Yardstick

Dough
Conventional flours are fine for most recipes, but  many pizzaiolos use high-protein flours to increase crispness. Fresh or dried yeast is a must, and hand-formed and tossed dough is also crucially important to the process. It results in the softest dough and crispest crust. Many restaurants and pizza parlors use commercial or cake-flour dough because they are easy to work with, but the resulting crust texture and mouth-feel are noticeably inferior. Many pizzerias use machines to hand-stamp or roll the dough to make it thin. These “sheeters” extrude dough through two rolling pins, squeezing out all the air pockets that the yeast creates. The system is built to increase the speed and consistency of the process, not the quality of the pizza. The result is brittle crust lacking chewy texture. Most of these doughs are then placed in baking trays (to make the job of cooking pizza more suited to the skills of the part-time employee than the professional cook), which keeps the crust from getting as hot, and thus the texture suffers.

Sauce
Twin Citians like their pizza sauce sweet. But you need acids to cut through the richness of the cheese, otherwise the pizza is out of balance. The local standard is thick, the tomatoes cooked to death to bring out all their sugars. Many pizzerias offer the same sauce on pasta. Pizza sauce is not appropriate for pasta. Short-term cooking, which preserves the acidity of high-acid imported Italian tomatoes, makes the best pizza sauce.

Cheese
VPN restaurants (see page 92) use only fresh mozzarella and bufala mozzarella, but many great pizzerias use commercial preshredded mozzarella. The best of this is natural mozzarella, grated into large bags for distribution. At the bottom of the category are soft and white cheeses that do not resemble mozzarella at all, but are sold to many pizzerias because they are cheap and most customers just want gobs of gooey white stuff on their pie.

Ovens
Pizza-making is a tricky affair. We like our pizza crust crispy on the edges and tender-chewy everywhere else. Achieving this is easiest when pizzas are cooked in a wood-burning oven that reaches temperatures of 750 to 800 degrees. You also get a nice smoky flavor imparted into the pizza itself. Pizza made in a deep, tiered baker’s “deck” oven is second best, resulting in dependable, consistent pizza. Conventional ovens—even those fitted with stones to lower humidity for a crisper outcome—don’t cut it.

Neapolitan Pies
Verace pizza Napoletana—pizza made as it is in Naples, Italy—is considered by many to be the only real pizza in the world. Its hallmarks are the yieldingly tender but crisped dough with a blistered crust, made by hand and cooked in a wood-burning oven without being placed on a baking pan of any kind. VPN pizza should be topped with fresh mozzarella, San Marzano tomatoes, and olive oil, but often garlic, basil, and a sprinkle of Parmesan are also added. Confession: I love my pizza VPN–style (see Bricks, Pizza Nea, and Punch).