I'm interested about how they would burn coal in a wood-fired oven. Does the fire just sit on the floor like a wood fire would? You'd think that coal burning would need a grate with air access from below.
Can I take a moment to lobby for all recipes to be calibrated (secondarily, in small print) in grams? I used to mock the French with their multi-scale weight based measuring cups, but now cheap digital scales have made a drawer full of measuring implements potentially useless.
Brooklyn and Manhattan do not share the same water source. Brooklyn water is cloudy, discolored, bitter and metallic
All of NYC, execpt for a small corner of distant Queens, gets its water from the same source.
What's with the sunny-side up eggs on French pizza? When I toured France a few years back, we ended up in a lot of pizzarias because they were the only places open late, and again and again, that silly egg.
I agree about weights - I have a digital scale and nothing is easier than baking in grams, recalibrating the scale to zero after the addition of each ingredient. I obtained Nigella Lawson's books from the UK exactly for this reason.
I disagree with the water theory. The best pizza I have had outside of NYC was in North Carolina - two brothers who moved down from the bronx to open up a place. It's how you make it as well as the ingredients.
It may help those engaged in this melee to know that there is no one "NYC" water. Upper Manhattan and the Bronx get it from one source and reservoir system. Manhattan south of 110th St or so (I'm not sure where the boundary line is exactly) get it largely untreated from the Delaware River and southern Catskills through a different reservoir system. Brooklyn and Queens get it from another source, and I don't know where Staten Island gets theirs from. As many have pointed out, you can get good pizza from places other than the lower 2/3 of Manhattan and outside NY City. I'm sure there is water so bad that you can't make good pizza from it, but it's clear that you can do fine with lots of different kinds of water. For what it's worth, Phoenix gets its water from the Colorado River, the source of a lot of Southern California's water. The City of L.A. gets theirs from the Owens Valley, east of the Sierras.
Slightly OT...but when I was in NYC for my first wedding anniversary 10 years ago, I had a pretzel from a street vendor that I could swear tasted like smog. Not exactly a good thing, not exactly a bad thing...but distinct and unforgettable. So I don't know if you can rule the water thing out...though I agree that bad pizza is probably due more to user error than bad water. =)
h2o? maybe-I think it's a northeast us thing: I've traveled all over the US and there's nothing like NY/NJ/PA ( I live in Central PA) pizza. California pizza just doesn't have the sauce flavor or the great foldable crust.
benlee: FYI-San Fran's great sourdough is from a decades-old starter, but there are also specific cultures/spores present in the air out there. They've even been named for the city!
i'd say it's the italians.
that and all the tough customers in ny.
FYI, NYC water now is way different than it was when I was a kid growing up in the Bronx. There's way more chlorine now and it just doesn't taste as good.
As I've been saying online for 4 years, the water thing is 100% myth. I get emails about this several times a week. According to Maggie Glazer, the myth that baked goods are better in NY because of the water goes all the way back to the 1700's when in the rest of the country people used well water and not municipal tap water. Half the time this wasn't too far from the latrine. In other words the original comparison was comparing NY water, which comes from a pretty good aquifer system upstate, to other systems that would be comparable to what the 3rd world uses today. This rumor says more about how rumors and 'common knowledge' are passed down through the ages than anything about your local water system's shortcomings today. As anyone who's read my recipe (http://slice.seriouseats.com/jvpizza/) or tasted my pizza here in Atlanta knows, it's not the water...
Nanuet Hotel
Nanuet, NY
My, my...it takes more than H2O to make good pizza. It's takes the embodiment of beliefs and soul to create magic and mozarella. The alchemy of alimentary proportions. IMHO, it boils down to these simple rules - high turnover = more production by the pizza man, seasoned ovens = better flavor and product, and lastly, NYC Dept of Health codes = everyones' on their toes, including Mr. D of Midwood. Guess who's favorite dishes are these inspectors lingering over?
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