From thin, blistered Neapolitan pies to buttery, frico-laced Detroit-style pan pizzas, Peter understands—and champions—the importance of a good, flavorful crust. He’ll be kicking off our summer pizza series over at the Milk Street Cooking School on June 20 (get 20% off all three classes with the code THREEPIZZA), but was also nice enough to hop on a call and discuss the importance of technique over ingredients, why Italy doesn’t own pizza, and the only pizza rule he cares about.
Would you consider yourself a pizza minimalist or pizza maximalist?
In terms of elaborate versus minimal? No, I consider myself a pizza omnivore. And the general term that I use for this whole community of pizza folks that gather once a year in Las Vegas at the Pizza Expo, and have all sorts of podcasts and Instagrams and this and that—I call them “pizza freaks.”
And in the bread world—I also have a lot of history in the bread community—I call them “breadheads.” They're just terms to kind of consolidate everybody. And then within the pizza world, there are those who are totally committed to wood fired pizzas, and I call them “the fire freaks.” The ones who are just like me, we just love pizza of all types, and I just call us “pizza freaks” or “pizza omnivores.”
You’ve got some pretty wild pizza toppings in your books—cauliflower pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, a pizza based on a Monte Cristo sandwich. What would you say is your most controversial pizza?
It's a cliché, of course, but anytime you introduce pineapple to the equation, camps are going to form. And to me, it should be a non-argument, because the only reason people are opposed to pineapple on pizza is because it's not an Italian thing. Some are really fixated on pizza being an Italian product, which I'm not, and I don't believe it is. I think they get bragging rights for a lot of reasons, but they don't own it.
From a culinary standpoint, the principle of mixing sweet flavors with acidic and spicy flavors is universal—whether it's pineapple or any kind of fruit. A guy was influenced by Chinese cooking—he was a Canadian but he was trained in Chinese cooking—and he wanted to introduce the principle of sweet and spicy and savory onto the top of a pizza. So he used pineapple, and because it was pineapple people gave it the name “Hawaiian pizza.” It never came out of Hawaii, but that's many years ago and little by little it has gained a foothold as a very popular style of pizza because it works. My guiding principle when it comes to pizza rules is “The Flavor Rule.” And The Flavor Rule is: Flavor rules.
“The only reason people are opposed to pineapple on pizza is because it's not an Italian thing.”
I get emails from people all the time asking “Can I do this? Is it allowed? Can I put seafood and cheese together?” And all these things that they hear you're not allowed to do from the Italian Romans, the popes of pizza or whatever. And I said, “Well, do you like it when you put those together? How does it taste?” And they said “I love it. The flavors are great.” I say, “Well, then it passed the flavor rule.” So maybe you flunked the Vera Pizza Napolitano rule, but there's a higher rule. The flavor rule is a higher rule.
And so that guides me in my decisions, especially when I define pizza as “dough with something on it.” And the something on it does not have to be Italian. It does not have to be Mediterranean. It can be Asian. It can be South American. It can be anywhere because it's dough with something on it. And there are versions of pizza under different names in cultures all over the world. And since I'm an omnivore in general, I love every style of pizza if it's executed well. That's the end goal. And then there are certain guidelines that define for me what creates an excellent pizza.
I'm from Mississippi, so I don't have a strong pizza identity, but my partner is from New Haven, and he's very opinionated.
New Haven has definitely got some geographical bragging rights for pizza, that's for sure. And the white clam pizza is legendary. But all the pizzas out of New Haven are great and the coal fire aspect is part of the allure. It's great pizza. And for many years, it was the benchmark. Every pizza maker aspired to be as good as the pizzas coming out of New Haven.
If you define pizza as “dough with stuff on it,” to me that indicates that the crust is the most important part of the pizza. Is that fair to say?
In my opinion, yes. I think it's the key. I mean, any pizza can be good. If it's just a frozen Pillsbury biscuit dough, you can still make a good pizza. But my goal is to try to find pizzas that meet the level of excellence or greatness. I see the difference between good and great. It's not in the ingredients per se, it's in the craft and the technique of making it, but it starts with a great dough. So you can have the best, most inventive toppings in the world, and if you put them on just a so-so crust, meaning a fast-rising, uninteresting crust that hasn't had a lot of fermentation development and things like that, you're just going to get a good, interesting pizza. But if you want it to break from the pack and be memorable, and that's my real definition of greatness—is it memorable? Is it one that sears itself into your Taste Memory Hall of Fame? Then you've got to have a great crust.
And I think if you look at Frank Pepe's and Sally's and some of the New Haven places, they all start with a great crust. To them, it's not rocket science. They've been making it for almost a hundred years there. They just do it. They don't think about it the way the new generation of pizza freaks think about fermentation. They just know what to do, but the crust is always really great. It's got snap, it's got a crispness, but it's not dry and cardboard-y. It's thin, but not so thin that it dries out—the different things that kind of check off the boxes for that style. And then they have good ingredients that they work with locally, especially with the clam. They're getting the clams a couple miles away, right off the coast.
But the Detroit style, which is very popular right now, which is a pan pizza, almost like a cross between a Sicilian and a focaccia-style pizza. It’s a much thicker, totally different kind of pizza altogether. And it ticks off boxes also. And there are good versions and there are memorable versions. And it's the same with any style of pizza. The hottest style right now is what they call the bar pizza or the parlor pizza, a tavern-style pizza. Super thin, almost like a snappy, crackly crust. Thinner than New Haven. It is cut not in wedges, you know, pie-shaped, but in the “party cut,” in little squares and diamonds. That's been around for years and years but it's coming back in a big way.
And that’s a Chicago style?
Well, Chicago is one region that claims it. I don’t know if it started in California, but in the 1950s, one of the very early pizza parlors was called Shakey's Pizza Parlor. And the term “pizza parlor” became associated with that style of pizza. So parlor, tavern, and bar are very synonymous styles. And Shakey's, I think, was a California company initially. And Chicago had their style, and then in the New Jersey, New York area, there was the bar-style pizzas. And the main difference is just the way that they came about, but the category that it fell in was very similar, very thin.
The bar pizzas were called that because they could be made in a regular under-the-counter oven, like a restaurant oven instead of a pizza oven. Because they had to, because they didn't have pizza ovens in the bar. And so they developed a technique that worked there. Same thing with the Detroit-style pizzas, they don't require any kind of special pizza oven to do it. They could be made in a home oven or any kind of oven--convection, not convection--it doesn’t matter because you can modify the oven to do the job.
But anyway, they're all interesting and they all have good versions. They all have great versions. So if you're at my stage [in life] where I can only have so many pizzas a week before I'm putting myself in the danger zone, then you want to limit it to the really great ones.
What are the characteristics of a good pan pizza?
Well, one of the things that I look for is a great buttery, crackly undercrust—the bottom of the crust. And it's almost like eating a really good piece of hot buttered toast. So it should have a crunch factor, and then kind of shatter in your mouth. The oil or butter or whatever it is that you use to grease the pan—a lot of them use Crisco to do it—but the fat that you use to grease the pans fries the bottom of the crust. So if it's underbaked then you don't get that fried effect, you just get a doughy, bready effect. But if you want the best version of it, you want that undercrust to be golden brown and shatter just the way a good piece of toast shatters when you bite into it when it comes out of the toaster.
So Detroit style has that particular characteristic, plus because it's baked in a pan that's taller than a regular sheet pan, it can rise higher. I don't like my crust to be much thicker than an inch, some places do it thicker, and I think that is a detriment because it's too bready. But the pan can accommodate a lot of cheese melting without falling off the side of the pan into the oven. So you use a tall pan, at least two inches to two and a half inches tall, and it creates a very crisp outer perimeter crust. The cheese melts over the side and it kind of creates a little cheese wafer on the side of the dough. They call that the frico. And the frico is not really a pizza term, it's traditionally associated with crispy potatoes, but they started applying it to these pizzas because you get something very similar. It's almost like getting one of those cheese crackers—one of those Parmesan cheese crisps. So that becomes part of the characteristic of it as well.
“It's almost like eating a really good piece of hot buttered toast.”
And then, the other characteristic of Detroit-style, originally, is that they use a type of cheese called brick cheese, that has flavor characteristics similar to cheddar, mozzarella, provolone—all those flavors exist in that one particular style of cheese. It’s buttery. It’s not that good if it’s not melted on a pizza. It’s not the kind of cheese you eat out of hand. The flavors really come out when you melt it. And so the original Detroit pizza parlors used that cheese, because they were close to it, they could get it and whoever started it started with that.
But in more current times, a lot of people are using blends because it's hard to get brick cheese everywhere and it's expensive. So they'll use a combination of mozzarella, cheddar, and sometimes provolone, sometimes fontina. Muenster works really good because it melts. It's got the melting qualities of a brick, but it doesn't have the complex flavors of a brick. It's not as acidic. So you mix that with some cheddar and you've got something that tastes a lot like brick cheese. So a lot of pizzerias are using their own blend and they're not dependent on getting brick cheese.
How is deep-pan pizza different from deep-dish?
I coined the term “deep-pan pizza” to differentiate it from deep-dish pizza because there's so much confusion about those terms. In Italy, they have a term, the “al taglio,” and that means baked in a pan, so it's a category. And then within that, there's the tall pans and a standard sheet pan, which is only about an inch thick. And that's excellent for foccacia or even a Sicilian. Usually Sicilian pizzas are baked in a slightly taller pan, but they're all different heights. And so one of the characteristics is they're baked in a pan, and in order to get them out of the pan you need to grease the pan and the greasing can be anything from oil to Crisco. I use a blend. I melt butter—like 50% butter, 50% olive oil. It's still liquidy when I brush it on the pan, and then when it cools, the butter firms up a little bit and it holds the dough in place. And that's one of the advantages of Crisco or shortening is that it also is a solid fat, so it will anchor the dough and keep it from shrinking back. But I like the flavor. If I'm going to eat fat, I'm going to prefer butter and olive oil to Crisco.
So, the Chicago-style deep-dish, which has its own fanatical popular following, is associated with Chicago. It was originated there at a couple of famous pizzerias. There's the Pizzeria Uno and Due, and then there's Lou Malnati's, Gino's, all slightly different, but they're usually more like a pie dough. The dough is not the kind you stretch. They make it in a deep pan—some people refer to it as a casserole—but it's really a tall pan that is greased, and then they can pat the dough in. They can press the dough into the pan, just like you would a graham cracker crust. Some people use semolina. It almost seems like it's made with cornmeal, and I always assumed that it had cornmeal in it, but when I went to Pizzeria Uno and they took me in the back and showed me how they do it, they don't use cornmeal. It's flour and it's oil, a lot more oil than a regular pizza dough, because it's really a pie dough. It's not a pizza dough. It's a pie dough. And then it's filled with cheese and sauce and all sorts of other things.
“It's not a pizza dough. It's a pie dough.”
So it's not unfair to call it a casserole, even though it's been used derogatorily by East Coast people, where they want to denigrate the Chicago deep-dish. “That's not pizza! That's a casserole!” Well, you could say pizza is kind of a casserole too. It's a stupid argument, but it's a fun territorial argument.
And then there's a Roman-style pizza, which is, again, a generic term. There's a lot of different styles of pizza out of Rome, but it's mostly associated with a type of style of pizza popularized by Gabrielle Bonci in Rome, which is more of a focaccia-style pizza. It's bread. It has a fair amount of whole grain in it often. It's got big air pockets. You know, it's nice and spongy and then beautiful, fresh toppings sometimes after it comes out of the oven, which is like what we're going to make in our class. We'll be doing one where we put the toppings on after that. So that focaccia could almost be called a Roman-style in the way that we execute it.
Massimiliano Saiva, he's a guy that moved over here from Rome to try to popularize it here in the States, he uses a slightly taller pan, and he does a beautiful version of it. His dough is very wet, highly hydrated, more even than mine, and mine is one of the most hydrated of anyone's I know of. But he goes even beyond that in his method. He's got a system where he makes it four or five days ahead, and he folds it every day, and each time he folds it it gets a little stronger and a little firmer and it's spectacular. There's a few places that have tried to replicate it. He's training people to go out and do it but nobody seems to have done it as well as him. It hasn't quite gotten traction the way that I thought it might, but I wouldn't give up on it because when it's done well, it is definitely something that is like a “WOW” experience.
What I'm trying to capture in the pan pizza book is that all these styles fall under a generic category, but they have different forms and variations that they can be done in. But the key, as we said earlier: It always comes down to the dough. It's always about the dough and the crust. So like in that Roman-style, the long fermentation is a big part of the process. You can't get the same results if you try to make that dough in less than 24 hours. I think sometimes two and three days is all you really need to get maximum flavor development. But in his version, he feels that it's that fourth day that really makes the difference.
Do you also fold your dough instead of knead?
That's more of a mixing technique. Kneading is something that you can't really do with a really wet dough. You can knead it a little bit but it's so sticky. So the folding technique is a way of working with a dough that's a little wetter and stickier than the standard bread dough, what I call “tacky dough,” which is what most bread and most pizza doughs are like. You can knead that by hand or by machine without it getting all over you.
But a wet dough, like the ones we use in the pan pizza book, that one is close to 80% hydration as opposed to 66 or 68% hydration in a regular pizza dough. So the technique that a lot of bakers do with wet doughs is something called a stretch and fold. A stretch and fold is a way where you do as much mixing as you can in the bowl, get everything hydrated, you get all the flour mixed and then all the ingredients distributed properly. After a while the best thing to do is to just let it rest. Let the hydration take place. The flour will absorb the water and the gluten will begin to develop. The proteins gliadin and glutenin need to find each other and bond to create gluten. It doesn’t matter how fast you mix it, it still takes time for that to happen.
But the mixing time is not as critical as letting that happen so that all the flour has been touched by the water so that you don't get lumps. Then what I do is I put a little bit of oil down on the counter and I transfer the dough to the oil slick. I use a plastic bowl scraper and I mix it up. Then you take one end and stretch it and fold it just over the halfway point and you take some from the other half and fold it over that and then do it from the two sides.
So you fold it from all four sides and we call that one cycle of stretch and fold. And it helps the gluten not only to develop, but to bond and to form a gluten matrix that will trap the carbon dioxide. That's comparable to almost one minute of mixing—that one stretch and fold. You keep doing that, you just keep stretching and folding it until the dough gets where you want it. You can do that stretch and fold, cover the dough, walk away from it for five minutes or up to 20 minutes. Some bakeries who use this technique for ciabatta and things like that, they'll give it a 20- to 40-minute resting period for things to happen on their own naturally and then they stretch or fold it again. I do it in five minute intervals. The main thing is that you want the dough to be smooth. Each time you do one of these stretch and folds, the dough will go from being very wet, almost like a batter, to getting firmer each time. I usually do three cycles and if the dough still feels not quite strong enough, I'll do one more cycle of it, then I put it in a lightly oiled bowl so you can get it out later, and cover it and then start the fermentation process.
Why do you cube the cheese instead of shred it for deep-pan pizzas?
I saw that in some of the Detroit-style places, and I’m wondering “Why do they do it that way instead of using shredded cheese?" And I realized the reason is because the pizza takes longer to bake. So if I bake my Detroit-style in a pan, the pan insulates the dough, so it takes longer for the heat to get to the dough. It's not like a wood-fired oven where it just happens in 90 seconds. So the dough takes longer to cook, and that means that the cheese is being exposed to that heat longer as well. So if you just use grated cheese or shredded cheese, it melts so fast that it can very easily go to caramel, then to carbon.
I feel like I should have figured that out.
Yeah, it makes sense, but you know, you get lost in the weeds of making these things and you're not thinking about function. And at the culinary school where I teach, at Johnson and Wales, we're really focused on teaching our students the functionality of ingredients. And so when you start to think of them in terms of why you do certain things: Why do we use certain temperatures to cook things? What are we looking for? What are the functions that will create caramelization, or protein coagulation and gelatinization of starches? Everything affects everything else.
In the end, what you're trying to do with the pizza—the pizza dough especially—you want everything to be done at the same time. With the dough, you have to accomplish three transformations in the oven: The sugars caramelize to give you the browning effect. The starches gelatinize, which means they thicken and they kind of burst and suck up all the loose moisture. And that gives you the body of the bread. And then the proteins, which in this case are mainly gluten, they coagulate. And that's what creates the matrix, the webbing and the network. And those three things have to happen, and they're dependent on certain temperature thresholds.
“Everything affects everything else.”
So there's one more point here, which is that the definition of baking itself is the application of heat to a product in an enclosed environment, meaning the oven, for the purpose of driving off moisture. Baking is driving off moisture. And all these other transformations that I just described, they are not the definition of baking. They are the result of baking. And some of these things can't happen until you drive off moisture because the moisture is kind of suppressing these things from happening.
The balancing act between time, temperature, and ingredients is baking. That's the baking triangle. And once you understand that, you can control the outcomes by making choices. Anything that affects one point of that triangle will affect the other points. And again, the craft of baking is people have worked it out, by repetition. And then somebody says “It's so good, I'm going to make all these rules to protect your technique for how to do it.” And then they become the pizza rules and then god help anybody who violates those rules.
Speaking of rules: Should the toppings go over the cheese or under the cheese?
There’s different philosophies about that. In Boston there's a bar with a pizzeria in it near Logan airport called Santarpio's and they have great pizza. And one of the tricks I learned there was if you like anchovies on your pizza—and not everybody does, mainly because if the anchovies are put on top, they really dry out and become almost like jerky, and they become super salty. At Santarpio's, they put the anchovies under the cheese. They cover the anchovies with the cheese. The cheese insulates the anchovies, and it kind of melts them and turns them almost into anchovy butter. That one little thing totally changed how I do any kind of pizza with anchovies.
Other ingredients can also work that way. Some ingredients need to be protected by the cheese because they might burn. Certain meats, if they're dry meats. Pepperoni is oily enough so it usually will survive being on top. It may not get as crisp as you want it to get if you put it underneath the cheese. But I do it both ways. The cover shot of “Perfect Pan Pizza” is what we call the pepperoni deluxe, or something like that. And I have two layers of pepperoni, one under the cheese and one on top of the cheese. Because why not?
And so there's no absolute rule. The functionality of the ingredients should dictate that. Certain ingredients just need to be underneath or they'll burn. Certain cheeses, like Parmesan cheese, Romano cheese—they're very dry. Better to put it on after the pizza comes out of the oven or mix it in with the other cheeses if you want the flavor to melt a little bit. Most focaccias take 15 to 20 minutes to bake. If you put a melting cheese like mozzarella on at the very beginning, if there's no sauce to buffer it, it'll burn before the pizza's done.
I usually wait until it's halfway done and then pull it out, put cheese on it and then put it back in the oven. I even wait on the sauce. Usually I don't put the sauce on at the beginning because the top will be a little gummy. It won't quite bake on top. So I wait until the top gets baked about halfway and it's gelatinized on the surface. It hasn't quite caramelized, but it's gelatinized, so the sauce won't soak into the pizza. Then I'll put my sauce on and then my cheeses and finish it up that way.
In the end, the function of the ingredients and the temperature you're baking at, and its style, they all kind of come together to dictate to you what it needs. The pizza dictates what it needs, rather than the rule book.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Photos and art by Johnny Autry and Holly Swayne.
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