Our Authors
Adam Kuban
- Location: Forest Hills, Queens, NYC
- Favorite foods: bar pizza, sliders, cacio e pepe, dim sum, corn, sushi, Japanese curry rice, cha siu bao
- Last bite on earth: Some White Castle sliders (plain and cheese), a supreme pizza from Maria's Pizza in Milwaukee, oysters on the beach in Cancale, France.
Recent Posts
Comments
(More) Ultimate(est) Perfect Sliders
Wait! Says this yields 4 sliders. BUT it says to divide 1lb beef into eight 2oz portions. So doesn't that make 8 sliders?
5-Ingredient Strawberry Shortcakes
Excellent! Picked strawberries from the garden this morning and made this this evening. Perfect dessert.
The Food Lab: How to Make New York's Finest Sicilian Pizza at Home
It's an incredibly good pizza that has only two problems. First, with all the toppings and that olive oil–packed crust, it's heavy enough that you can't eat it more than, say, once a month.
Can't eat more than once a month?!? HAHAHAHAHAHA! Says you. 😂 😂 😂
Meet the Mini Baking Steel Griddle
The video was oddly satisfying. Until the munching sounds at the end. Hahahahaha.
Makes me want a BSGMINI.
The Best Spinach Lasagna
Excellent recipe. Thank you! Very good for a Sunday afternoon. Best lasagna I've ever made. Going to try some of the tweaks mentioned by other users (tomato sauce layer, herb in spinach mix…).
Also think the ricotta mixture would be great as a pizza topping on a white pie.
How to Make the Best Boeuf Bourguignon (Beef Stewed in Red Wine)
Gorgeous photos!
The Comfort Food Diaries: All I Want Are Some Potato Skins
REQUEST: POTATO SKIN RECIPE.
Slice Walk: Park Slope
@Paul Cline: What are you doing digging around in this old garbage?!?
This Week on Special Sauce: Rich Torrisi Talks Curiosity, Craftsmanship, and Carl Sagan
I really enjoyed this episode as well, and it might be my favorite one (I've listened to all so far -- right now the Susie Essman ep is the most recent). Jake, VitaminC, you are right. Rich's answers really dispelled a lot of the backlash against MFG in my mind. "Soulful" is exactly the word I was looking for. He really seems like a cool guy.
A Sandwich a Day: Pret a Manger's 'Famous Ham & Cheese'
Why don't I learn! Just had one again today and it was DISMAL. How far the mighty have fallen. Was it ever good? Was I just crazy? I was pressed for time, figured I'd try it. I should have just gotten a dollar slice.
Top This: Why Don't We Put More Broccoli On Pizza?
As is my recipe-finding M.O., I googled "broccoli pizza kenji" yesterday and found this post. Kenji's suggestion of cutting the florets small worked like a charm — especially on a 10-plus-minute Detroit-style pizza. My daughter LOVES broccoli pizza but isn't super keen on onions, so I tossed the florets with minced garlic instead. (The broccoli pizza at our regular pizzeria does broccoli-garlic, and she's never complained there.) I cut mine down to SINGLE-jellybean size, and they were perfect. Fun times!
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish Cakes: An Editor Says Farewell
I loved your post until you mentioned the Gin Blossoms.
Good luck with your next act, and thanks for the memories. I'll miss your stuff here but look forward to seeing your work in a new context.
Hasta la pizza!
The Pizza Lab: Three Doughs to Know
That's also what's going on when you hear/read people talk about HYDRATION. A 50% hydration dough vs a 75% hydration or even 100% hydration or 100%+ hydration! It's simply the amount of water-by-weight in the recipe, expressed as a percentage of the flour's weight. 50% hydration or lower is fairly low hydration. 70% and higher, IMO are high hydration -- and it even depends on the flour. Some flours absorb more water than others, so they can feel drier or less tacky even at the same percentage as another flour that absorbs less.
As you play with various recipes, you'll get a feel for it.
I know, for instance, that the recipe I use for NY-style pizza goes from easily manageable to STICKY MESS somewhere around 66-67% hydration. There's almost a tipping point, where if I accidentally add just a gram or two more water, I get a much wetter dough. It's kinda crazy!
The Pizza Lab: Three Doughs to Know
@pat28365: yeah, that's kinda confusing, huh? This is how bakers' percentages work, though.
In US baker's percentages, the flour (BY WEIGHT) is the ingredient held as the standard quantity, and all other ingredients are expressed, also BY WEIGHT, as a percentage of the flour's quantity. It's easy when you see this…
Flour - 1,000g - 100%
Water - 500g - 50% (of the flour's weight)
Salt - 2g - 0.2% (of the flour's weight)
Yeast - 1g - 0.1% (of the flour's weight)
This makes it easy to scale up (or down) recipes -- as long as all the ingredients are expressed in relation to weight of the flour.
So if you have to add 50% more dough because you've invited 5 more people to your 10-person pizza party…
You know you'll need 1,500g flour, and then you can just calculate everything in relation to that.
Water - 750g
Salt - 3g
Yeast - 1.5g
I've had to do that in a professional setting when we had a big holiday weekend coming up and figured the pizzeria would be busier than normal, so was told to make 50% more dough than usual. Nobody told me the exact amounts, I had to calculate it from the base recipe. Because of bakers percentages, it was easy. (Though I did double and triple check myself!)
Equipment: What's the Best Pizza Peel For My Home?
@JustJali: My tips for working with a pizza peel -- work quickly and start simply.
Don't think of the peel as your work surface. Do all your stretching on the countertop. Then move the stretched skin to a generously flour-dusted peel and sauce/cheese/top AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN! (That means it's super handy to have your mise en place down so you're not scrambling to build your pizza.
You want the dough to spend as little time possible on the peel. As the raw dough sits there, it starts to hydrate/absorb the "bench flour" on the peel. Obviously that's not good, since that flour basically acts like ball bearings/dry lubricant to get the pizza sliding.
You'd probably do best to start with semolina flour, since it doesn't hydrate as quickly and is more "slippery" than regular flour. Some people don't like it because it can give a crunchy/gritty texture to the finished pizza, but I don't mind it, and some people prefer it.
As you build the pizza, jiggle the peel every now and then to see if the pizza is sticking or not. If it is sticking, there are some tricks. If you have a large, wide spatula, you can try to lift the dough and throw some flour beneath it. Then re-jiggle it to unstick it.
Once you're ready to transfer to the oven (and the pizza is able to wiggle on the peel), insert it in the oven parallel to the Baking Steel until you get teh edge of the peel nearish the back of the steel. Then lower the peel slowly while beginning to tilt it at at 20–30° angle. You want to gently pull the peel back while jiggling it a bit to get the pizza to slide. Once the edge of the pizza hits the steel, it will stick to it and sort of "anchor" the pizza, and you should be able ot pull the peel out smoothly from there without too much trouble.
If you don't get it the first, time, don't worry. It takes practice. My advice is to start with smaller pizzas at first until you get the hang of things. That will give you a more compact shape to deliver to the steel (which is less likely to deform) and you've effectively "increased" the size of the "target" you're trying to hit -- at least relative to the pizza.
LMK how that works! Good luck!
Equipment: What's the Best Pizza Peel For My Home?
@JustJali: Just practice using a pizza peel! It's not that difficult! Use a LIBERAL DUSTING of semolina flour or regular flour until you get the hang of it, then back down on the dusting. The method you describe is not going to give you good results, since the pizza won't be in direct contact with the steel. Which is the whole reason you just dropped close to a hundred bucks on the Baking Steel in the first place -- not to mention the hundreds you spent on a food processor. If you're committing to making pizza at home, you owe it to yourself to try it on a peel.
Real Texas Nachos
I don't care if you're supposed to add meat and/or refritos or what not. As a nacho minimalist, I find this recipe to be perfect. The freshly fried tortillas clinch it. All the best parts of nachos without the extraneous bullshit that renders them soggy faster than you can say "Don't Mess with Texas."
(Separate note to @tom dunne: Italians invented pizza [as we know it], which is just as bad for pizza and "authenticity" debates as Texans are over nachos, brisket, chili, queso, Tex-Mex, etc.)
Adam Kuban's '8 Pizzas That Haunt My Dreams,' 2014 Edition
Also try NY Pizza Suprema near Madison Square Garden!
Adam Kuban's '8 Pizzas That Haunt My Dreams,' 2014 Edition
@Glutenboy: I should have probably also tacked on more to the disclaimer saying that you shouldn't read too much into this as any kind of portrait on the state of pizza in general. This is simply 8 pizzas that REALLY stood out in my mind at the time. I went through all my Instagram pics dating back 12 months and picked the top 8 that caused me to say "OH! YEAH. THAT was a great pizza." IIRC in 2014 I didn't eat that much New York-style pizza. There's still some good stuff out there, but I think the kind you describe is now few and far between. Where my head is now, it's not the thing I'm most deeply interested in. In late 2014, I was eating a lot of wood-fired pizza and a lot of different types of pan pizza -- and that's pretty much still where I am right now.
Try:
Williamsburg Pizza (Williamsburg, LES)
Best Pizza (Williamsburg)
Patsy's in East Harlem
Di Fara (really it's its own animal at this point)
Joe's (Greenwich Village, East Village 14th St.)
Pizza Cotto Bene (Gowanus)
Homemade Bagels, à la Jo Goldenberg
@beuteiful: Dunno. Never tried it. Wouldn't hurt to try, no?
Homemade Bagels, à la Jo Goldenberg
@ftmftm: Thanks for the kind words! It's always fun to get an email notification from a satisfied bagel baker! Yeah, I think I didn't do the salt by weight because it ends up being such an insignificant amount to weigh for.
Ed Levine on Josh Ozersky: A Well-Fed Life Cut Too Short
Thanks for writing this. You captured what it was about Josh and his writing that made him larger than life. He held no cows sacred and a fair amount of them delicious.
Favorites
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Great recipe! Have made it a couple times now. Flavor is right on — red-saucy Italian-American throwback. Sometimes a bit too watery, but it seems to "set up" after sitting and cooling a bit. Have added sautéed kale at times, sautéed spinach at other times. Both sneak in a little green for those concerned with that sort of thing. Adding this recipe one to our go-to rotation. Thanks!