There’s a reason pizza is America’s favorite food: It’s fairly quick, delicious, budget-friendly, and full of variety. And now, that variety has grown to include not only an incredible assortment of toppings but also sauce bases, crusts, and cooking styles. “Pizza’s transformed,” Food 360 host Marc Murphy says. “There’s a million types of pizza,” ranging from Mediterranean flatbreads to Mexican pizzas made with tortillas, fancy pizzas to dollar slices, vegan pizzas to extra-extra cheese, and they all seem to be equally people-pleasing. On this episode, Marc invites pizza experts Scott Wiener, who runs a popular guided pizza tour company in New York, and Nancy Silverton, James Beard award-winning chef and owner of Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, to find out what makes pizza so special.
Nancy’s journey to pizza seems almost inevitable due to her passion for bread and mozzarella. After working for acclaimed chefs Jonathan Waxman and Wolfgang Puck, she opened her own restaurant, Campanile, which led to her also opening the legendary La Brea Bakery. “I didn’t know where I was going to get my bread from, because at that time...there were not really any options,” Nancy recalls. “Wolfgang always told me the two most important parts of the meal were the bread when people sat down and the dessert when they left, and I always remembered that.”
Naturally, this means the crust of her pizza is of paramount importance. “When a slice of pizza is cut, I really love to examine the side of it to see the structure...that it has. So my pizza is crisp, hopefully, on the bottom...it’s not a wet pizza and a soft dough, which you find more in Neapolitan style restaurants.” She explains that her pizza was a bit controversial at first, with customers saying it was too crunchy or not authentic enough. But for her, it's just right. “It was my pizza,” she says, “it tells my story.” Marc agrees: “You’re right - it’s a very personal thing...it felt like a perfect pizza to me.”
Scott knows pretty much everything about a good slice - he’s been eating upwards of 15 a week for 11 years guiding tourists around some of the best pizzerias in New York. Marc asks about the history of pizza overall, which is a little unclear: “We cannot pinpoint a who or a when,” Scott answers, “but we know it’s happening around the late 17th, early 18th century, in southern Italy, around Naples. That’s about what we know.” They also get into the history of the dollar slice. “That’s why New York is so great, that you can get a slice of pizza for a buck.” “And it’s good!” Marc says, to which Scott returns, “Well...it sometimes is good enough.” Scott’s favorite is a good margherita “where the cheese has only just slightly puddled, finished with an olive oil that’s bright and smooth and almost buttery, there’s nothing like that.”
“That was sexy,” Marc says. “It just got a little warm in here.”
Join Marc, Scott, and Nancy to learn more about the perfect pie, the difference between Sicilian and deep dish, and Scott’s epic collection of pizza boxes, in this episode of Food 360.
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