San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Some of best pizza around is in Selma
Mia Marco’s turning out top-tier pies
I’m part of a monthly poker gang in Austin. One of us is always in charge of bringing food. Last time happened to be my turn.
Lucky for me, Mia Marco’s Pizza is just off Interstate 35 in Selma, right on the way to Austin. I had never been, though I’d heard that this scrappy trailer bagged some big trophies in the world of competitive pizza.
Mia Marco’s opened its windows five years ago, named for owner Derek Sanchez’s kids, Mia and Marco. Besides being a dad, Sanchez is a doctor of physical therapy. But pizza is his passion, something he’s chased around the world, picking up secrets about dough, sauce and sausage along the way.
Sanchez and chef Joey Hernandez have packed that whole world’s worth of knowledge into a trailer next to a Craftsmanstyle bungalow that will become the brick-and-mortar home of Pizzeria Mia Marco’s in about three months, with 12 pizzas, three or four salads, a couple of desserts and beer and wine. The trailer will run right up until then, Sanchez said.
I ate my pizza on the porch of that bungalow, then drove the rest to Austin, where the poker collective raved about it before taking my money. I might have lost at poker, but I won at pizza.
Best dish: The Danbo Pie ($21; all pizzas are 16 inches) gets three things right, and they’re big ones: pepperoni, sauce and crust. The pepperoni’s the cupand-char kind popular in the Midwest and Northeast, little disks that curl into cups with crispy edges that cradle the
grease of the gods within.
The sauce is electric red, with a bright acidic taste as vibrant as the color suggests, a blend of Italian and sweet California
tomatoes finished with sea salt, garlic and pepper. The crust is New York style bubble-and-toast, crackery and light but substantial enough to fold without
drooping at the tip, with a resounding fresh-bread flavor from dough that’s fermented six days using a natural starter.
The Danbo is finished with roasted red pepper, mozzarella and Pecorino Romano cheeses and a swirl of hot honey that pulls everything together with heat and sweet.
Other dishes: The sauce and crust that serve the Danbo so well translate across three more pies. The Hotta Soppressata ($20) stars that marbled Italian salami that radiates the same fatty satisfaction as a dry-aged steak, amplified by basil and more hot honey.
The Veggie’s ($22) one of the best and most bountiful garden pies in the city, with a wellcooked constellation of red bell pepper, red onion, mushrooms, olives and zucchini. And the Saw-Cheese ($18 plus $2 for red onions) deploys housemade Italian fennel sausage that Sanchez learned to make from a pizza cook in New York whose shop sold only sausage pies. It turns out the pizzaiolo was from the same part of Italy as Sanchez’s mother.
Mia Marco’s also makes a white pie, the Pizza Bianco ($16), that lets garlic and olive oil do most of the talking, in eloquent accord with a blend of mozzarella and Pecorino Romano cheeses. They’ll encourage you to add roasted spinach. Listen to them.
One more story: When Sanchez was a kid growing up on the Northeast Side of San Antonio, he loved Luca’s Pizza at Windsor Park Mall. His family moved, so when Sanchez got his driver’s license, his first trip was back to Luca’s for a slice. But by then, Luca’s had closed.
Cut to a lifetime later, and Sanchez is working the trailer when an older man walks up and orders pizza, saying he’s heard it’s the best around. That man was Luca himself, Carlo Luca, and he’s been a Mia Marco’s customer ever since.
It’s fair to say that if Mia Marco’s had been part of our 52 Weeks of Pizza series last year, it would have been a contender for the Top 10.