, but the results were always disappointing; nothing I made could match the impact of that Finale Ligure focaccia. I knew part of it had to be the sesame seeds. The town had a long history as a stop for ships bearing goods from Asia and Africa, and its cuisine reflects that influence. And there, the sesame seeds, delicate and volatile, hadn’t had to travel for nearly as far as they would to reach me in Arizona. So I started thinking less about how to copy the focaccia and more about how to evoke its spirit. What was it that had spoken to me so urgently? Well, I loved how it did so much with so little. I loved its connection to place, how something as small as a sesame seed symbolized the town’s unique history and culture. I loved the play and echo of the nutty seeds against the Parmesan, which already has that quality of nuttiness.

I started thinking about what we had of worth in Arizona, of the singular ingredient, like the sesame seeds, that would remind people that what they were eating was from somewhere. What I came up with was our pistachios, grown here and plentiful in southern Arizona, fresh, bright, and beautiful married with some Parmigiano-Reggiano. But the pistachios and Parmesan needed something else, something with a spice to it. We had tons of rosemary growing around our building, and the woody herbaceous quality of the bruised leaves went perfectly with the nuts and cheese. I was getting close, but I found I wanted another texture. There was something about that original, by now mythic, focaccia that had reminded me of the bialys of my childhood. And the best part of those bialys was the melted, chewy onions that tended to collect at their centers. So I added red onions, sliced thin and tossed in olive oil until they wilted, and the Rosa was born: I named the pizza after the pink of the red onion.

This is a pizza of restraint that delivers tenfold on its first bite.

Makes one 10-inch pizza

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

3 ounces Parmigiano-Reggiano, coarsely grated

Scant ¼ cup paper-thin slices red onion

Leaves from ½ rosemary sprig

A small handful of unsalted roasted pistachios, crushed

Extra virgin olive oil, for drizzling

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 dough on the floured 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.

Scatter the Parmigiano evenly over the pizza, stopping about ¾ inch—a fat thumb’s width—from the edges. Scatter the onions and then the rosemary—pinching it to lightly bruise it and release its oils as you go—evenly over the top.

Open the oven and, tilting the peel just slightly, give it a quick shimmy-shake to slide the pizza onto the pizza stone. After about 5 minutes, quickly scatter the pistachios over the pizza. Bake the pizza for 5 to 10 minutes longer, until the crust is crisp and golden brown.

Remove the pizza with the peel and drizzle with a good glug of olive oil. Enjoy immediately!

PISTACHIOS

Arizona has beautiful pistachios. We get ours fresh from some kind Greek Orthodox monks in the southern part of the state. We roast the nuts slightly, so they’re more stable, and give them just a little bash with a pestle to break them up. Then we scatter them on the pizza about halfway through cooking so that they are warmed just enough to release their oils, without scorching them.

SONNY BOY PIZZA (#ulink_2810610a-a315-514d-a886-08e1d950103e)

This pizza was born of two contradictory impulses. On the one hand, I wanted to do a pizza that I felt like someone from the old neighborhood would dig, something they would recognize. To me, pepperoni pizza is an iconic New York-style pizza. On the other hand, I wanted to somehow preempt people’s tendency to order automatically, like “Give me a cheese pepperoni!” and so I could say to customers, “Well, we don’t have that, but you might like this.” I sought out a really good-quality soppressata, which has a similar fattiness and spice profile to pepperoni. I love the coarse texture of it, all that good porkiness and salinity, which is so beautiful married with the acidity of the tomato sauce. But you could also use finocchiona, coppa, or your favorite salami—or, if you like, by all means pepperoni.

I don’t usually use a lot of olives, but I like them here, both because they echo the canned black olives that might share space with old-school pepperoni pies and because the combination of olives and salami reminds me of a classic antipasti plate. And for me, the Sonny Boy is kind of like an antipasto. It’s my favorite of the pizzas to share and to have a slice or two. And it’s almost too salty, in a good way, without going over that edge. In case you’re wondering, I named it after my dad. Sonny Boy was his nickname growing up—he hated it, and I’m a smart-ass. He likes the pizza, though.

Getting the salt balance right is the make-or-break factor for this pie, and you have the best opportunity to refine that by tweaking the olives you use. Make sure you taste them, before you add them to the pie. If they’re super salty, you’ll want to cut back on them. You’re looking for balance with the fat, acidity, and crispy bits.

Makes one 10-inch pizza

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

6 tablespoons Crushed Tomato Sauce (#ulink_b5865456-7e91-5474-be97-c3f47109b61a)

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

2 ounces fresh mozzarella, torn into cubes