Guy "reverse engineers" Napoletana / NYC Pizza

A software engineer falls in love with the coal oven fired pizza from Patsy's on 117th in New York City - one of the city's best Naples-style pizzas, imho.

He spends six years uncovering the secrets.

He discovers that it's not the flour, it's the kneading.

It's not the water, but the "poolish" or starter. He also rests the dough in the fridge for one to six days, allowing lactobacilli to ferment.

As we expected, it's all about high heat.

He cut off the locking mechanism on his self-cleaning oven, stuffed a bit of aluminum foil into the door latch to "fool" the oven into "thinking the door's closed, and cranked it up to 800F!! Do not try this at home.

He's created a spreadsheet to help us with baker's percentages, he ranks the best tomatoes for sauce, flours for dough (not that much difference as it turns out), all-in-all a wonderful over the top reference.

It's also been boing-boinged and farked over the past coupla days, so here's a mirror site

http://www.sliceny.com/jvpizza.php

mchodera wrote:It's also been boing-boinged and farked over the past coupla days...

And LTHForum-ed, too! (But it's a story that bears repeating ... I copied it from a post on MetaFilter!)

If you're the least bit interested in the reverse engineering of great pizza, check out the masters and enthusiasts over at pizzamaking.com. There's some beautiful and quite indepth posts by none other than our own Bill/SFNM as well as other highly knowledgable pizza mavens.
Below are links from pizzamaking.com that attempt to reverse engineer the great pizzas from Difara’s in Brooklyn, A16 in San Francisco, and Patsy’s in East Harlem.



http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index. ... 504.0.html

http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index. ... 298.0.html

http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index. ... 053.0.html