06-19-2020, 06:12 PM
Update - Fired up the BGE this morning to do a "New Haven" style pie, which seems to be just a coal fired version of what most of the brick oven pizza joints do around here already. it was really good, but I have some notes:
1) I made a sauce this morning that was very heavy on the fennel and a little more sugar than I normally add. Simmered over the course of 3 hours to about half the volume of the original canned tomato sauce I started with. Other additions were just garlic powder, salt, and a fair bit of oregano. Good sauce. Not sure how authentic this is for the style since most of the New Haven places seem to pride themselves more on the white clam version of their pizzas. Only other toppings were whole-milk mozz and hormel (yeah, I know) pepperoni since that's what I had around.
2) The BGE, using just cowboy lump, settled in around 650 degrees, and the first pie after preheating turned out almost perfect. For subsequent ones, the platesetter just got too hot, and I had to either settle for the perfect bottom crust and pepperoni only a little curled on top, or the perfect char on top but with a way too blackened lower crust. Next time, i'm going to try putting my wire spacer in to the BGE above the fire ring and an 11" pizza stone on it, and then the platesitter will sit about 3" above that, leaving an air gap. My hope is that this stops the platesetter from taking direct coal heat and heating up faster than the convection around the top can cook the surface of the pizza.
3) I did one without sauce for my daughter. She enjoyed it and I stole a piece, and the crust really does shine here. 48-hour fridge-fermented dough. Easy to work with, though still springy even without re-kneading. Removed from fridge 3 hours before making pies, right when I started the sauce.
4) Will take another stab. I like the style - I wouldn't call it anything unique, and it's kind of funny that it was all started by talking about a chain pizza joint, but since it was brought up in this thread, I figured I'd keep the discussion here. Because of the charred smokiness, I'll bet something like capers would go well on it, but for this style, I think just pepperoni is really great. I'll probably upgrade to better pepperoni once the bottom/top heat combination is dialed in right.
5) Holy hell, keeping the BGE at 650-700 for an hour and a half goes through a lot of charcoal. With current pricing, the heat source was probably about 10X the ingredients cost on this one. Got a total of 4 small pies out of one crust recipe, which was just full strength bread flour, instant dry yeast, salt, and water.
1) I made a sauce this morning that was very heavy on the fennel and a little more sugar than I normally add. Simmered over the course of 3 hours to about half the volume of the original canned tomato sauce I started with. Other additions were just garlic powder, salt, and a fair bit of oregano. Good sauce. Not sure how authentic this is for the style since most of the New Haven places seem to pride themselves more on the white clam version of their pizzas. Only other toppings were whole-milk mozz and hormel (yeah, I know) pepperoni since that's what I had around.
2) The BGE, using just cowboy lump, settled in around 650 degrees, and the first pie after preheating turned out almost perfect. For subsequent ones, the platesetter just got too hot, and I had to either settle for the perfect bottom crust and pepperoni only a little curled on top, or the perfect char on top but with a way too blackened lower crust. Next time, i'm going to try putting my wire spacer in to the BGE above the fire ring and an 11" pizza stone on it, and then the platesitter will sit about 3" above that, leaving an air gap. My hope is that this stops the platesetter from taking direct coal heat and heating up faster than the convection around the top can cook the surface of the pizza.
3) I did one without sauce for my daughter. She enjoyed it and I stole a piece, and the crust really does shine here. 48-hour fridge-fermented dough. Easy to work with, though still springy even without re-kneading. Removed from fridge 3 hours before making pies, right when I started the sauce.
4) Will take another stab. I like the style - I wouldn't call it anything unique, and it's kind of funny that it was all started by talking about a chain pizza joint, but since it was brought up in this thread, I figured I'd keep the discussion here. Because of the charred smokiness, I'll bet something like capers would go well on it, but for this style, I think just pepperoni is really great. I'll probably upgrade to better pepperoni once the bottom/top heat combination is dialed in right.
5) Holy hell, keeping the BGE at 650-700 for an hour and a half goes through a lot of charcoal. With current pricing, the heat source was probably about 10X the ingredients cost on this one. Got a total of 4 small pies out of one crust recipe, which was just full strength bread flour, instant dry yeast, salt, and water.