Portland's on it way to becoming a pizza town:

Food lovers who know anything about Portland, Oregon, may first think of the city's renowned food-cart scene. Or its way with the microbrewed beers. Or its rising coffee-roasting culture. All thriving. Add to that a killer artisanal pizza moment.

(Serious Eats)

the latest and greatest

Sarah is finally here! It only took a few years, but she's now living with Amie in NE. We had dinner this evening at Blossoming Lotus, which is the other well respected all-vegan restaurant in town. Coconut sweet potato soup was consumed among other delicious plates.

I've also been reunited with another friend:

Remember her?

The Great Catsby presides over a new kingdom.

She's also better behaved. I don't have to distract her with a toy at all times.

Furthermore, as probably all the readers of this blog are aware, Portobello was listed in the Willamette Week's 2010 list of the top restaurants in Portland. Pat on the back to us. I don't have any new shiny blocks of color to share from the restaurant, but I did make some cheesy pizzas at home the other week:

...still got it.

ITEM! One Fuji bicycle, which has become my main form of transportation (with thanks to Oma for the capital, and Morgan for having a bike to sell):

 

Also, the other week I went on a short hike with Laurel and Jonah to Horsetail falls out in the gorge. It was lovely:

Sungold.

Oven management is really something you don't think about too much when you're only making a three or four of pizzas in a night. It's also pretty straightforward when you can only fit one pizza in your oven. The oven at home can generally bake two or three pizzas in a row before it needs some time to reheat, which takes about 15 to 20 minutes.

The Bakers Pride at work though is a trickier beast. Because it has two decks, but only one burner, and seemingly poor thermal mass. Any time I open a deck to put a pizza in, take it out, or move it, I heat is lost. And it doesn't matter which deck I'm messing with, if I open one, I lose heat in both.

And the temperature difference between the top and bottom deck is probably roughly 50 to 100 degrees. There are up and downsides to this, which I'll get into soon. But for now I have to grab my shin guards. My legs are in demand.

LA: The Sequel

I unclogged my bathroom sink today. Hooray.

In other more appetizing news:

Two LA slice joints had the dubious honor of my bum in their seats.

Tomato Pie is a kinda hole-in-the-wall greasy slice joint. It's cramped, with bar seating around the circumference, and seemingly without air conditioning. It the kind of place that could be a hive of scum and villainy (and I mean that in the best way).  While it ain't gonna be the origin of a pizza revolution, they churn out some very decent slices.

The Sunny Los Angeles Exterior

On the left we have their Margherita slice. On the right we have a slice of their Tomato Pie.

I sampled their simplest offerings. The Margherita was pretty straight forward tomato cheese and basil, while the tomato pie offered a marinara with a kick, sprinkled with some parsley and romano. 

While the undersides revealed themselves to be on the golden-brown side of things, they were pleasantly crisp without being crackery. The winner here is the tomato pie, which might be described as a grandma-style (or nonna-style), with an olive oil-infused, pan-baked crust, and a sauce that's tart, sweet, and spicy.

For dessert I went to Vito's and tried their margherita-esque slice featuring globs of fresh mozz and a uniformly super-thin crust:

Whoever the architect of this slice was, did not really think things all the way through. Vito's thin crust does not have the kind of structural integrity required to hold the weight of cuts of cheese that thick and and fresh tomato slice. So really, I ended up eating some cheese, then some tomato, then some crust, more cheese, and more crust. Disjointed is my best description. Also the slice was over $5.

Given that I ended up eating most of the components individually, I can say the cheese was rich and creamy—exactly what I look for in a fresh mozzarella; the tomato sauce was fine, but a little too thick and pasty; the tomato slice was your standard grocery store beefsteak slice, which isn't ever going to win me over; and the crust, while nicely charred, was dry with little-to-no rise on the edge.


Conclusions: Tomato Pie named their establishment after the right kinda pizza... though also, if they'd named it Sausage and Mushroom Pie, it maybe wouldn't have the same kinda marketing pull. I give it six and a half Mulligans. Vito's was overpriced and medicore for an upscale "sliceria." If I end up in LA again, I wouldn't go back.

Tales of LA: A Moon Landing

There's a water problem in Los Angeles. It's so bad that bottles of the stuff now cost up to $9. This is true. At least the $9 part. To be fair it was the water in my parent's hotel room at the W Hollywood, which has a nightclub on the first floor and the second floor, and apparently is also stocked with naked men to appear in hallways at odd hours of the night.
From the mini-bar:

yes, 200 ml of vodka is $33

My base of operations (facing the celebrity center for the Church of Scientology... the street was guarded by security with guns... on bicycles):

Think the apartment complex in the Karate Kid, but nicer

Also street traffic is now so bad they've instituted public blimps:

At least the pizza situation is under control.

First stop: Mozza

Squash blossoms, tomato & burrata

Margherita with mozzarella, tomato & basil

Coach farm goat cheese, leeks, scallions, garlic & bacon

Abita! Root beer!

Blond, yet crisp.

Big and crunchy on the outside, soft and airy on the inside.

All in all, I was quite pleased with the pizzas Mozza's volleying out.

Highlights!: 

• The tomato sauce on the Margherita was rich and piquant.
• An incredibly creamy burrata with a delicate flavor similar to egg whites.
• The puffy edge, which maybe appeared to be little much—almost showy—but turned out to be light and flavorful. I'd be happy to finish any slice with an edge as nice.

In all, I wasn't blown away by the pizzas at Mozza. They were very good, but in some cases it seemed they were concerned with appearances over palate. The squash blossoms for instance—as far as I could tell—didn't have any flavor at all, though they looked beautiful, especially with the mounds of bright white burrata floating on top of them. Also $23 for a 12" pizza is a bit pricey. UPN could get away with it, but they were serving arguably the best pizza in the country.

This is also one of the few instances were a blond crust was actually very good. It was crisp, but not crackery. And it held it's own against the weight and wetness of those burrata mounds. They also get some bonus points for being a fancy joint that also serves root beer.

Rating: five-and-a-half mulligans out of eight.


Further pizza adventures TK.

Culinarily speaking...

First point of business: Portobello now offers pizza to go (other parts of the linked report are false). So now you don't have to wait 45 minutes for table.

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#2

So when I've said in the past that there are no good slices in Portland, I was wrong. Give Pizza A Chance actually does some pretty solid work. When I originally tried their wares when I first moved here, it was toward the end of the day and the slices available were limited and had likely been sitting out for quite a while. I failed to take this into account in my thinking. After dropping by there for lunch this afternoon, I can say that their slices are better than most NYC slice options. They certainly blow Escape from NY out of the water.

I tried the margherita and the sausage and mushroom. The former was crisp and pliant, with dots of char on the underside. The mozzarella and basil used were fresh along with a couple of thin wedges of roma tomatoes. A mildly seasoned tomato sauce was there too, hiding under the mozz. The crust has some whole wheat in it to add a little extra depth of flavor (it adds a little bit of weight and chew as well, but it's a minor compromise in this case).

The sausage and mushroom slice was a little more pedestrian. The crust wasn't quite as well baked and the grease from the sausage soaked through a little bit. But it was plenty satisfying with Carlton Farms pork sausage and aged mozzarella.

I followed that up with ¡¡BEIGNETS!! from The Swamp Shack.

Some of the things I didn't think about when considering the life of a pizzamaker:

1. that my glasses would constantly be covered in flour
2. the hour and half it would take to clean the kitchen
3. how quickly I would need to rush to fulfill orders
4. how long I would sometimes have to wait between orders
5. wearing sneakers could lead to pulling a muscle slipping on wet concrete
6. I could make more than $100 in tips in a week
7. how tired my legs would feel—especially my right leg, as I absent-mindedly put all my weight on it
8. the amount of money I'd save on dinners
9. free soda pop and alcohol at the end of the night

char.

Two of the ten pizzas I made this evening:

Mushroom, garlic, basil, olive oil, tomato:

field sausage (vegan), pine nuts, basil, fennel, olive oil

Oddly, the most positive response came from the simplest one: tomato, garlic, crushed pine nuts, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Not pictured included a lemon & fennel pie, and pies featuring shaved broccoli stem.

I'd still like to get a crisper exterior on the edge crust. That's my biggest issue right now in terms of results.

If anyone has topping recommendations, I'm open to suggestions.

Dig the new digs.

So I'm leaving my job at VTech to become the pizzamaker at Portobello. We still have a bunch of kinks to work out pizza-wise, but I promise you, we will be serving some of the best pizza in Portland in the near future.

I'll try and keep this here updated with pizza developments as they occur. Last night was the first time I used the oven—a two-deck Bakers Pride, natural gas-fired deal. The temperature hits 650 on the dial, so it's kind of a step up from my home oven.

We've got the opposite problem though. Heat is from the bottom in the Bakers Pride (as opposed to from the top element on the broil setting at home), which is good in that it's more efficient as warm air rises and all. However in the current set up, the pizzas are cooking too fast on the bottom, and are barely cooked at the top of the cornicione when the bottom is practically a block of char.

As possible solutions we're looking at shrinking the height of the decks to make the floor and ceiling temperatures more even or adding a reflective material to the top of the decks to bounce the heat back down (and keep it from escaping as quickly via heat transfer). If anyone else has any ideas, I'm all ears.

So we're experimenting with some dough mixtures. Last night was 100% white whole wheat, and a 75% unbleached white-25% white whole wheat blend. Tonight is a 50/50 whole wheat-unbleached white mix and a 100% unbleached white. All Bob's Red Mill. I forgot to drop the dough balls in the fridge this morning. Hopefully they haven't over risen.

Photos are TK. I totally spaced on bringing my camera yesterday. I'll try and make up for it this evening.

another sunday pizza

tomato, vegan tomato-cream, pine nuts, salt, pepper, basil, olive oil

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vegan tomato-cream, pine nuts, garlic, mizuna (from Sauvie Island Organics CSA), salt, pepper, olive oil

* * *

margherita #2

* * *

margherita #1

* * *

Foolish Poolish is right. The top rack is where it's at. I layered about three sheets of tin foil under my stone and placed 3 bricks around the sides (couldn't fit a 4th due to the oven light's placement). Aesthetically, these are some of the nicest looking crusts I've made. Could've used a touch more salt though.

Eat This NY

Eat This NY: PIZZA DAY from Eat This NY on Vimeo.

burn it to the ground.

I've started construction of my wood-burning oven. Right now I'm kind of in the test phase. I put the fire pit together (which in the instructions specifically says it's not for grilling or other cooking purposes) and attempted my first mixture of perlite and portland cement at about 3:1 perlite to cement by volume. Hopefully this will set well and make for a relatively solid block.

I really have no idea how much water to add to the mix. There doesn't seem to be a standard ratio for that. I may have made it too soupy to set properly...The good news is that the perlite makes for an ultra light mixture, so making it easy to move and store shouldn't be a problem.

If anyone reading this has any knowledge they'd like to drop regarding masonry or oven building, please speak up.

Another Sunday Pizza or Four.

Moriah and Ian have conquered Bridgetown and left it in magnificent ruins. It will never be the same after they depart. They have slayed our first born and swallowed whole all the kale, doughnuts, and asparagus within sight. It's been awesome so far. Yesterday morning Moriah made a brunch consisting of a roasted asparagus and fennel salad topped with a sunny-side up egg (one for each of us), with a mescaline mix riding sidecar. And then in the evening we conquered Pambiche and Staccato Gelato.

Tonight Moriah made wilted kale with some citrus zest (AWE-some) and I made the pizzas.

Tomorrow brings Pine State biscuits and St. Cupcake.

Pizza documentation (that's Ian's documenting machine and hand in the upper-right):

Adam at This Is Pizza mercifully did not post images of the bottom of my crusts when posting about the the festivities the other week. Some of that pizza was, like, beyond blond. It was practically albino. Just to prove I'm not a complete hack, here's the upskirt of the first one out of the oven (generally the best baked of the lot) this evening:

via tribunali

this spot is one link in a seattle mini-chain. neapolitan style is their game—wood-burning oven, buffalo mozz, "pomodoro", and all.

via tribunali, a story in pictures:

readers of seattle weekly like this place (it may help that there are multiple locations, allowing for more readers to have a convenient location to sample).

there are roughly two dozen pizzas on the menu. it made for a lot of hemming and hawing. we had nearly a half-a-dozen visits from our waiter before we were able to divulge our preferences. to be fair, i copped-out and settled on the margherita (non-d.o.c. version), leaving the really hard choosing up to ian & jenn.

the results were pretty standard neapolitan. über-thin crust, a sauce made of what seemed to be naked, canned tomatoes; fior di latte; and a dabbing of basil.

the charring speaks for itself, but the edge was described by ian as spongy and i concur. pretty good flavor tough. tasted like fresh baked bread, so they were doing something right.

the highlight for me was the cherry tomato, arugula, grana, and prociutto pie. the arugula was infantile and did not have the bitterness or peppery kick sometimes associated with older leaves. the prociutto was cut remarkably thin and kid of melted in my mouth. the cherry tomatoes played the sweet card and supplemented the saltiness of the prociutto and grana nicely.

maybe the best thing about this place is the neighborhood. when we tried parking in front of someone's house we mistook an inquisitive look from the homeowner for the hairy eyeball. turns out the guy was just checking out the oregon plates on the car. he was a chatty native american fellow who'd lived in portland for a while. he knows a couple of the people who own shops in the revitalized area down the street, which is where our pizzeria of note lies.

that block of shops is like a super concentrated greenpoint, brooklyn. hipster-punk central. lots of bikes, skinny jeans, and at least one tricked out woman sporting an 18" pink mohawk with leopard spots buzzed into the sides of her head. around the corner from via tribunali is the fantagraphics bookstore, a record shop featuring soul music, a cycle shop, a couple of bars, a café, a button-maker rental shop, a letterpress office, and a mo-ped shop. this is all surrounded by a neighborhood filled with auto-repair garages, and a giant boeing complex. the falafel truck was down the block.

serious pie

i forgot my camera, so this review gets an automatic fail. the pizza, thankfully, does not.

the lowdown

serious pie does wood-fired, thin crust, oval pizzas. their dinning space is compact, with communal, bar-height tables. service was efficient and friendly.

two pizzas sampled:
1—buffalo mozz & san marzano tomato (fresh basil and dried oregano, not listed on the menu did actually appear on the pie)
2—black peppercorn cheeese, pancetta, asparagus (special of the day)

both pies had nice splotches of char on their cornmeal (or semolina?) encrusted bottoms. the edge of the ovals seemed to be coated in a salty, garlicky swab of oil, which gave the crust a little extra pop and zing.

The margherita, was nicely balanced between the light spring of the tomato's sweetness and the fattiness of the cheese and coated crusted.

The special pie's asparagus was chopped into tiny rounds and really played well with the thin strips of pancetta. the black pepper cheese was, frankly, a stroke of genius, adding just a hint of bitterness and spice to keep the tastebuds on their toes. i thank my friend ian for having the gumption or order this pizza.

additionally, lord chancellor thomas kemper's root beer is available.

the upshot

not necessarily what i think of when i imagine pizza, but a delicious change of pace. i haven't met another pizza exactly like it.

The List: Portland Pizza I've Sampled

Just counting them off in no particular order:

1. Gladstone Pizza
2. Pyro Pizza
3. Wy'east Pizza
4. Ken's Artisan Pizza
5. Apizza Scholls
6. Bella Facia
7. Al Forno Ferruzza
8. Pizzicato
9. Give Pizza a Chance
10. Pizza Depokos
11. Firehouse
12. Nostrana
13. Tastebud
14. Escape From New York
15. Bella Gioia
16. Pizza Schmizza
17. Good Neighbor Pizza
18. Flying Pie Pizzeria
19. Dove Vivi
20. Bellagio's
21. Carboni's (Closed)
22. Lovely's Fifty-Fifty
23. Hammy's Pizza
24. Hotlips
25. Roma (SE Woodstock)
26. Kindle (N Mississippi)
27. Slice Brick Oven Pizza (SE Division & 32nd)
28. Pizza Contadino (St. Johns)

My current favorites (12/15/10):
1. Ken's Artisan
2. Apizza Scholls
3. Pizza Contadino
4. Pyro
5. Slice Brick Oven Pizza

short rounds.

so i made this machine here at Laurel's urging. it's inspired by the "italia"—one of the pizza images on the pizza mania apron that my aunt gave me. that there is a ring of spinach on the outside. it was a little heavy on the toppings and the spinach could've used a little salt and garlic, but otherwise, it was okeedokey.

i'm gonna ride on the coattails of This is Pizza again for a moment, if i may. they recently posted a review of Pizza Depokos, a new pizza cart curiosity up in NoPo.

the good:

• pleasant smokiness right outta the wood burning oven
• nice char and chewiness on the crust
• friendly service
• our pesto, olive, fresh tomato, and cheese pie had a nice balance of flavors—the salty and sweet of the olives, the nutty-savoriness of the pesto, and the creamy cheese

the bad:

• the tomato sauce was both too heavily applied and too richly seasoned for my taste—it's a thick, almost pasta-y sauce; some people will likely dig this, but it threw off the balance for me
  

the ugly

• the blurtastic upskirt shot, which is unfortunate because the char is so purty