Also if you want a good guide for NY style pizza then this is a good read.
What is this, that it's 'on'? In the UK a grill is the hot element you put something under, in the oven. 'Broiler' in America I believe. I realise you're not in the UK ('500F'), but what then is this grill, that's clearly not the same?
> not heating up the house
An outdoor covered barbecue/smoker/pizza oven type thing?
https://www.homedepot.com/b/Outdoors-Outdoor-Cooking-Grills/...
The oven has the classic broiler, like you.
Some Americans will call it a barbecue too, but barbecue should really be equivalent to smoker.
My second favorite is in Switzerland of all places, in the small town of Meilen. Amazing toppings too. But I went there once since the start of the lockdowns, and it didn't taste as good. I don't know if it's the pandemic leaving a bitter taste, or just an issue for their supply chains...
I'm not sure if you have ever been to NYC but an interesting observation I have had with Gino Sorbillo is the pizza in Napoli is very good, but he/they opened a restaurant in NYC and it's absolutely average at best.
I assume they import everything, but quality wise, the places are polar opposites.
Also curious your thoughts of Da Michele?
On the Netflix show ugly delicious one of the chefs explain supposedly in Naples chefs will choose their mozzarella freshness by the hour (e.g. 6 hours or 12 hours) but to make "authentic" Neapolitan pizza with Neapolitan mozzarella you're not going to get Mozzarella fresher than 7 days old...
Bingo. Produce and ingredients are generally very high quality in Italy, because people care about and make their purchases based on that, rather than simply looking at how much they're getting at a given price and how good it looks on the shelves.
the cheese is the hardest part of the pizza to replicate outside of italy for sure, you can easily buy high quality imported olive oil, flour, and san marzano tomatos.
Japan have decent local dairy (Hokkaido milk) and their overall attitude to produce is similar to Italy which probably is a big contributor to their food culture
Bland will NOT be your problem.
However, you have to understand that a lot of the US really doesn't deal well with food that isn't bland--a holdover from WWII rationing and canned foods, probably. IIRC, McDonalds(?) went through a huge engineering process to attempt to add an ingredient to their pipeline. They found that adding cucumber was fine, but avocado was a step too far for the midwest.
That's something I'd love to read in more details about. Personally, I'd say avocado is a step too far in anything that isn't fruit salad. But so is (pickled) cucumber. I wish they'd remove it from their burgers altogether. The reasoning is, pickled cucumber overwhelms everything else with its sour flavor. McD burgers I experienced (in several countries, Europe and Asia) have a balanced composition of tastes, and that slice of cucumber there is as if someone threw a grenade into it. I usually hunt it down and eat it with my first bite, so that I can enjoy the rest of the burger in peace.
I think that heavily depends on where your circle is eating at in both places.
this has definitely happened to tomatoes. Supermarket tomatoes vs heirloom varieties are night and day
And for a different type of pizza but honestly my favorite pizza on Earth, try the Portobello pizza at Mediterraneo on the UES. They have no idea how good that pizza is otherwise they'd turn the whole place into a pizzeria and just do that everyday
It looks like it can also refer to instant active yeast, i.e. dehydrated beer yeast, that should actually be fine as far as I can tell (I have no idea of exact proportions however).
That being said, you can probably use a smaller amount of instant yeast, it definitely shouldn't be replaced as a 1:1 with regular yeast as the fermentation time is an integral part of the flavour profile.
Everytime I hear someone say things about units, it is not that people don't understand - there are other issues around that. For example, Americans know that metric system is better but they can't just switch solo until the entire nation changes which is a huge task.
Furthermore, those people who gawk at Americans still use 360 degrees for a full circle, 24 hour segments in a day and other weird units - for e.g. Switzerland still uses points for fonts! Not mm.
I would go ahead and even say - Metric system is based on base 10 which sucks, we should rewind back the history and grow 12 fingers because Duodecimal system is far better than decimal system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal
We are just stuck with base 10. Just like Americans are stuck with their archaic units. It has nothing to do with the fact that people are smart/dumb. I am gonna push back on that nonsense.
In practice, I constantly use both. To some extent it depends on the packaging of the ingredients, which may use either unit.
When measuring small things, it's only practical to use teaspoons and fractions, but otherwise I weigh everything. I even tend to weigh liquids in dry ounces sometimes, as I've memorized 8 fluid ounces = 8.337 dry ounces.
Using different measuring systems is no more of a mark of inferiority than using different languages. And similarly to languages, modern technology makes it fairly easy to translate even if you don't know.
It is definitely a misconception that you don't see metric measurements in the US. They're everywhere, including your car, school, stores...
I bought a second kitchen scale to deal with the minute quantities, since my old one is accurate to only 1g.
It's one of those pitfalls, kind of like having your tire pressure off by 1.5 psi* at a cars and coffee...
*https://jalopnik.com/how-not-to-explain-why-you-crashed-your...
Anybody who deals with typography in any professional capacity does so. It is the normal, not some obscure Swiss habit.
It is sometimes hard to get rid of 100+ years of history, in the case of typography thats probably longer.
Now, the amount of moisture a flour will absorb depends on many things, including its age, source and your climate. I'm in an arid region of Canada, and our flours are typically harder than most. Having said that, I'm lucky enough to have access to relatively fresh, locally milled flour.
So as I said, this moisture ratio looked off to me compared to what I usually bake with.
At 300 ml of water, I didn't even get a dough that would combine. I added about a tablespoon and a half of extra water, and still got a much firmer dough than I would usually want. After resting for 20 minutes, folding it left creases as it wouldn't stick to itself.
I've got it rising now, so we'll see if it still turns out, but if you're trying this with typical American store-bought 0 or 1 flour, I would recommend starting with 5-10% more water and adding flour if necessary once it's combined.
This is gospel for pizza. My wife used to run a NYC-style pizza place in college, and later a chain pizza place, and they both had 24-72 hour slow proofs in the fridge. In other words, they mixed the dough and let it rise, very slowly, in the fridge for 2-3 days before using it. Kenji Lopez-Alt has similar advice in his pizza articles.
Leopard spots, also called "maculatura" or "mako" in some pizza-lovers forums, is considered by some a mark of perfect maturation of the "panetto" (the little bread, i.e. the dough used for a single pizza); to be honest it's quite a mystery to me how to obtain a good one, and as it often happens in this matters reality tends to conflate with legend: I've also heard sometimes that it is a sign of temperature mismanagement of the panetto, and I am not experienced enough to have a say on this :)
I don't especially care whether or not my results would ore wouldn't pass Neaopolitan milspec.
https://www.eater.com/2018/2/23/17025722/ugly-delicious-pizz...
The dough recipe from the article is pretty legit and exactly the way I do it at home; the main problem I see is that it would be pretty hard to find good Mozzarella or Fiordilatte cheese (Fiordilatte di Agerola is slightly drier than Mozzarella, therefore producing less liquid in the oven, and also costs less), and I find that pizza done according to the Neapolitan recipe loses much when using a different kind of cheese.
A pet peeve of mine is that many recipes, while getting most of it right, use instant yeast; an important part of Neapolitan pizza is the slow dough rise using very little amounts of yeast, that should take from a minimum of 7/8 hours to an entire day or more (of course by storing it in a fridge).