Why can’t most Florida pizzerias get it right?
There is a seemingly endless number of New York style pizzerias all over Florida, and although good pizza can be found in Florida if you search long and hard enough, most Florida pizzerias don’t get it right. Let’s shed a little light on why most “New York Style” pizzerias in Florida don’t make the cut.
The main components of a New York pizza are the dough, the sauce, the cheese, and optional additional toppings. Let’s start with the cheese. Grande brand shredded whole milk mozzarella is the cheese that most New York pizzerias use – it’s the Gold Standard. Whole milk mozzarella is creamier, melts better, and gives the perfect blend of flavor, color, and stretch. It also provides the “shine” to the traditional New York pizza, what some call “grease” that drips down the elbow when eating a slice. Many Florida pizzerias will miss the mark here. Some use part skim milk mozzarella or a blend of part skim milk and whole milk. Florida pizzerias will use this because it’s cheaper and because the “oily” appearance of whole milk mozzarella scares off some of their customers. The Grande brand of chesses founded by a Sicilian immigrant has been the go-to cheese brand of New York pizzamakers for decades. It stands up better than other brands to the high heat produced by pizza ovens and is more resistant to browning and separating. Grande is engrained in the New York pizza making culture. In Florida, there is a wider variety of brands used by pizza operators. They opt for lower priced generic brands or mix other brands of cheese with Grande in an attempt to claim they use Grande cheese. At Seby’s, we only use Grande cheese products – whole milk mozzarella, fresh mozzarella, provolone, ricotta, parmesan – (with the exception of Pecorino Romano which Grande does not make).
Let's move on to the sauce. Sauce on New York pizza should have a balanced flavor – not too sweet, not too acidic, not too tangy – and should be in balance with the crust and cheese – not too much, not to little. Most New York pizzerias make their own sauce using whole peeled tomatoes, strips of peeled tomatoes, crushed tomatoes or a blend of these. Canned California plum or pear tomatoes are the tried and true standard for making New York pizza. Canned tomatoes are picked and packed exactly when ripe and are much more consistent than fresh tomatoes. San Marzano tomatoes are not generally used on New York style pizzas, they are traditionally used on smaller 12” Italian and Neapolitan pizzas. They are very expensive in the United States and using them on larger New York size pizzas would significantly increase the cost. The brand of tomato products used by most New York pizzerias is Stanislaus. Stanislaus makes products that create the flavor that New York pizzamakers are known for. Here is another area where many Florida pizzerias miss the mark. Some will buy premade ready “pizza sauces” made from poor quality tomato concentrate and tomato pastes mixed with dried seasonings. Others will make their own sauce but use cheaper, lower quality whole canned tomatoes or will mix them with cheaper thick tomato pastes and purees and later add garlic powder, onion powder, sugar, and other seasonings. Many pizzerias will add sugar to their sauce because of its poor flavor profile or because they think pizza sauce is supposed to be sweet. At Seby’s, we make our own sauce from a blend of whole peeled plum and pear tomatoes that create an exceptional flavor without the need for sweeteners. There are no dried or powdered seasonings in our sauce, and unlike most pizzerias that do not cook their sauce, we slow simmer ours in order to completely blend all of the flavors together so our sauce is more like a marinara then a traditional pizza sauce.
Proper New York pizza dough is made with only 5 ingredients - high-gluten flour, water, salt, olive oil, and yeast. The most popular and most commonly used flour in most New York pizzerias is General Mills Gold Medal All Trumps High Gluten Flour, Bromated, Bleached – this is the Gold Standard and has been for decades. It has 14.2% protein content, much higher than bread flours and all purpose flours. The high protein content is the key for creating a traditional New York pizza crust that is thin, crispy, chewy, foldable without cracking, and strong enough to hold toppings. This is a big miss for many Florida pizzerias that choose to use less expensive or other types of flours to make their dough. At Seby’s, we only use General Mills Gold Medal All Trumps High Gluten, but we use the Unbleached Unbromated version.
Now on to the water…water makes up almost 40% of the dough mass, so the water used for making pizza dough plays a major role in the final product. The differences in the chemical and mineral properties of New York and Florida tap waters are well documented. Florida tap water is highly treated and has higher chlorine, PH, and hardness levels compared to New York City tap water. Chlorine, PH, and water hardness all impact yeast reproduction and fermentation in the dough making process. Some Florida pizzerias use filtration systems or import water, most Florida pizzerias, especially high-volume pizzerias, use tap water straight from the sink. This is the second miss for Florida pizzerias. Good pizza can still be made with this tap water, but not great pizza. At Seby’s, we only use mineralized water from our in house 7 stage reverse osmosis system.
Although some high profile pizzerias in New York do not add oil to their dough, high quality olive oil is another major component of traditional New York pizza. Oil is added to the pizza dough for several reasons – it adds some flavor, provides elasticity, which is essential for hand stretching and tossing pizza, and helps create a crispy golden crust. Miss number three for many Florida pizzerias is that they use low quality olive oil or use other cheaper kinds of oil in their dough hoping to achieve the same results at a lower cost. Low quality olive oil can taste bitter or too acidic. At Seby’s, we only use imported Italian Olive Oil.
Many Florida pizzerias will add other ingredients to their dough like sugar, malt, or condensed milk. They typically do this for one of several reasons – 1. They don’t know why, it’s what they were taught or told, 2. They are trying to add flavor to the dough because the dough lacks flavor due to poor fermentation techniques, 3. They are trying to add color to their dough because the crust is too pale from using bleached flour and poor fermentation techniques. The Maillard Reaction occurs when sugars are heated and creates a browning effect. At Seby’s, we never add sugar to our dough – our unbleached flour and complex fermentation process contribute to our naturally golden-brown crust.
Getting the right ingredients for making the dough is the first step, but the dough making process is just as critical for achieving the proper New York style results. Many Florida pizza makers add the ingredients to the mixer and just start mixing. For example, if the oil is added before the flour has fully absorbed the water, the oil will coat the wheat germ and prevent it from fully hydrating. The fermentation process is another area where Florida pizzerias miss the mark. New York pizza dough is best when fermented from 48 to 72 hours. For reasons including lack of cold storage space, lack of time, and lack of technical knowledge, many Florida pizzerias will use instant yeast and room temperature proofing techniques to get their dough to grow and rise faster to be ready for use sooner. This dough is not fermenting or maturing, and no flavor is being created. This is known as yeast respiration – with lots of oxygen present in the dough, the yeast performs respiration, which produces lots of carbon dioxide gas causing the dough to rise faster. Although the dough has risen, it is not fermented. Fermentation occurs in the absence of oxygen, and the yeast produces less carbon dioxide and now produces different gasses including ethanol, lactic acid, acetic acid – all of which add flavor to the dough. Yeast gives off different gases at different temperatures, so a more complex fermentation process can lead to a more complex flavor profile for the pizza dough. At Seby’s, we use a multi-stage fermentation process that includes autolyzing, prefermentation, bulk fermentation, room temperature fermentation, and delayed cold fermentation to create our flavorful crust.
There are other elements that determine how and why most New York pizzas are better than most Florida pizzas – New York has a 100 year pizza culture and generations upon generations of skill and expertise in doughmaking and pizza baking. There is a certain level of incomparable pride that New York pizzamakers have in their craft, and they also have much easier access to the best ingredients. Florida humidity also impacts the doughmaking process as well as cultural tastes and economic factors – chain restaurants thrive more in Florida than New York so many kids in Florida grow up eating pizza from the big chain fast-food American-style pizzerias instead of small independent New York style pizzerias.
Most New York pizzerias will hit all the marks and that’s why there are so many great pizza shops in New York. Few Florida pizzerias hit all the marks, some will hit most, most will hit a few, and some will hit none.