Be a cheese whiz
Downtown pizza shop teaches even novices to make a great pie
G OOD slices of New York pizza are as ubiquitous as manhole covers. Great slices are rare. Making superior pizza at home — well, if you live in my home, it’s a bit of a crapshoot.
Standard operating procedure on homemade-pizza night is to pick up the dough from Park Slope slice joint Smiling Pizza, get fresh mozzarella plus sauce from Italian grocer Russo’s and pull the thing together with a bit of dry pizza seasoning sprinkled on top. But it never quite comes out as well as I hope.
So when I hear that rural Italy native and Neapolitan-pizza expert Roberto Caporuscio and his daughter Giorgia, the pie geniuses behind the acclaimed West Village pizzeria Kesté, are offering pizzamaking classes at their new outpost in the Financial District, I sign up.
In a wood-raftered back room of the shop, I join the other students.
Roberto brings us up to speed on the history of pizza — it dates back to the 1600s, he says, a time when Neapolitans feared that tomatoes were poisonous and ate sauce-free pies; the first pizza spot in Naples opened in 1786.
First, we learn to make the dough: tap water, a pinch of fresh yeast, flour and salt. Kneading the dough by hand — a 15-minute process that the Caporuscios find to be relaxing — Roberto offers a good justification for scratch pizza. “Late at night, you can easily wind up with a slice made from dough that has extra yeast in it, so that it can rise quicker,” he says, pointing out that the extra-yeast tactic is employed by places needing to do quick turnarounds on dough because they run low as closing time nears. “[The] next morning, you feel [that extra yeast] in your stomach.”
Kesté lets its little pillows of dough rise for times that range from 20 hours to two days. Pre-made dough, according to Giorgia, is likely to spend around eight hours maturing, which leads to heavier, denser pizza. But since this is just a threehour course, Roberto hoists a plastic container lined with already risen dough. We gently massage the soft and sticky stuff in order to push air from the center to the edge. This ensures a puffy edge.
Eschewing the showiness of American pizza makers who like tossing their dough in the air, Roberto prefers gently forming it into a small circle via softly pressing down and stretching it out on the table with some flour underneath to prevent sticking. Ever an Italian, he likens pizza dough to a wife: Press too hard and you won’t have dinner.
Next, a light flourish of tomato sauce. The Caporuscios use canned tomatoes from Italy, with just a little salt but no sugar or garlic. We add a sprinkling of grated pecorino, a few fresh basil leaves, ground sausage cooked in red wine and a generous spread of buffalo mozzarella. But, Giorgia warns, don’t be too generous, lest pies get weighed down to the point of collapse. I finish with a drizzle of olive oil. Giorgia slides my pie onto a pizza peel, shoves it into the oven and allows two minutes of cooking at 900 degrees.
In no time at all, I am chowing down on a perfect pie, sipping red wine and looking forward to my family’s next homemade-pizza night.
Pizza-making classes ($80), Saturdays from 2 to 5 p.m. at Kesté Wall Street, 77 Fulton St.; KestePizzeria.com