I was able to eat at Serious Pie this past week, and it truly is fantastic. I’d also like to try and recreate it at home. I picked up some interesting tidbits I thought might help everyone here reach a starting formulation.
First of all, the oblong shape is not a marketing gimmick. The shape helps cook the “center” of the pizza, eliminating that mushy wet center. I can’t stand pizzas that are so wet and soggy in the center that you can’t even fold them, so this was just fantastic to me. There is thin, there is thin and crispy, and then there is mush. Mush is no good.
Anyhow, we were actually on a tour of gourmet places in Seattle. Our guide gave us some other info on the pies, but again I’m just not sure how much I believe him on these ones. He obviously knows the pizza shop well, and stops there daily, but I don’t know. These seemed odd.
First there is honey in the dough. Okay, that’s not odd, but the honey is there to promote browning and help crisp the dough in a lower temperature.
According to the guide, the pie is cooked in a 500 degree oven. Their website says 600 degrees, which I believe more, but it still seems pretty low.
http://www.tomdouglas.com/restaurants/serious-pieThe guide also said they cook the pie a few minutes WITHOUT cheese, and then pull it to top it with the cheese, and then slide it back in. He said this was to get that nice brown char at a low temperature without destroying the cheese. This seemed really suspicious to me, though I didn’t have a chance to catch a pizza maker in the act either way. The toppings are on top of the cheese as well.
The dough was very flavorful, but it was also liberally “sauced” with olive oil after it was pulled from the oven, so that did add flavor there. But it was very tender – a 12 hour room temperature fermentation. It was also cut in squares from that oblong shape (you can see that in the picture above) and had a cornmeal dusting on the bottom.
Very good, very tasty, and very unique. It was some of the best pizza I’ve had, and much better than Ken’s Artisan down the road in Portland (though I’d have to say Apizza Scholls in Portland was a bit better).
I have some pictures of Serious Pie as well that I’ll post when I can, but I thought I’d get this down before my thoughts dried up!
---- Edit ----
I had the pictures closer than I thought, so here they are.
Day 1 on the tour we got to sample the Mushroom pizza and a more traditional pie with buffalo mozzarella, san marzano tomato. The pies were very, very, steaming hot, and the tomato sauce was lights out great. Not a soggy piece in the house, even in the thinnest part. The mushroom pizza was equally fantastic, and head and shoulders above Ken's Artisan (had that as well two days later): roasted porcini, smoked pancetta, wood violet. Finally on Day 2 when we came back (we had to have more!) my wife and I shared the penn cove clams, house pancetta, lemon thyme pizza (when in Seattle, right?). Super fantastic.
You can see the crust is also well developed: they get really good bubbles, pockets, etc. Very random from pie to pie - more so than what I generally see elsewhere. The dough was a very tender dough, not dry in the slightest, but it did have a good crisp to it. And again, they had cornmeal on the bottom and olive oil drizzled over each one.
I would most definitely go back to Serious Pie if I get up to Seattle again!
