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Pizza Night

Thursday, October 1 · 5:00pm

Ninety seconds in a wood-fired oven we built by hand, from a terracotta pot a neighbour carried over. Everything on top of it grew about forty feet from where you'll be standing.

Thursday, September 17 — Thank you for a wonderful evening — a complete success. See you at the next fire.

6
of 10 left
$10
each
Put my name down

4 of 10 claimed

Ten pizzas, and this is the list. If more than ten people put their name down, the prepaid ones go in the oven first — so paying ahead is the only thing that actually guarantees it.

  1. 5:00Susan KaderPrepaid
  2. 5:15open
  3. 5:30Melissa FukushimaPrepaid
  4. 5:45Melissa FukushimaPrepaid
  5. 6:00open
  6. 6:15Sarah SantamariaPrepaid
  7. 6:30open
  8. 6:45open
  9. 7:00open
  10. 7:15open
prepaid — guaranteed open block — prepay claims it

How the night works

The oven makes one pizza every fifteen minutes, so each name on the board owns a fifteen-minute block — two pizzas, two blocks. Only prepaid pizzas hold a block; signing up without paying puts you on the waiting list, served in order from whatever blocks stay open. Come at the start of your window to sit at the table and watch the fire, or at the end to take your pizza at its absolute hottest. Walk-ins are welcome on the couch — they get whatever block is open when they arrive, never one that’s reserved.

Put your name down

Two fields, ten seconds

How many pizzas?
$10 total
Pick your time — one pizza out of the oven every 15 minutes
Make it a combo

Tonight’s mocktail: grapefruit cordial with green cardamom and coriander, over ice with sparkling water

How do you want it?
Make it yours — free add-ons
Extras — paid at the table, per pizza

No payment yet. You can prepay on the next step to guarantee it.

Already paid? Change your time

Every other Thursday, same time.

Four ingredients, and nowhere to hide

A Margherita is dough, tomato, mozzarella and basil. That's the whole list. There is no sauce recipe to hide behind, no long-simmered anything, no seasoning blend. Every part has to be right because every part is visible.

The tomatoes are Romas from the front yard

Blanched for thirty seconds, skins slipped off, then crushed by hand — one at a time, squeezed through the fingers. Never a blender: the blades whip in air, turn it orange and foamy, and grind the seeds to bitterness. Then salt. That is the entire sauce. It has never seen a pan.

It gets cooked once, in ninety seconds

Raw tomato goes onto raw dough and both cook together in a minute and a half. Cook the sauce beforehand and you have cooked it twice, which is exactly what makes a pizza taste like it came out of a jar.

The mozzarella is made that morning

Milk, citric acid, rennet, salt, and about forty minutes. It gets stretched by hand until it turns glossy, pinched off into a ball, then torn and drained overnight so it doesn't flood the pie.

The basil is picked while the oven heats

Two leaves under the cheese, where the heat draws the oil out and perfumes the whole pizza. Two more on top the second it leaves the fire.

Olive oil, and nothing else

No sugar, no oregano in the sauce, no garlic powder, no dried anything. If it isn't tomato, salt, cheese, basil or oil, it isn't on there.

The oven is a flower pot

A neighbour heard we wanted to build a pizza oven and walked over with an enormous terracotta jar. We cut it at its widest point, set the dome on a hearth of salvaged brick, cut an arched door into the front, and packed four inches of cob — clay dug from under our own pond, mixed with sand from the yard — over the whole thing by hand.

Underneath the cooking floor is a bed of glass bottles laid in clay. Trapped air is what keeps the heat where the pizza is. Then five days of small fires, each one a little bigger than the last, until the soot burned back off the dome and it turned white — which is the oven's way of saying it's ready.

Nothing in it was bought new except the firebrick and a bag of sand. The clay came out of the ground here. The bottles were empties.

Where this comes from

Pizza in this form is Neapolitan, and it began as food for people with very little money — sold by the slice in the streets of Naples in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, eaten standing up, folded. The oldest one is the marinara: tomato, garlic, oregano, oil. No cheese. It was named for sailors, not for a sauce.

The Margherita is supposed to date from 1889, when a Naples pizzaiolo named Raffaele Esposito is said to have made one for Queen Margherita of Savoy in tomato, mozzarella and basil — red, white and green, the Italian flag. Historians think that story is at least partly invention; the pizza was almost certainly around before the queen was. We tell it anyway, with the caveat attached.

In 2017 UNESCO added the craft of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo to its list of humanity's intangible cultural heritage — not the pizza, the making of it. The dough opened by hand and never with a rolling pin. The wood fire. The ninety seconds. That's what we're trying to do here, on a corner in University Heights, with a flower pot.

Make the mozzarella yourself

It takes forty minutes and four ingredients, and it is genuinely worth doing once just to feel the moment the curd turns to taffy in your hands. A gallon of milk makes about a pound, which is four pizzas.

Fior di latte

40 minutes
You need
  • ◆1 gallon whole milk — NOT ultra-pasteurised
  • ◆1½ tsp citric acid in ¼ cup unchlorinated water
  • ◆¼ tsp liquid rennet in ¼ cup unchlorinated water — or ¼ rennet tablet, crushed to powder first
  • ◆Non-iodised salt
  • ◆A thermometer — every step is a temperature

Ultra-pasteurised milk will never form a curd — check the carton and put it back if it says UP. Chlorinated tap water kills rennet, so use bottled or filtered.

TabletsA quarter tablet per gallon, crushed to powder before the water goes in — a whole tablet won't dissolve and the specks set unevenly. Mix it while the milk heats and use it within thirty minutes. Junket tablets from the pudding aisle are about a quarter the strength of cheese rennet and won't set a gallon at that dose.

Method
  1. 1.Milk at 55°F. Stir in the citric acid.
  2. 2.Heat slowly to 90°F, stirring gently.
  3. 3.Off the heat, add rennet. Stir up-and-down for 30 seconds, cover, and don't touch it for 5 minutes.
  4. 4.Check for a clean break — a knife drawn through leaves a clean edge and clear whey.
  5. 5.Cut the curd into 1-inch cubes.
  6. 6.Heat to 105°F, stirring slowly, until the curds pull away from the whey.
  7. 7.Off heat, stir 2–5 minutes, then drain.
  8. 8.Heat whey or water to 175–180°F and salt it hard. Submerge the curd, then fold and pull it with wooden spoons until it turns glossy.
  9. 9.Three or four folds and stop. Tuck the edges under, pinch off a ball, drop it in ice water for 5 minutes.

TipOverworking is the one thing that ruins it. The moment it's glossy and stretches like taffy, stop — every extra pull tightens it toward squeaky.

1264 Lincoln Ave · University Heights

Ten pizzas, until the fire goes out.

Put my name down