The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
New Haven-style pizza, now in the frozen food aisle
DURHAM — For nearly 20 years, Heath Andranovich has been creating his New Haven-style gourmet pies with locally sourced ingredients using his 100year-old family recipe.
Since he moved to Durham from West Haven in 2002, the 51-year-old owner of Carmine’s Pizza & Italian Takeout in Durham Village, at 16 Main St., has perfected his signature combination: an airy, crispy and chewy pizza, light on the olive oil.
Andranovich’s more creative pizzas include mashed potato and bacon; arugula with asiago cheese, garlic, and balsamic vinegar glaze; breakfast pizza with scrambled eggs, bacon or sausage; and seafood, topped with calamari, clams and shrimp. He also has traditional white and red pies.
Andranovich’s uncle Frank (Butch) Buonocore runs the very popular Mike’s Pizza on Campbell Avenue, which has been in business for 78 years. His uncle’s father Mike founded the business in 1942.
At 15, Andranovich became a busboy at his uncle’s shop. That’s where his lifelong love of cooking was sparked. “I would fool around in the kitchen and make pizzas in the back. Food was it. I loved it,” said the businessman, who worked in the construction and bartending fields before opening his own place.
The pizza purveyor insists on offering homecooked food from scratch using fresh, all-natural ingredients whenever possible. As such, Andranovich buys the best cheese
he can afford, and insists on grinding his own tomatoes.
His recipe is bare-bones — flour, water, cheese, tomatoes, very few spices, and a light sprinkling of salt. Andranovich always has an eye out for making his pies as healthful as possible.
The mozzarella and ricotta come from Napoli Foods in Cheshire. In spring and summer, Andranovich visits JC Farm and Greenhouses in Durham, buying “cases and cases” of vegetables there. He insists on fresh eggplant, basil, tomato and other ingredients.
“That’s why it’s the best,” he said. His daughter, 20, who works parttime at Carmine’s, and son, 18, for whom the restaurant is named, “grew up” in the restaurant, he said. Since they were 4 or 5, customers would find them in the kitchen stirring the sauce.
Andranovich’s signature phrase, “It’s a beautiful thing,” speaks to both the quality of his food and philosophy of life. He never settles for good and always insists on great.
Whenever Andranovich gets “bored,” his mind begins churning with ideas, coming up with new menu items or recipe variations.
His penchant for dogged work — between 10 and 15 hours a day, often seven days a week — and hiring of dedicated staff led to the restaurant’s success. Now the frozen version has prompted national food companies to take notice.
When Andranovich first began making frozen pizzas, he stocked about two-dozen a day in the cooler: “quick, little simple things, putting them in the freezer, and selling them and selling them and selling them,” he explained. “There are no extra additives. It’s not going to last six years in your freezer.”
One day, he got lucky when the sister-in-law of a friend who works for Stop & Shop realized a business opportunity. She contacted corporate.
About seven months later, while Andranovich was driving, he got a call from Stop & Shop headquarters in Pennsylvania.
The national supermarket chain wanted to carry his pies in its stores. “I almost panicked. I probably could have crashed my car I was so excited,” said Andranovich, who couldn’t believe he got his “big break.”
“So I went 100 percent.”
He didn’t even have a delivery vehicle at the time.
“I walked into every single grocery store, found the manager, brought product in there, cooked it for some of them in their ovens, and let them sample it,” Andranovich said. It took him about a year-and-a-half to complete the Stop & Shop deal.
Soon, Carmine’s Frozen Pizzas began to stock grocery store freezer cases throughout the area. Now, he’s in 30 stores, such as Stew Leonard’s, Adams Hometown Market, IGA, Geisslers and, soon, Big Y. The pies are available throughout Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and even Yonkers, New York.
Stop & Shop sells his frozen pizzas at the company’s Middletown, Hartford, Wallingford, Newington, Branford, East Haven, Hamden and North Haven locations. Andranovich also delivers them to the Wesleyan University campus grocery store WeShop in Middletown and Country Market in Killingworth.
When he began selling his frozen pies at IGA, the government stepped in. Part of the issue was the packaging labels didn’t include weights, measures and calorie counts.
“The USDA came in and paid me a visit, and said, ‘You can’t do it like this anymore.’” Andranovich was forced to stop production, hire a lawyer and undergo the lengthy process of being FDA- and USDA-approved.
The first step was building a production and packaging facility. It took him a couple of months to construct an 800-square-foot plant in the rear of the plaza. There, his staff put out between 400 and 500 pizzas a week.
Other business owners have told Andranovich they dread working with government agencies, but he welcomes regulations. “My operation is spotless. It’s beautiful in there. You could eat off the floor.”
Now, whenever he makes his frozen pies with meat — about three times a week — a USDA inspector comes in to make sure the operation goes smoothly. “Everything has to be perfect. They make us a better company.
“I want to keep us open. They don’t want to shut us down. They want to keep us in business,” Andranovich explained. “I’m not bringing in big paychecks, I’m not driving a Mercedes, but, for some reason, it’s wonderful. The kids are involved, everybody helps.
“If I didn’t have the family and crew that I have, there’s no way this would be going on,” the owner said. “It feels pretty good.”
For information, call 860-349-5411 or visit carminespizzadurham.com and Carmine’s Frozen Pizzas on Facebook.