What Do You Think of This NY Pizza - KoNYP

[Essen1]

Respectfully, Mike and Pete, but a 59-61% hydration dough, with a 5 minute bake time that produces that much color, can't be both floppy AND chewy.  That level of floppiness with that thickness factor can only be achieved with high residual water and the only way to get high residual water where that much browning is involved is with an elevated hydration dough. To end up with a lot of water (flop), you've got to start out with a lot of water.

If it was just floppy, then I might be open to the prospect of a lower protein flour <12% with a relatively high hydration (for it's AV) of 59-61, but... there's no amount of kneading that will ever make a <12% protein crust chewy.

Not that this makes a huge amount of difference, because I think we're all in agreement that this dough isn't worth reverse engineering, but, just for argument's sake, I'm leaning towards 67% hydration.  If you knead All Trumps enough, it will act like a much lower hydration dough (no tackiness), but still end up plenty chewy and abundantly floppy.

Scotty,

I know what you're saying but I don't think the dough has that much water in it. I thought they had compensated the hydration with oil instead (had a real buttery taste to it) but since Peter mentioned otherwise I'm kind of out of the loop here. I have never dealt with a commercially-made frozen dough and to be honest, I wasn't that impressed.

Water, or the evaporation of it, can give you tremendous oven spring but this dough was just flat. Don't know why.

[scott123]

Mike, the oven spring achieved by steam expansion is very much contingent on the level of hydration, but more water doesn't translate into more spring. Evaporation is critical to spring, but there's always going to be that happy amount of water that boils within the right time and a quantity beyond that, which takes longer to boil, which, in turn, impairs spring.  You can make up for this literal 'wet blanket' effect by ramping up the heat even further, but that will only get you so far. Every flour is going to have a window of hydration where the oven spring is maximized, and if you go above it, oven spring will suffer.

The fact that this dough was floppy, chewy AND oven spring impaired only seems to further my extreme hydration hypothesis.

I have to admit, though, that when I see frozen doughs I run the other way, so my experience is minimal as well.  There may be something else in play here that I'm not aware of.

[norma427]

Mike or anyone else that might be interested,


When I was trying the NY frozen dough balls at Reply 25 http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,13592.msg135737.html#msg135737 Peter included a link to Re: Making Costco Pizza Dough (Lamonica’s) at Reply 24 http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,9121.msg83041.html#msg83041  It can be seen at Reply 35 http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,13592.msg135880.html#msg135880   I got about the same results as you did with Lamonica’s dough in my deck oven.  Since I didn’t get the best of results the first time with the RNYPD Peter referred me to this link at Reply 45 http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,13592.msg135945.html#msg135945  You can see the results I got using the second dough ball at Reply 57 http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,13592.msg136950.html#msg136950   They results were a little bit better, but still wasn’t what I had hoped for.

Norma

[Pete-zza]

I have long been interested in how commercial frozen dough balls are made and used and, as a result, I have read quite a few articles on the subject. On occasion, I have even tried to apply what I have learned to a home setting, an example of which is discussed at Reply 721 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,576.msg62457/topicseen.html#msg62457.

Lamonica's makes a very "clean" dough ball without having to resort to all kinds of chemical additives and conditioners that many other commercial frozen dough ball producers use (see, for example, http://www.foodservicedirect.com/product.cfm/p/1931563/Pizza-Crust-Dough-Ball-16-Ounce.htm). So, I am not surprised by the simple ingredients list that Mike posted. That list is also consistent with the frozen dough balls that Lamonica's makes for the Costco stores as Norma noted. Lamonica's does custom frozen dough ball production, so it isn't entirely clear why the small amount of semolina is used. I would guess that it is to add a bit more protein and to help strengthen the dough. Some frozen dough ball producers use soy flour for the same reason. It is also quite possible that Lamonica's uses a flour with a protein content of around 13-13.5% and a hydration to match. I do not ever recall reading about hydration values in excess of around 60% for frozen dough balls but, as a custom producer, I suppose that anything is possible. But the common practice is to use a lower hydration than normal.

Peter

[Pete-zza]

Anyway, I just pulled the second dough out of the fridge, which has been thawing and fermenting now for two days. What I noticed that it has the same little dark specs on it as the Marcello dough ball I bought awhile back. That's only the second dough that I have seen those dark specs or spots on.

Could the cause be the semolina? I can't find the pics of the Marcelo's dough balls right now but it looked identical. I have never experienced those spots with my own doughs, even after long fermentation times, such as 3-4 days.

Mike,

I do not believe that the specks were due to the semolina, or at least I can't ever recall semolina being blamed for spotting. You can read about other possible causes of spotting in this thread: http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,12818.msg124032.html#msg124032.

Peter

[PizzaEater101]

As some of you might know, I injured my finger all in the name of pizza lifting a 50 lb bag of flour incorrectly and giving myself mallet finger.  Although only one finger is messed up and I should be able to make pizza it still is a hindrance so for now I will lay off making pizza.  The splint will snag the dough when I toss and spin it thru the air.  So for now I'm gonna go out and buy my pizza. 

I plan on going to KONY pizza soon and I'll give another report on my experience there. 


James

[PizzaEater101]

Yesterday my wife and I went to KONY.  Got the pep and sausage.  We got the deal for $20 - 1 NY Pie with two toppings, 5 hot wings, garlic knots.  Could have done the two pies with cheese only but wanted to try the wings.  Wings were flaming hot.  I can eat hot food but it was ridiculously hot.  Did not enjoy it.  Knots were okay.  The pizza was out of the stratosphere.  Have not been there since late June I think it was so it was a treat. 

Since I only been to Luigi once and that was months ago I can't give a good comparison but if I was to guess the KONY tasted very close to Luigi.  I'll opt for KONY since it's about 25 min drive and Luigi is in San Diego, 2 hour drive if lucky without traffic.  Yes KONY does not make their own dough like L does but that's fine because the dough/crust taste great as is and the sauce is super.  I timed it and it was 8.5 minutes from entering oven to exiting oven. 

My wife likes pizza but she's not as much as a pizza nut as we are here at the forum but she had a lot of great words for this KONY pizza.  She loved the sauce, the cheese, the toppings, the crust, the whole nine yards.  We'll be going there more.

[PizzaEater101]

If any of you are interested here are some so-so, did my best at taking pics, pictures of the KONY pizza -

[PizzaEater101]

The rest of the pics -

[scott123]

James, nice write up and photos.  Thanks for doing this.

I can completely understand your reluctance to drive two hours to Luigi's, but, as a NYer looking at the NY slices California has to offer, I'd take a Luigi's (or Bronx, or Avellino) pie any day before KoNYP. I'm glad you and your wife liked it, but I won't go near an 8.5 minute pie. Luigi's is most likely around 6, which is still not ideal, but it's still better than 8.

Was the crust a little on the chewy side or was it just right?

Thanks, again, for the detective work.

[Glutenboy]

Just had a large sausage pie there last night.  Those pics are pretty spot on.  The crust IMO leans to chewy in a NY street slice way.  I personally look for a crust that's thin, but leathery enough to challenge my bite.  For this kind of pie, it hits the spot, and I've tried everywhere here in LA for many years.  KONY is a local standout.

[PizzaEater101]

James, nice write up and photos.  Thanks for doing this.

I can completely understand your reluctance to drive two hours to Luigi's, but, as a NYer looking at the NY slices California has to offer, I'd take a Luigi's (or Bronx, or Avellino) pie any day before KoNYP. I'm glad you and your wife liked it, but I won't go near an 8.5 minute pie. Luigi's is most likely around 6, which is still not ideal, but it's still better than 8.

Was the crust a little on the chewy side or was it just right?

Thanks, again, for the detective work.

Glad to have helped out this forum with my trip to KONY.   The crust was just right in my opinion and not too chewy.   I will go again some time and time the bake time just to make sure I didn't make any errors.

[scott123]

James, for that much golden brown (GB), 8.5 minutes seems appropriate.

I don't completely understand how a low hydration frozen dough while produce some flop with an 8.5 minute bake, but, perhaps there's some aspect about freezing that I'm missing.

Glutenboy, thanks for the NY street slice comparison.  I've been pretty fixated these days on avoiding leatheriness, but I think part of that comes both from enjoying pizza that's been at room temp for a while as well as pizza from the fridge the next morning, and, slightly leathery crusts, when warm, will be a bit too leathery as they as cool. My own personal taste is probably straying a tiny bit from the archetypal 100% All Trumps slightly leathery NY style slice.

[Glutenboy]

Hey, Scott, question.  If you know, when did All-Trumps or just HG flour in general become the standard for the NY street slice?  The stuff I really developed my tastes on was from my local North NJ pizzerias in the early-mid 70s.  Were they already on the high-gluten flour at that time?  Even when I return to NYC and NJ, I can't seem to find anything that quite fits my youthful recollection.  It was thin, blistery at the rim, the cheese and the sauce were very intermixed.  The cheese was stringy.  I always saw a dusting of oregano applied before it went in the oven, and though no oil was directly applied, there was an orange drip from the back of the folded slice.  The crust was thin and dusted with flour/semolina; crisp and pliant but toothsome.  It had a flavor that, at this point, I'm not sure really existed or is just a product of my own nostalgia.  That's why I'm here.  Sometimes I think I've captured it, but it drives me nuts.  KONY is the closest I've gotten to it out here, but there's no oregano.

[scott123]

Glutenboy, while I probably had a few slices in the 70s, my passion for eating pizza didn't really bloom until the 80s, but, as far as my fixation on ingredients and conversing with staff goes, that wasn't until the 90s, and, by that time, it was all HG, so I can't say when the migration occurred with any real certainty.

To complicate things even further, my two favorite pizzerias from high school (80s), although still open, have thoroughly debased their crusts, and, much like you, I'm working with a 30 year old memory. I can picture an image of a slice like it was yesterday, but, the texture is a little tougher to nail. I know it was very puffy- and very white- extremely white. Snow white with a few charred areas. It was characteristically chewy, but I don't think it was ever leathery. I've made AP pies that have approximated it, as well as All Trumps doughs that were close too, although, in all fairness, the All Trumps dough was barely kneaded. Out of the possibility of my place using either an 11-13% protein dough versus a barely kneaded 14ish dough, my money is on 11-13. 13%, though, was still part of that AP/HG migration.

I think Peter's done the most digging into the AP/HG migration history, so I defer to his timeline.  For me, though, that was before my time.

Even though my favorite place debased their crust over time, fortunately, for the last 30 years, they haven't changed either their cheese or their sauce.  I can say, with absolute certainty that they've been using Grande all this time.  Now, as far as Grande's past penetration into the market, I think it's safe to say that they most likely have garnered the market share for at least that long.

Stringy cheese, in my experience, is undermelted/not bubbled cheese, and undermelted cheese rarely oils off or produces the precious orange drip.  Straight from the oven the cheese would be very melty, and if you picked it up too soon, perhaps you could get a pull away strand of cheese, but, by the time you ate it, it was very cohesive and toothsome.  The best description I can come up with is slightly pebbly textured and a little spongey.

[Glutenboy]

Sounds like our experience of the crust is different, but you described the cheese to a tee.  So how long HAS Grande been the top-of-the-line mozzarella supplier?  That's really a good question, and I'm sure when they infiltrated the market, the shape of pizza was changed forever.  One thing I do know.  The pies I've made that have come the closest so far to this elusive memory/delusion have been made with Polly-O or Sorrento aged mozz, freshly shredded by me, with an undercoat of freshly grated reggiano and pecorino romano.  I have developed a taste for fresh mozzarella over the years, but it definitely wasn't a part of those pies I remember.  I've tried Grande, and to be honest, I wasn't floored by its contribution.  The best word I can use is ordinary.  It melted well and certainly didn't make anything bad, but I used it at a party, and all guests agreed that it was not a standout ingredient.

The guy who owned Phil's Pizzeria in Montvale, NJ (I must assume his name was Phil), the place where I cut my pizza teeth, died a decade or so ago.  When you walked in, they were all speaking Italian.  I went back about 5 years ago.  Phil's is still there.  A waitress had bought the place.  No one spoke Italian anymore.  The pizza sucked.  No bubbles in the crust, no oregano, no orange drip, and the cheese sat in a blanket.  There's no Phil's pizza without Phil.  I guess the past is a murky place without guide who knows how it was done... 

[Pete-zza]

GB,

Based on what I learned about the use of high-gluten flour to make a NY style pizza, I would say that high-gluten flour started to gain traction in the mid-80s. However, its origins perhaps go back to the 1970s where its use was sporadic and quite limited. I'm fairly confident that Evelyne Slomon would be able to pinpoint the times and dates with greater accuracy since she knew almost all of the key NY pizza masters personally and published her book on pizza (The Pizza Book) in August, 1984. In her book, Evelyne acknowledged the use of high-gluten flour, and even mentioned it in the context of using it for pizza dough, as noted below, but none of her dough recipes called for that flour but rather emphasized the use of all-purpose flour and bread flour in a protein range of 10-13 percent. Three flours she specifically cited were Pillsbury, Gold Medal and Hecker's. Evelyne viewed the Hecker's flour to be fairly high in gluten with a protein content of 13%. I don't know how accurate that 13% number is but, according to the Hecker's website at http://www.heckersceresota.com/nutrition.html, the protein content for that flour today is 12%.

Here is an excerpt on Bread Flour from page 16 of Evelyne's book in which she talks about flour with a protein content of around 14%, which she placed in the bread flour category:

Bread Flour. The choice of commercial pizzerias, bread flour is milled only from hard, northern spring wheat. Noted for its rising power and strength, this flour creates a dough that can be stretched into the thin circles of pizza. Because of its high-gluten content (approximately 14 percent), bread flour (sometimes called "high-gluten flour") requires more liquid than other flours, more kneading, and two risings in order to ensure manageability. This dough demands respect: It must be allowed to rest and to double in bulk twice before shaping or it will shrink back on you as you try to roll or stretch it out. Pillsbury distributes an excellent bread flour to most supermarkets in 5- to 10-pound bags; it is the same commercial flour that many pizzerias use--only they buy it in 50- to 100-pound sacks!

I think it is pretty clear from the above excerpt that the type of high-gluten flour as represented by the likes of the All Trumps flour was on the radar screen at the time that Evelyne wrote her book but pizza operators were just starting to figure out how to use it.

Not long ago, a thread was started at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,14920.msg148148.html#msg148148 to discuss the evolution of the NY style pizza. You might find this thread, which include links to several of Evelyne's posts on the subject, of interest.

Peter

[Glutenboy]

Thanks, Peter.  You're a light in the darkness as usual.  I don't question Evelyn's knowledge or her expertise at all.  I do wonder (based largely on her own comments) how much she was holding back and oversimplifying in her book at the behest of her publisher.  I'd love to know exactly what flour/flours predominated that 70's NY/NJ scene, as well as the cheeses.  I'm assume that even back then the shops weren't using supermarket blends, but I never hear specifics.  Any idea why the switch to high-gluten?  I don't think the product is better now than it used to be, so why the preference for these new ingredients?  I'm still also curious about the cheese history in NYC/NJ.  I'll go back and look those posts over again.  If anyone here has any firsthand experience from those days and that region, please share.

[Pete-zza]

GB,

Maybe you have already seen these posts by Evelyne, but she did have some differences of opinion with her publisher:

Reply 424 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3944.msg28747/topicseen.html#msg28747 ;

Reply 47 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3489.msg31563/topicseen.html#msg31563 ;

Reply 14 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3443.msg29359/topicseen.html#msg29359.

You will see from Reply 47 that Evelyne discusses the use of All Trumps flour. I suspect that it was because of the publisher that some of what she wrote in her book about the commercial side resulted in some fuzziness and vagueness in her writing.

Although Evelyne hasn't posted in some time, I do see her on the forum from time to time checking PMs. You might try sending her a PM with any inquiries that you may have on the subject.

Peter

[scott123]

No offense to Evelyne, who's a tremendous information resource, but, from the posts that I've read of hers, she's always struck me, much like Jeff Varasano, as being more of a coal/Lombardi's kind of person than a slice aficionado.  To me, they're two different worlds.  To an outsider, this is the NY area, but when you start comparing Manhattan to the outer boroughs, it's apples and oranges, and, as you go back in history, the differences are even greater. Imo, NY style varies from coal as much as coal varies from Neapolitan. We're dealing with branches here. We're dealing with, to an extent, different generations of Italian Americans.

I'm not exactly sure when the deck oven places started popping up, but I know that Ray's dates back to '59 and Pizza Town (Elmwood Park) began in '58 (they claim they're the first to sell slices in NJ), but I'm guessing it took at least a decade for the deck oven places to be on just about every block. By the time Saturday Night Fever was filmed in 1977, it was pretty obvious that slices were king:

http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2004/06/you_can_tell_by.html

I don't know this for certain, but I'd wager to say that the coal places were probably late adopters of 14% flour. My best guess is that, much like the surgingly popular chains of the 90's and 00's ended up influencing slice places (for the worse!), the slices places, as they pulled customers away from the coal joints, got the coal owners thinking about ways of improving.  Look at cheese- there's still coal places today that never made the move to low moisture.

GB, Grande is the king of pizza cheeses, but, in order to do it justice, you have to bake with it under the right conditions.  The thickness factor has to be minimal, so the cheese gets heat from below and bubbles and the baking time must be long enough to oil off the cheese, but not so long that the cheese starts browning/drying out. It has to be grated fine enough and you have to use enough so that you get a thick layer, but not so much that you have melting issues. Lastly, like all mozzarella, Grande has to be purchased fresh from a store with good turnover. Whole milk Grande is the only cheese that, without the added fat from pepperoni, guarantees that magical orange layer of grease that drips off. Grande is also responsible for the buttery scent wall that hits you in the face when you walk into a NY pizzeria.