June 28, 2019 • 25 mins
America’s love affair with pizza has humble beginnings. In this episode, Marc gets way more than a history lesson when he catches up with Scott Wiener, owner of NYC’s popular pizza tour “Scott’s Pizza Tours.” Later, chef and restauranteur, Nancy Silverton joins Marc and talks about honing in on the perfect pizza recipe (hint: the dough matters, a lot), and reveals whose pizza inspired her to start making her own (and open LA hotspot, Osteria Mozza).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Food three sixty with Mark Murphy as a production of
I Heart Radio. So I said, look at, I'll take
the space for the restaurant, but you have to give
me that pizza. Rha pizza is so simple to make,
which means it's so easy to screw up, like a
screen showing it right. Yes, Welcome to Food three sixty,
(00:29):
the podcast that serves up some serious of food for thought.
I'm your host, Mark Murphy. Some of you may know
me as a chef and a New York restaurateur. Today
we're going to be discussing America's favorite food, and that's pizza.
At the start of the show, you heard the voices
of Nancy Silverton and Scott Winer. Nancy a world renowned
(00:50):
chef that loves pizza, and Scott whose obsession for it
turned into a full fledged career. I sat down first
with Scott, who owns Scott's Pizza Tours and guided bus
and walking tour that visits some of New York's best pizzerias.
He also writes a pizza column and judges competitions, and
he's in the Guinness Book of World Records. We're going
to talk about that a little later on Scott, Thank
(01:15):
you so much for being here today. I wanted to
talk to you about pizza, obviously because you're the pizza man, right, yeah,
I guess. So yeah. How did you get into pizza?
Probably the way most people who are involved with pizza
get into it. Like, I love eating pizza, That's pretty
much it. But I love eating pizza so much that
the nuances and differences amongst styles started to really come
out to me as I was like, it would explore
(01:36):
pizzaias beyond my hometown. Right, But most people that just
get really into pizza and want nuance and all those
fancy things, they don't make it a career. How did
you turn this into your career? Well, because I think
most people don't see nuance as understanding the difference of
bake temperature and bake time and air movement of an oven.
And that's the stuff that made in my career is
when I started noticing that there were differences and that
(01:57):
those differences had historic and scientific reasons. So I would
take my friends to Pizzaia's and explain to them the
reasons for the differences, and then that turned into more
people wanting to do that and have that experience. And
like when I started calling it a tour and selling
tickets and having a website, that's when I realized that
I probably didn't need to get a real job. And
(02:17):
this is this is it. How long you've been doing this.
It'll be eleven years at the end of this month.
That is pretty amazing. And I'm sure there's a lot
of people kicking themselves in the butt right now, going
why didn't I think of that? Well? I meet a
lot of people on my tours who say, oh, you know,
I thought about doing this twenty years ago, and I said,
I kind of wish you would have done it, because
I would love to go on it. But then you
have to have some of them boring job or something
(02:38):
like that, like a pizza historian. I mean, that's probably interesting,
but just sitting there reading books about it. At least
you're out there eating it. But I do that too.
When you walk into a pizza store when you know
it's going to be good and the smell is at
the look of the place, what's gonna tell you it's
gonna be a good pie? There are a few things
that happened right upon walking in overwhelming smell of a
regano usually tells me the style of pizza, it's going
to be too much. A regano to me means, okay,
(03:00):
they're not buying great tomatoes. They're really trying to doctor
them up. Is a cooked sauce, which means it's probably
a buy the slice pizza. It's gonna be a dark,
pasty sauce, which always kind of turns me off personally.
So that's number one. You want the tomato to be
bright and fresh. I wanted to be a good tomato.
You know, if you see heat lamps over a pizza's,
that's that's terrible. If I see thirty forty pizza sitting
(03:20):
out and like five people in the place, that's a
bad sign to stay away. Don't don't waste the calories
on that. Well. I limit the slices that I eat.
I limited to fifteen per week week, so I know
if I'm gonna use one of those slices, I'm not
going to use it on something that looks like it's
it's like a piece of cardboard. No, you're not gonna
go for that. That's not what it's about. Because pizza
(03:41):
is so simple to make. Not to say that it's easy,
but it's simple, which means it's so easy to screw up.
So with food, the easier it gets to make a dish,
the more bad stuff there will be. But you know
it's the worst Mistakezza. Oh, there's so many really have
been noticing too much flour while stretching out a dough
(04:01):
and forgetting to whisk away extra flower so that you
get this like burnt flower on the undercarriage that gets
yellow and gets tart on your tongue, and it's grainy. Textually,
it's awful and it just tastes terrible. The easiest thing
you could fix. You remember two Boots. I think that
we're still around. They put the cornal on the bottom. Yeah,
I remember when they opened in these village. That's when
I lived there. It's so amazing. I mean, I didn't
(04:25):
grow up in this country, but I've been here probably
about twenty five years. So I always had friends that
they were true New Yorkers and born here. They would
literally walk an extra ten or fifteen blocks like no, no, no, no,
we're going to that place. And I was like, really,
it's like one o'clock in the morning, I gotta walk
another fifteen blocks. No, No, They'd make a better slice
over here, and sure enough, when you got there, you're like, okay,
(04:46):
But it was one o'clock in the morning. I was
probably gonna be okay with that one because we've been
at the bar for a long time. But what is
the history behind the dollar slice? Isn't that something that
just came around recently or totally. I mean, that's why
New York is so great that you can get a
slice of pizza for a buck and it's good. Well,
it's good, it's it's sometimes it's good enough. Again, it
depends on your level of sobriety at the moment. So
(05:08):
what you're saying you always have to be drunk when
you have slice. I'm saying that there is a right
time of the day for every slice of pizza in
which it can be the perfect antidote at any moment.
But that two am slice is not going to be
a good eight pm slice. So the dollar slice, which,
by the way, just to clarify for your listeners here,
we're not talking about just a price, because we had
(05:30):
dollar slices that were you know, normal pizza was for
a buck in the late eighties. We're talking about the
genre of the dollar slice, which is popping out so fast,
low quality cheese pizza makers who are not really pizza makers,
but since they're only a dollar, they're able to sell
so many of them that they're able to keep the
price down at least for now until their rents go up.
(05:50):
But historically, we're talking about going back to about the
recession two eight when a lot of these places started
to open, and now there are about eighty or ninety
dollar slice places around New York City. Really, yeah, how
do they pay their lot? Well by guaranteeing volume? Since
it was over ten years ago, I truly believe that
we will see fewer and fewer those places, as you said,
(06:12):
as the rents go up, as those ten year leases
run out, there's no way you can keep that price point.
It's going to be tough for them. But another question
about your tour, So how long is your tour and
how many spots do you hit when you're out on
your tour. We do a couple of different tours. So
we do a public walking tour where we take sixteen
people out and it's about two and a half to
three hours. We hit three pizzerias, each one of a
(06:34):
different style and a different time period. Of pizza evolution.
That's like a neighborhood specific tour. But then we do
a once a week bus tour just on Sunday, and
that's four and a half hours, four pizzaas, four pizza reas.
We start every one of them at Lombardies on Spring Street.
So Lombardies has this old coal fired oven. Before Neapolitans
came to New York and brought that food here. Wood
(06:56):
fired coal was just cheaper here than would but it
also made a culinary just vision. Because coal is much drier,
it takes longer to bake that pizza. The ovens are
built in a different way than a wood fired oven,
and so the food is instantly changed. So where was
it pizza invented? Then we cannot pinpoint a who or
a when, but we know it's happening around the late
(07:16):
seventeenth early eighteenth century in southern Italy, around Naples somewhere. Okay,
pizzas transformed. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, there's
a million different types of pizza. I was just in Morocco.
We pulled over and had Berber pizza. Okay, I thought
the tour guide was joking, right, But no, it's this
pizza that actually is more like a calzone but flat,
and it's got all this chopped up meat. It was
(07:37):
a chicken one, there was a land one, and there
was a vegetarian one with all of those Moroccan spices
in there. It was phenomenal. But I got a question.
They called it a pizza or is it something that's
recently been called a pizza that really has a cultural name.
On the menu, it said pizza had a different name.
I'm not I don't remember, but everybody in the restaurant
they were calling it a pizza. There are all these
foods that we now call you know, Oh it's a
(07:57):
Turkish pizza. Oh it's a Mexican pizza. But really it's
a flatbird history. And the way we see it is
as a pizza because it's round, you can cut it
into triangles, right, And I just love to say the
Turkish one. It is so good. It's one of my
favorite favorite foods. But now in America, there's obviously New
York style pizza, there's Chicago pizza. There's this thing called
(08:19):
Detroit pizza. So Detroit style pizza is fascinating because it's
essentially a Sicilian pizza. So it's a dough that is exactly.
Oh my god, I'm so heavy. You said that. Yes,
it's like Spini, which is like this thing that people
like think that Sicilian pizza exists in Sicily, which became
known as a pizza only in America. Yeah, but what
(08:41):
Sicilian pizzas in America is not at all what's been shown.
It is. They're like totally different products. No, but like
you just rattled off all these different styles, and the
way that I would define each of those styles is
based on the crust. I don't care what you put
on a deep dish pizza in Chicago, it's still a
deep dish pizza. So when I say Sicilian pizza, we're
talking about out what it has in common with Spnjoni,
(09:02):
which is that it's essentially a focaca. So the dough
is allowed to proof when it's in its pan, unlike
New York style, where the dough is stretched and then
not allowed to proof after the stretch. Instead, it's topped
and baked. So Sicilian is stretched proof left top exactly.
And then the thing that Sicilian has to do with
(09:22):
Detroit is Detroit is a Sicilian pizza. But baked in
a much higher pan. That edge of the pan allows
the cheese to be stacked all the way to the
edge of the pan, which is where it burns along.
You've got no borders, I mean, you've got no edge
to pick up. Yeah, like you know on a Sicilian
pizza in New York, you can hold the edge. That's
why I always get the corner. Corner. Okay, of course
(09:43):
I get the corner. I mean I'm always like, who
doesn't want the corner? With this list stuff, I'm like, no,
but the corners like be delicious part. I'm glad I
have friends who like the edge or like the middle,
you know, because then I get the corner. You must
go to Chicago to have the deep dish, right, yeah, sure,
do you like the deep Dish? I do? I do.
It is the heaviest thing. I mean, I remember we
had it once. We were sitting on the floor of
some hotel because we have to order it in and
(10:04):
it was just like that. It was the densest stuff
in the world. I don't know how people eat a
whole one. I'll tell you that. I don't know how
much you got through, but usually I get through a
slice and then I want another one and two bites
in I realized there's a mistake. This is a mistake,
which kind of sucks because you kind of want to
try different ones. Yeah, and I think it's just a
difference between the way people eat in Chicago and in
New York, which is why, you know, like every city's
(10:26):
got its own thing, and New York is really a
town of small bites and of eating constantly. In Chicago
is a big restaurant sit down. We're gonna make this
an event. Well, because the kid go outside. It's so
damn cold, exactly, and the wintertime you get into a
place and take your coat off, there's no way in
hell you're going outside, which is why it makes sense
that that's the pizza that sort of became a development
in Chicago. Totally, totally. I mean people ask me my
(10:48):
favorite pizza, and I mean Neapolitan pizza. I've been to
Naples many times. Gino Sorbeto is a is a good friend.
He makes that fried cal zone. It's so good. I
got to make that with him, so good, And the
line down the street it's unbelievable. I think they're making
somewhere like hundred pizzas a day. You saw the whole
all the different rooms he has back This is where
the stuff comes in, this is where the dough is made,
(11:09):
and then he has a special room downstairs. I didn't
go downstairs. So what it is is, I guess he's
had problems with some of the organized crime and whatnot,
and he's well protected, so he feeds all the cops
downstairs and the soccer team. That's so cool. You gotta
go down there. Next, I gotta join a soccer tea.
You gotta join a soccer team, will become at They
both said, like the hardest things in the world. Yeah,
being either one of those things is probably difficult. You
(11:31):
hold a record in the Guinness Book Award Records. That's
pretty impressive, and it's for your pizza box collection. First
of all, why are you a hoarder? Sound like, what's
going on? Where do you put these things? So I'm
not a hoarder, but thank you do have How many
do you have? Now? I have one hundred seventy six. Okay,
that's a lot of pizza box I keep them in
(11:51):
my closet in my apartment. Three hundred of them are
in my parents house. I'll tell you that Okay, so
that's good. It's three hundred that I don't need as
much as the other. Are they insured? They are insured.
I love it absolutely. Very few people ask me that,
what's value that a hundred thousand dollars? Wow? You see? Well,
because listen, a pizza box is designed to be thrown
(12:13):
in the garbage. It's scarcity becomes its value. Right. So
I've got pizza boxes that are thirty years old and
nobody has them because they're by definition in the garbage.
You have foreign pizza boxes as well. I think I've
got about ninety two countries. Countries. Okay, well, I'm glad
we got through that. A couple more questions here. First
of all, what's your favorite pizza? Margarita? Pizza? Just straight
(12:33):
up yeah, boring? No, what even boring? It's like, got
everything you want and a pizza right there. For some reason,
I just love the salty, oh totally. But I just
feel like a well baked pizza margarita where the cheese
has just only slightly puddled, finished with an olive oil
that's like bright and smooth, almost buttery. There's nothing like that. Whoa,
that was sexy. I who I'm glad you felt this
(12:57):
just got a little it's got a little warm in here.
All right, it's that time. I'd like to play a
little game at the end. I'm gonna ask you a question.
You give me the first word that pops in your head. Cheese,
are pepperoni, thicker thin crust? Team? Pineapple or no? Yeah, pineapple?
Why not? Piece? Or a slice? Slice? Coast? Come on, alright?
A pizza or a pie? A pie, A folder or
(13:19):
a forking knife. I'm actually a semi folder. You have
to have your favorite topping. Oh, sausage crumbled, the chunks
out of the casing, chunks, black pepper, garlic, fennel seeds, Yeah,
put it on rall, Okay, here we go. All right,
that's it. We gotta go, man, I gotta go get
a pizza. Thank you so much, Thanks for having me.
(13:40):
We'll be right back after a quick break. Welcome back
to food three sixty. I want to talk to someone
who really knows the art of making pizza. Nancy Silverton.
She's a James Beard Award winning chef and co owner
of Pizzeria Mozza and Ostia Mozza in l A While
in college, she realized she wanted to be a chef,
(14:00):
so she went on to study at the Cordon Blue
in London and then they called Leon in France. She
worked as a patry chef at Michael's and Santa Monica
and then for Wolfgang Pucketspago and Beverly Hills. Nancy is
best known for her devotion to bread and mozzarella. She
popularized artisanal bread in l a and gained a cult
following when she opened the LaBrea Bakery in If you
(14:21):
haven't seen her episode of Chef's Table on Netflix, do
yourself a favor. Watch it soon. But don't do it
on an empty stomach. You'll be starving by the end
of it. All right, Nancy, thank you so much for
joining me today. This is very exciting, obviously, because I
love you so much and you're on my show and
I think you're just an amazing person. The only upsetting
thing is that we're not in the same studio at
(14:41):
the same time. Busy schedules do not allow us to
hang out together enough, and that's just something we have.
I think it's something that has to be changed. So
my first question for you was, after you decided to
become a cook, you went off to cooking school you
did a couple of things, but one of your first
jobs was at Michael's. Well, you know, Jonathan Waxman hired me. Oh,
he was there as well, Yes, yes, So when I
(15:03):
came in, Jonathan was the chef and he was the
one that was not only hired me, but let me
know that he didn't have a position on the hotline,
which is what I wanted to do, but that I
was going to be the assistant pastry chef, a position
that I really didn't want, but it got me in
the door of Michael's and a lifelong relationship with Jonathan Waxman.
(15:27):
And then you went and worked for Wolfgang Puck. How
did you make the transition from dessert to bread? Wolfgang
always told me the two most important parts of the
meal were the bread when people sat down and the
dessert when they left, and I always remembered that in
developing the menu and thinking about my own restaurant, Campaniely,
I was very frustrated. I didn't know where I was
(15:48):
going to get my bread front because at that time
in Los Angeles, there were not really any options. And
it was then that I thought that if we could
find a building that was large enough and I could
have a bakery on premise. You made this place absolutely
like the perfect bread place for l A and then
you you sold it. So the restaurant or the bakery
(16:08):
opened in eighty nine, and by two thousand and two
we had interest in somebody acquiring it. And for me
at that time it was the perfect thing to do,
because it had become sort of a beast, way too
large for myself a man. I opened that bakery because
I wanted to mix and shape and bake every loaf
(16:30):
of bread, and within the first year we had to
move to a much larger facility. As proud of I
was of the product, it wasn't as personal for me anymore.
And I think what I love about the baking of
the bread is doing it, and then I like eating
it also. It's something that you can't change the process.
You just have to understand it and then make little
(16:52):
subtle changes, and it's frustrating but ultimately so satisfying. You
can't just turn up the heat and cook of higher,
or braise it longer, or add more salt. It's a
lot more challenging than that. So now you have Osteria Moats,
Pizzeria Mozza. When you open those restaurants. O way, don't
forget Kiths Baka exactly, but those two it was your
(17:13):
love of bread and mozzarella. You sort of joined them
together and started making pizza. What brought you to go there? Well,
you know, I think that the way I cook and
the way that I sort of am inspired is usually
because someone else has done it before, and I'm in
awe because I had never had a pizza before that
that really really drew me in. You it was usually
(17:34):
an excuse to hold melted cheese and tomato sauce, which
is also good too. But when I had Cris Bianco's
pizza out in Phoenix, Arizona, after one bite, you know,
I had that same feeling like, one day, I'm going
to figure out how to make a great pizza, but
I just never had the opportunity. What kind of pizza
have you come up with at the restaurant. I come
(17:56):
from the bread baking background, right, so I have to
make sure that that's a big part of what I make,
and so I really appreciate the structure of bread and
therefore the structure of pizza. So when a slice of
pizza is cut, I really love to examine the side
(18:18):
of it to see the structure and the open crumb
that it has. So my pizza is crisp hopefully on
the bottom, with a very open structure. It looks like
it might be a thick pizza because you see that
thick rim which is called corniche, but that corniche should
be filled with air pockets, so it's not dense, but
(18:41):
it's not a wet pizza and a soft dough, which
you find more in Neapolitan style restaurants. So there was
a lot of controversy when I first started making pizza.
You know, I would get these comments like go back
to Italy and figure out how to make pizza, or
your pizza's too crunchy. You know. Again, it was my pizza.
You know. It tells my story. It's amazing to me
(19:02):
because I've been talking about pizza now for quite a while,
researching this and whatnot, and the different flowers and the
companies that make it in Italy, and they used the
double zero and that's really good for Neapolitan because it
cooks in ninety seconds. But if you want more structure
and more crust, what are you using to give it
that crunch? Well, when I started the process of figuring
out how to make this dough that I envisioned. I
(19:23):
thought that the best place to start was a Italian
double zero flower, but it didn't end up working for
whatever formula I was following. And by the way, the
way I came up with my pizza crust is I
took the bread dough that I felt was the most
similar or the most compatible with turning it into a
(19:44):
pizza dough, and so I worked from there, which is
kind of interesting because where that loaf as a bread
loaf may have taken me fifty tries to get there,
turning that dough into a pizza dough was just so
much easier. Most of the work had been done. I
just knew what I had to do to change it
to make it, you know, stretchable. But it was really
a huge, huge help. That's amazing because I do remember
(20:06):
last time I was in l A. I remember pulling
up and sitting at the bar and having the pizza
with the zucchini flowers, and I do remember sitting there
and eating this pizza, and I think I had just
been Naples, and I was like, I think you're absolutely right.
It's not that thin, wet pizza like it is in Naples,
and it's obviously not a New York slice that people
have got to go there and try it. But I
have to say it felt like a perfect pizza to me,
(20:28):
and I was very happy to to realize that it
was the Nancy Pizza and it was what you had
envisioned to be a pizza, because you're right, it's a
very personal thing, yep. And I think that with more
and more pizzeria is being opened by chef types, I
think there's a whole lot of new styles being thrown
into the mix. So for you that you were saying
(20:48):
that having the right bread, having the right topping when
you're creating a pizza, how involved is that for you?
What's your process? It's very involved because I think that
pizza or that dough, just like pasta, they're not vehicles
to clean out the refrigerator. And sometimes you see it
at places like that, like where did you come up
with this combination? You know what I'm saying, Oh, yeah,
(21:10):
I've seen that. I like what's on top to be
very very well curated, including not everything works as a
red pie, And boy do I ever see it because
you know, at the very beginning, we were very strict,
and it's like we had to approve the combinations people
were making. But that got a little difficult because you know,
you've got to give the customer choices. Customers, you were
(21:31):
letting them choose what they wanted to put on it,
and you were disapproved. No. No, we would say, you
can subtract, but you can't add, because some of the
additions that they would make were so inappropriate, not only
the way I could tell that they would taste, but visually.
But we got a little bit more lenient. So, for instance,
if you come into me and you say you want
(21:51):
the margarita, but can I add mushrooms, I'm gonna say yes,
but I'm going to close my eyes when I make it,
because there's something about mushrooms on red sauce that just
don't work for me. I hate. Yeah, it's just a
personal thing, that color palette. I don't know what it is.
It just doesn't work for me. And so when I'm
(22:11):
thinking about curating a pizza, usually what happens is it
is a seasonal ingredient that's going to inspire a new pizza, right,
And that's always fun, But it's always the balance and
the shape and the way it eats. One of the
last pizzas that I did was inspired by a small
article in the New York Times Sunday Style section where
(22:35):
they were featuring different creative people on what they cook
at home. So the person whose article I read was
I believe she was a clothing designer and happened to
be a vegan. And so she said what she loves
to do when she invites people to her home, and
she loves to make pizza. And instead of making a
pepperoni pizza, she uses lemon slices as the pepperoni. And
(22:59):
I thought, wow, not only does that sound great, but
I also am always looking for ways to invite vegans
to eat at my restaurant, and knowing that they're getting
a dish that was it doesn't matter if you're vegan
or not vegan. It's delicious. So it's not just like
I guess I'll have the side of vegetables and a
green salad. You know, it is a red pizza and
(23:22):
on top of that are some mildly spicy slippers of
fresno chilies, and then the pepperoni slash myer lemon slices
on top of that, and then it's finished with fried
parsley and capers, and it is so delicious. I it's
just out of this world. And that was a great pizza.
(23:43):
Both flavor and the look of it is so inviting
that it has really become a favorite from all sorts
of different palettes. And I like that that's a pizza
prime people order and after they eat it, you can
tell them that there was a vegan pizza and the like,
and by the way, it was veganzing. People make pizza
at home. Do you have any tips? Well, first of all, absolutely,
(24:03):
a baking stone is imperative to bake the pizza on.
I'm finding that a stainless steel stone, which is not
a stone, a staneless steel plaque, actually conducts heat even
better than the stone in a home oven. I think
that one should not get caught up in making around
pizza because sometimes that's challenging for people. And also not
(24:26):
be too ambitious with the ingredients, nor have a heavy
hand on what's on top, because it's going to be
a little bit difficult then to transfer that pizza from
the peel onto the stone. I find that with people
sometimes it gets there's just too much going on to it.
This has been fantastic. I'm so excited that we got
to do this. I get to hear your voice. I
(24:47):
don't get to see you unfortunately, but we're gonna do
that soon for lunch. Thank you so much, Nancy, thank you,
what a pleasure. Well that's it for pizza guys. I
gotta go get a slice, but first I want to
thank my guests, Scott Wiener and Nancy's overton see you soon.
Food through six is a production of I Heart Radio
(25:08):
and I'm your host, Mark Murphy. A very special thanks
to Emily carpet In, my director of Communications, and producers
Nikki Etre and Christina Everett. Mixing and music by Anna
Stump and recording help from Julian Weller and Jacopo Benzo.
Thank you to Bethan Macaluso and Kara Weissenstein for handling research.
Food through sixty is executive produced by manguest pet ticket or.
(25:31):
For more podcasts or my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Food three sixty with Mark Murphy as a production of
I Heart Radio. So I said, look at, I'll take
the space for the restaurant, but you have to give
me that pizza. Rha pizza is so simple to make,
which means it's so easy to screw up, like a
screen showing it right. Yes, Welcome to Food three sixty,
(00:29):
the podcast that serves up some serious of food for thought.
I'm your host, Mark Murphy. Some of you may know
me as a chef and a New York restaurateur. Today
we're going to be discussing America's favorite food, and that's pizza.
At the start of the show, you heard the voices
of Nancy Silverton and Scott Winer. Nancy a world renowned
(00:50):
chef that loves pizza, and Scott whose obsession for it
turned into a full fledged career. I sat down first
with Scott, who owns Scott's Pizza Tours and guided bus
and walking tour that visits some of New York's best pizzerias.
He also writes a pizza column and judges competitions, and
he's in the Guinness Book of World Records. We're going
to talk about that a little later on Scott, Thank
(01:15):
you so much for being here today. I wanted to
talk to you about pizza, obviously because you're the pizza man, right, yeah,
I guess. So yeah. How did you get into pizza?
Probably the way most people who are involved with pizza
get into it. Like, I love eating pizza, That's pretty
much it. But I love eating pizza so much that
the nuances and differences amongst styles started to really come
out to me as I was like, it would explore
(01:36):
pizzaias beyond my hometown. Right, But most people that just
get really into pizza and want nuance and all those
fancy things, they don't make it a career. How did
you turn this into your career? Well, because I think
most people don't see nuance as understanding the difference of
bake temperature and bake time and air movement of an oven.
And that's the stuff that made in my career is
when I started noticing that there were differences and that
(01:57):
those differences had historic and scientific reasons. So I would
take my friends to Pizzaia's and explain to them the
reasons for the differences, and then that turned into more
people wanting to do that and have that experience. And
like when I started calling it a tour and selling
tickets and having a website, that's when I realized that
I probably didn't need to get a real job. And
(02:17):
this is this is it. How long you've been doing this.
It'll be eleven years at the end of this month.
That is pretty amazing. And I'm sure there's a lot
of people kicking themselves in the butt right now, going
why didn't I think of that? Well? I meet a
lot of people on my tours who say, oh, you know,
I thought about doing this twenty years ago, and I said,
I kind of wish you would have done it, because
I would love to go on it. But then you
have to have some of them boring job or something
(02:38):
like that, like a pizza historian. I mean, that's probably interesting,
but just sitting there reading books about it. At least
you're out there eating it. But I do that too.
When you walk into a pizza store when you know
it's going to be good and the smell is at
the look of the place, what's gonna tell you it's
gonna be a good pie? There are a few things
that happened right upon walking in overwhelming smell of a
regano usually tells me the style of pizza, it's going
to be too much. A regano to me means, okay,
(03:00):
they're not buying great tomatoes. They're really trying to doctor
them up. Is a cooked sauce, which means it's probably
a buy the slice pizza. It's gonna be a dark,
pasty sauce, which always kind of turns me off personally.
So that's number one. You want the tomato to be
bright and fresh. I wanted to be a good tomato.
You know, if you see heat lamps over a pizza's,
that's that's terrible. If I see thirty forty pizza sitting
(03:20):
out and like five people in the place, that's a
bad sign to stay away. Don't don't waste the calories
on that. Well. I limit the slices that I eat.
I limited to fifteen per week week, so I know
if I'm gonna use one of those slices, I'm not
going to use it on something that looks like it's
it's like a piece of cardboard. No, you're not gonna
go for that. That's not what it's about. Because pizza
(03:41):
is so simple to make. Not to say that it's easy,
but it's simple, which means it's so easy to screw up.
So with food, the easier it gets to make a dish,
the more bad stuff there will be. But you know
it's the worst Mistakezza. Oh, there's so many really have
been noticing too much flour while stretching out a dough
(04:01):
and forgetting to whisk away extra flower so that you
get this like burnt flower on the undercarriage that gets
yellow and gets tart on your tongue, and it's grainy. Textually,
it's awful and it just tastes terrible. The easiest thing
you could fix. You remember two Boots. I think that
we're still around. They put the cornal on the bottom. Yeah,
I remember when they opened in these village. That's when
I lived there. It's so amazing. I mean, I didn't
(04:25):
grow up in this country, but I've been here probably
about twenty five years. So I always had friends that
they were true New Yorkers and born here. They would
literally walk an extra ten or fifteen blocks like no, no, no, no,
we're going to that place. And I was like, really,
it's like one o'clock in the morning, I gotta walk
another fifteen blocks. No, No, They'd make a better slice
over here, and sure enough, when you got there, you're like, okay,
(04:46):
But it was one o'clock in the morning. I was
probably gonna be okay with that one because we've been
at the bar for a long time. But what is
the history behind the dollar slice? Isn't that something that
just came around recently or totally. I mean, that's why
New York is so great that you can get a
slice of pizza for a buck and it's good. Well,
it's good, it's it's sometimes it's good enough. Again, it
depends on your level of sobriety at the moment. So
(05:08):
what you're saying you always have to be drunk when
you have slice. I'm saying that there is a right
time of the day for every slice of pizza in
which it can be the perfect antidote at any moment.
But that two am slice is not going to be
a good eight pm slice. So the dollar slice, which,
by the way, just to clarify for your listeners here,
we're not talking about just a price, because we had
(05:30):
dollar slices that were you know, normal pizza was for
a buck in the late eighties. We're talking about the
genre of the dollar slice, which is popping out so fast,
low quality cheese pizza makers who are not really pizza makers,
but since they're only a dollar, they're able to sell
so many of them that they're able to keep the
price down at least for now until their rents go up.
(05:50):
But historically, we're talking about going back to about the
recession two eight when a lot of these places started
to open, and now there are about eighty or ninety
dollar slice places around New York City. Really, yeah, how
do they pay their lot? Well by guaranteeing volume? Since
it was over ten years ago, I truly believe that
we will see fewer and fewer those places, as you said,
(06:12):
as the rents go up, as those ten year leases
run out, there's no way you can keep that price point.
It's going to be tough for them. But another question
about your tour, So how long is your tour and
how many spots do you hit when you're out on
your tour. We do a couple of different tours. So
we do a public walking tour where we take sixteen
people out and it's about two and a half to
three hours. We hit three pizzerias, each one of a
(06:34):
different style and a different time period. Of pizza evolution.
That's like a neighborhood specific tour. But then we do
a once a week bus tour just on Sunday, and
that's four and a half hours, four pizzaas, four pizza reas.
We start every one of them at Lombardies on Spring Street.
So Lombardies has this old coal fired oven. Before Neapolitans
came to New York and brought that food here. Wood
(06:56):
fired coal was just cheaper here than would but it
also made a culinary just vision. Because coal is much drier,
it takes longer to bake that pizza. The ovens are
built in a different way than a wood fired oven,
and so the food is instantly changed. So where was
it pizza invented? Then we cannot pinpoint a who or
a when, but we know it's happening around the late
(07:16):
seventeenth early eighteenth century in southern Italy, around Naples somewhere. Okay,
pizzas transformed. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, there's
a million different types of pizza. I was just in Morocco.
We pulled over and had Berber pizza. Okay, I thought
the tour guide was joking, right, But no, it's this
pizza that actually is more like a calzone but flat,
and it's got all this chopped up meat. It was
(07:37):
a chicken one, there was a land one, and there
was a vegetarian one with all of those Moroccan spices
in there. It was phenomenal. But I got a question.
They called it a pizza or is it something that's
recently been called a pizza that really has a cultural name.
On the menu, it said pizza had a different name.
I'm not I don't remember, but everybody in the restaurant
they were calling it a pizza. There are all these
foods that we now call you know, Oh it's a
(07:57):
Turkish pizza. Oh it's a Mexican pizza. But really it's
a flatbird history. And the way we see it is
as a pizza because it's round, you can cut it
into triangles, right, And I just love to say the
Turkish one. It is so good. It's one of my
favorite favorite foods. But now in America, there's obviously New
York style pizza, there's Chicago pizza. There's this thing called
(08:19):
Detroit pizza. So Detroit style pizza is fascinating because it's
essentially a Sicilian pizza. So it's a dough that is exactly.
Oh my god, I'm so heavy. You said that. Yes,
it's like Spini, which is like this thing that people
like think that Sicilian pizza exists in Sicily, which became
known as a pizza only in America. Yeah, but what
(08:41):
Sicilian pizzas in America is not at all what's been shown.
It is. They're like totally different products. No, but like
you just rattled off all these different styles, and the
way that I would define each of those styles is
based on the crust. I don't care what you put
on a deep dish pizza in Chicago, it's still a
deep dish pizza. So when I say Sicilian pizza, we're
talking about out what it has in common with Spnjoni,
(09:02):
which is that it's essentially a focaca. So the dough
is allowed to proof when it's in its pan, unlike
New York style, where the dough is stretched and then
not allowed to proof after the stretch. Instead, it's topped
and baked. So Sicilian is stretched proof left top exactly.
And then the thing that Sicilian has to do with
(09:22):
Detroit is Detroit is a Sicilian pizza. But baked in
a much higher pan. That edge of the pan allows
the cheese to be stacked all the way to the
edge of the pan, which is where it burns along.
You've got no borders, I mean, you've got no edge
to pick up. Yeah, like you know on a Sicilian
pizza in New York, you can hold the edge. That's
why I always get the corner. Corner. Okay, of course
(09:43):
I get the corner. I mean I'm always like, who
doesn't want the corner? With this list stuff, I'm like, no,
but the corners like be delicious part. I'm glad I
have friends who like the edge or like the middle,
you know, because then I get the corner. You must
go to Chicago to have the deep dish, right, yeah, sure,
do you like the deep Dish? I do? I do.
It is the heaviest thing. I mean, I remember we
had it once. We were sitting on the floor of
some hotel because we have to order it in and
(10:04):
it was just like that. It was the densest stuff
in the world. I don't know how people eat a
whole one. I'll tell you that. I don't know how
much you got through, but usually I get through a
slice and then I want another one and two bites
in I realized there's a mistake. This is a mistake,
which kind of sucks because you kind of want to
try different ones. Yeah, and I think it's just a
difference between the way people eat in Chicago and in
New York, which is why, you know, like every city's
(10:26):
got its own thing, and New York is really a
town of small bites and of eating constantly. In Chicago
is a big restaurant sit down. We're gonna make this
an event. Well, because the kid go outside. It's so
damn cold, exactly, and the wintertime you get into a
place and take your coat off, there's no way in
hell you're going outside, which is why it makes sense
that that's the pizza that sort of became a development
in Chicago. Totally, totally. I mean people ask me my
(10:48):
favorite pizza, and I mean Neapolitan pizza. I've been to
Naples many times. Gino Sorbeto is a is a good friend.
He makes that fried cal zone. It's so good. I
got to make that with him, so good, And the
line down the street it's unbelievable. I think they're making
somewhere like hundred pizzas a day. You saw the whole
all the different rooms he has back This is where
the stuff comes in, this is where the dough is made,
(11:09):
and then he has a special room downstairs. I didn't
go downstairs. So what it is is, I guess he's
had problems with some of the organized crime and whatnot,
and he's well protected, so he feeds all the cops
downstairs and the soccer team. That's so cool. You gotta
go down there. Next, I gotta join a soccer tea.
You gotta join a soccer team, will become at They
both said, like the hardest things in the world. Yeah,
being either one of those things is probably difficult. You
(11:31):
hold a record in the Guinness Book Award Records. That's
pretty impressive, and it's for your pizza box collection. First
of all, why are you a hoarder? Sound like, what's
going on? Where do you put these things? So I'm
not a hoarder, but thank you do have How many
do you have? Now? I have one hundred seventy six. Okay,
that's a lot of pizza box I keep them in
(11:51):
my closet in my apartment. Three hundred of them are
in my parents house. I'll tell you that Okay, so
that's good. It's three hundred that I don't need as
much as the other. Are they insured? They are insured.
I love it absolutely. Very few people ask me that,
what's value that a hundred thousand dollars? Wow? You see? Well,
because listen, a pizza box is designed to be thrown
(12:13):
in the garbage. It's scarcity becomes its value. Right. So
I've got pizza boxes that are thirty years old and
nobody has them because they're by definition in the garbage.
You have foreign pizza boxes as well. I think I've
got about ninety two countries. Countries. Okay, well, I'm glad
we got through that. A couple more questions here. First
of all, what's your favorite pizza? Margarita? Pizza? Just straight
(12:33):
up yeah, boring? No, what even boring? It's like, got
everything you want and a pizza right there. For some reason,
I just love the salty, oh totally. But I just
feel like a well baked pizza margarita where the cheese
has just only slightly puddled, finished with an olive oil
that's like bright and smooth, almost buttery. There's nothing like that. Whoa,
that was sexy. I who I'm glad you felt this
(12:57):
just got a little it's got a little warm in here.
All right, it's that time. I'd like to play a
little game at the end. I'm gonna ask you a question.
You give me the first word that pops in your head. Cheese,
are pepperoni, thicker thin crust? Team? Pineapple or no? Yeah, pineapple?
Why not? Piece? Or a slice? Slice? Coast? Come on, alright?
A pizza or a pie? A pie, A folder or
(13:19):
a forking knife. I'm actually a semi folder. You have
to have your favorite topping. Oh, sausage crumbled, the chunks
out of the casing, chunks, black pepper, garlic, fennel seeds, Yeah,
put it on rall, Okay, here we go. All right,
that's it. We gotta go, man, I gotta go get
a pizza. Thank you so much, Thanks for having me.
(13:40):
We'll be right back after a quick break. Welcome back
to food three sixty. I want to talk to someone
who really knows the art of making pizza. Nancy Silverton.
She's a James Beard Award winning chef and co owner
of Pizzeria Mozza and Ostia Mozza in l A While
in college, she realized she wanted to be a chef,
(14:00):
so she went on to study at the Cordon Blue
in London and then they called Leon in France. She
worked as a patry chef at Michael's and Santa Monica
and then for Wolfgang Pucketspago and Beverly Hills. Nancy is
best known for her devotion to bread and mozzarella. She
popularized artisanal bread in l a and gained a cult
following when she opened the LaBrea Bakery in If you
(14:21):
haven't seen her episode of Chef's Table on Netflix, do
yourself a favor. Watch it soon. But don't do it
on an empty stomach. You'll be starving by the end
of it. All right, Nancy, thank you so much for
joining me today. This is very exciting, obviously, because I
love you so much and you're on my show and
I think you're just an amazing person. The only upsetting
thing is that we're not in the same studio at
(14:41):
the same time. Busy schedules do not allow us to
hang out together enough, and that's just something we have.
I think it's something that has to be changed. So
my first question for you was, after you decided to
become a cook, you went off to cooking school you
did a couple of things, but one of your first
jobs was at Michael's. Well, you know, Jonathan Waxman hired me. Oh,
he was there as well, Yes, yes, So when I
(15:03):
came in, Jonathan was the chef and he was the
one that was not only hired me, but let me
know that he didn't have a position on the hotline,
which is what I wanted to do, but that I
was going to be the assistant pastry chef, a position
that I really didn't want, but it got me in
the door of Michael's and a lifelong relationship with Jonathan Waxman.
(15:27):
And then you went and worked for Wolfgang Puck. How
did you make the transition from dessert to bread? Wolfgang
always told me the two most important parts of the
meal were the bread when people sat down and the
dessert when they left, and I always remembered that in
developing the menu and thinking about my own restaurant, Campaniely,
I was very frustrated. I didn't know where I was
(15:48):
going to get my bread front because at that time
in Los Angeles, there were not really any options. And
it was then that I thought that if we could
find a building that was large enough and I could
have a bakery on premise. You made this place absolutely
like the perfect bread place for l A and then
you you sold it. So the restaurant or the bakery
(16:08):
opened in eighty nine, and by two thousand and two
we had interest in somebody acquiring it. And for me
at that time it was the perfect thing to do,
because it had become sort of a beast, way too
large for myself a man. I opened that bakery because
I wanted to mix and shape and bake every loaf
(16:30):
of bread, and within the first year we had to
move to a much larger facility. As proud of I
was of the product, it wasn't as personal for me anymore.
And I think what I love about the baking of
the bread is doing it, and then I like eating
it also. It's something that you can't change the process.
You just have to understand it and then make little
(16:52):
subtle changes, and it's frustrating but ultimately so satisfying. You
can't just turn up the heat and cook of higher,
or braise it longer, or add more salt. It's a
lot more challenging than that. So now you have Osteria Moats,
Pizzeria Mozza. When you open those restaurants. O way, don't
forget Kiths Baka exactly, but those two it was your
(17:13):
love of bread and mozzarella. You sort of joined them
together and started making pizza. What brought you to go there? Well,
you know, I think that the way I cook and
the way that I sort of am inspired is usually
because someone else has done it before, and I'm in
awe because I had never had a pizza before that
that really really drew me in. You it was usually
(17:34):
an excuse to hold melted cheese and tomato sauce, which
is also good too. But when I had Cris Bianco's
pizza out in Phoenix, Arizona, after one bite, you know,
I had that same feeling like, one day, I'm going
to figure out how to make a great pizza, but
I just never had the opportunity. What kind of pizza
have you come up with at the restaurant. I come
(17:56):
from the bread baking background, right, so I have to
make sure that that's a big part of what I make,
and so I really appreciate the structure of bread and
therefore the structure of pizza. So when a slice of
pizza is cut, I really love to examine the side
(18:18):
of it to see the structure and the open crumb
that it has. So my pizza is crisp hopefully on
the bottom, with a very open structure. It looks like
it might be a thick pizza because you see that
thick rim which is called corniche, but that corniche should
be filled with air pockets, so it's not dense, but
(18:41):
it's not a wet pizza and a soft dough, which
you find more in Neapolitan style restaurants. So there was
a lot of controversy when I first started making pizza.
You know, I would get these comments like go back
to Italy and figure out how to make pizza, or
your pizza's too crunchy. You know. Again, it was my pizza.
You know. It tells my story. It's amazing to me
(19:02):
because I've been talking about pizza now for quite a while,
researching this and whatnot, and the different flowers and the
companies that make it in Italy, and they used the
double zero and that's really good for Neapolitan because it
cooks in ninety seconds. But if you want more structure
and more crust, what are you using to give it
that crunch? Well, when I started the process of figuring
out how to make this dough that I envisioned. I
(19:23):
thought that the best place to start was a Italian
double zero flower, but it didn't end up working for
whatever formula I was following. And by the way, the
way I came up with my pizza crust is I
took the bread dough that I felt was the most
similar or the most compatible with turning it into a
(19:44):
pizza dough, and so I worked from there, which is
kind of interesting because where that loaf as a bread
loaf may have taken me fifty tries to get there,
turning that dough into a pizza dough was just so
much easier. Most of the work had been done. I
just knew what I had to do to change it
to make it, you know, stretchable. But it was really
a huge, huge help. That's amazing because I do remember
(20:06):
last time I was in l A. I remember pulling
up and sitting at the bar and having the pizza
with the zucchini flowers, and I do remember sitting there
and eating this pizza, and I think I had just
been Naples, and I was like, I think you're absolutely right.
It's not that thin, wet pizza like it is in Naples,
and it's obviously not a New York slice that people
have got to go there and try it. But I
have to say it felt like a perfect pizza to me,
(20:28):
and I was very happy to to realize that it
was the Nancy Pizza and it was what you had
envisioned to be a pizza, because you're right, it's a
very personal thing, yep. And I think that with more
and more pizzeria is being opened by chef types, I
think there's a whole lot of new styles being thrown
into the mix. So for you that you were saying
(20:48):
that having the right bread, having the right topping when
you're creating a pizza, how involved is that for you?
What's your process? It's very involved because I think that
pizza or that dough, just like pasta, they're not vehicles
to clean out the refrigerator. And sometimes you see it
at places like that, like where did you come up
with this combination? You know what I'm saying, Oh, yeah,
(21:10):
I've seen that. I like what's on top to be
very very well curated, including not everything works as a
red pie, And boy do I ever see it because
you know, at the very beginning, we were very strict,
and it's like we had to approve the combinations people
were making. But that got a little difficult because you know,
you've got to give the customer choices. Customers, you were
(21:31):
letting them choose what they wanted to put on it,
and you were disapproved. No. No, we would say, you
can subtract, but you can't add, because some of the
additions that they would make were so inappropriate, not only
the way I could tell that they would taste, but visually.
But we got a little bit more lenient. So, for instance,
if you come into me and you say you want
(21:51):
the margarita, but can I add mushrooms, I'm gonna say yes,
but I'm going to close my eyes when I make it,
because there's something about mushrooms on red sauce that just
don't work for me. I hate. Yeah, it's just a
personal thing, that color palette. I don't know what it is.
It just doesn't work for me. And so when I'm
(22:11):
thinking about curating a pizza, usually what happens is it
is a seasonal ingredient that's going to inspire a new pizza, right,
And that's always fun, But it's always the balance and
the shape and the way it eats. One of the
last pizzas that I did was inspired by a small
article in the New York Times Sunday Style section where
(22:35):
they were featuring different creative people on what they cook
at home. So the person whose article I read was
I believe she was a clothing designer and happened to
be a vegan. And so she said what she loves
to do when she invites people to her home, and
she loves to make pizza. And instead of making a
pepperoni pizza, she uses lemon slices as the pepperoni. And
(22:59):
I thought, wow, not only does that sound great, but
I also am always looking for ways to invite vegans
to eat at my restaurant, and knowing that they're getting
a dish that was it doesn't matter if you're vegan
or not vegan. It's delicious. So it's not just like
I guess I'll have the side of vegetables and a
green salad. You know, it is a red pizza and
(23:22):
on top of that are some mildly spicy slippers of
fresno chilies, and then the pepperoni slash myer lemon slices
on top of that, and then it's finished with fried
parsley and capers, and it is so delicious. I it's
just out of this world. And that was a great pizza.
(23:43):
Both flavor and the look of it is so inviting
that it has really become a favorite from all sorts
of different palettes. And I like that that's a pizza
prime people order and after they eat it, you can
tell them that there was a vegan pizza and the like,
and by the way, it was veganzing. People make pizza
at home. Do you have any tips? Well, first of all, absolutely,
(24:03):
a baking stone is imperative to bake the pizza on.
I'm finding that a stainless steel stone, which is not
a stone, a staneless steel plaque, actually conducts heat even
better than the stone in a home oven. I think
that one should not get caught up in making around
pizza because sometimes that's challenging for people. And also not
(24:26):
be too ambitious with the ingredients, nor have a heavy
hand on what's on top, because it's going to be
a little bit difficult then to transfer that pizza from
the peel onto the stone. I find that with people
sometimes it gets there's just too much going on to it.
This has been fantastic. I'm so excited that we got
to do this. I get to hear your voice. I
(24:47):
don't get to see you unfortunately, but we're gonna do
that soon for lunch. Thank you so much, Nancy, thank you,
what a pleasure. Well that's it for pizza guys. I
gotta go get a slice, but first I want to
thank my guests, Scott Wiener and Nancy's overton see you soon.
Food through six is a production of I Heart Radio
(25:08):
and I'm your host, Mark Murphy. A very special thanks
to Emily carpet In, my director of Communications, and producers
Nikki Etre and Christina Everett. Mixing and music by Anna
Stump and recording help from Julian Weller and Jacopo Benzo.
Thank you to Bethan Macaluso and Kara Weissenstein for handling research.
Food through sixty is executive produced by manguest pet ticket or.
(25:31):
For more podcasts or my Heart Radio, visit the I
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.