Air: Baking’s Key Variable – Biological Leaveners (part 3) – Pizza

Jeff Varasano on Pizza

Jeff Varasano moved from New York to Atlanta, where a lack of New
York–style pizza drove him to years of experimenting—to the point where he clipped
the lock on his oven so that he could bake pizza in a super-hot oven set to its
cleaning cycle. He eventually quit his job as a C++ programmer and opened Varasano’s
Pizzeria in Atlanta.

How did you go from C++ programming to making
pizza?

I moved from New York to Atlanta. Like a lot of people transplanted from the
Northeast, I started to seek out the best pizza. A lot of places claim to be like New
York, and you go there and you’re like, “Hmm, have these guys ever been to New York?”
So I started to bake at home. At first I would just call up all of my friends and say,
“Look, I’m making pizza tonight. It’s going to be pretty terrible, but why don’t you
come try it?” And it really was pretty bad.

I started experimenting. I did all the flours. I experimented with different
methods of heating my oven. I tried to do it on the grill. I tried to wrap my oven in
aluminum foil to keep all the heat in. Then I moved to a new house and I had an oven
with a cleaning cycle. I didn’t really know what a cleaning cycle was. I had never had
an oven with a cleaning cycle, but I ran it and I realized that it was basically just
incinerating the contents. It was like, “Aha, I’ve got to get in there!” So that’s
where the whole idea of clipping the lock came from.

I threw up this website (now at http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm). I really didn’t
think too much about it. For a year and a half the counter was at about 3,000 and in a
day it jumped from 3,000 to 11,000 and crashed my server. I realized that people were
pounding that page and pretty much from that day forward I started to get email.
That’s what started me down the whole tunnel of thinking about giving up the software
stuff and going into pizza.

In the process of learning how to do your pizza, what
turned out to matter more than you expected, and on the other side, what turned out
to matter less?

Well, clearly what mattered less was the flour. Everyone is looking for the piece
of equipment or secret ingredient that they can buy which will all of a sudden
transform their pizza into something great. It’s not that. This is one of the things I
realized early on. There is no magic bullet. If you look at the top five pizzerias on
my list, you’ll see they use five different ovens: gas, wood burning, coal burning,
electric, and believe it or not, an oil burning oven. Not only do they use different
fuels, they’re different shapes, they’re different temperatures, some bake their pizza
for two minutes, some seven. So what is it then? The answer is that it’s an art, it’s
everything all together at that one moment. That’s what I realized, learning the
basics and the fundamentals, you come into style and artistry and that’s much more
difficult to define. It’s not going to be a single secret.

A lot of geeks who are learning to cook get hung up on the
very small details and miss the big picture of just getting in there and trying
something and playing with it.

Yeah. I’ve always been an experimenter. But I’ve always had sort of a different
way of approaching problems. I don’t make very many assumptions about the way things
should be done. Most people assume that knowing how things should be done is the best
way, so they keep struggling within a very small circle, whereas I have a tendency to
just try a much wider variety of things that may work and may not work.

So when you get stuck on one of these problems even though
you’re working in a wider circle, how do you go about getting
unstuck?

That’s an interesting question. Let me deviate from that slightly and then I’ll
come back. Most people are familiar with the scientific method, which is holding
everything exactly the same and changing this one thing. This reminds me of people
trying to do one side of the Rubik’s Cube. Most of the good methods don’t involve
getting any side. That’s the last thing you do. So people get stuck because they don’t
want to toss in the towel on the progress they think they’ve made so far. So if you
want to make it past one level, you may have to scrap your whole methodology and just
start over. And you see that with pizzas.

Art begins where engineering ends. Engineering is about taking what’s known and
carrying it to its logical conclusion. So what do you do when you have exploited
everything you know, but you want to go to the next level? At that point, you have to
start opening your mind up to completely random ways of thinking through something.
That might involve taking multiple steps at a time. It might be that you don’t abandon
one thing, but you have to abandon five things.

As an example using pizza, as soon as I switch flour, I can’t just keep the same
hydration because if I change the flour then I may also have to change the water, or
the dough may have a different consistency. Well, guess what, when I increase the
hydration then the heat penetration into the dough is going to be slower because more
of that water has to boil off. So now all of a sudden I might have to change the oven
temperature, too. I’d love to conduct a controlled experiment that would conclude that
Flour B is better than Flour A, holding all other variables constant. But in the real
world such a test is somewhat meaningless. This is why it’s an art.

This makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of geeks out
there would say that this would be a multivariate approach to finding one of these
optimal points of pizza recipes and techniques.

That’s right. And you have to work on the underlying forces and begin to
understand them independently, but in the end the results are not going to be a set of
independent things, they’re going to be a set of interdependent things.

In the first stage of working a problem or trying to master a skill, you find that
everything seems totally dependent and that’s when you have the least power. The next
stage is to make things independent and to break things down and classify them. The
whole idea is to segment things into finer and finer individual techniques. The
ultimate stage is learning how to reconnect all of those parts that you separated out
and now reorganizing them into something where the pieces are interdependent rather
than a collection of things that are independent.

I am at the middle stage myself, so I don’t quite see how all the pieces fit
together. For example, if we don’t leave the heater on in the restaurant, then the
dough warms up overnight at a different rate than it did a couple of days ago. I
think, well, there really doesn’t seem to be that much difference but I know there was
that two-degree difference, so I’ll correct for it. I’ll think I’m back where I
started, but I am not. And then sometimes you don’t even know what’s different and
then you just literally scratch your head. In a year it will be obvious what was
different.

Can you give me an example?

One of the ingredients I had given pretty minimal thought to—and didn’t realize
how important it was—was oregano. I have a little herb garden in front of my house and
I grow some oregano. I didn’t like the strain I had. One day I found a better sample
in an abandoned herb garden. I dug it up and I put it in my front yard and used
it.

So now I’m ready to launch the restaurant and I’m going to all my suppliers
looking for oregano. Thirty-three oreganos later, I’m still sitting here saying none
of them tastes like the one that I grew in my garden.

You don’t realize that there is a difference to be worked on, but that’s when
you’re caught with your guard down. The oregano that I really, really like is a year
away from production quantity so now I’m experimenting; maybe there’s a better way to
dry the oreganos that I have. If I get a fresh one, maybe I can dry it differently and
maybe it’s the drying process will give me something closer to what I want. So now
I’ve gone down the tunnel trying five, six, or seven ways of drying it; heated drying
using a dehydration machine that blows a fan and a little bit of heat over it using
dehumidifiers and all these different things.

So it sounds like your method for overcoming this is to
try a lot of different things?

It really is, and you know it’s funny because I like to say, well, how do you
know? I tried everything and a lot of people think, wow, it’s amazing you figured this
out! People think there is some sort of secret magic, but the problem is that when you
get to the end of what’s known, when you get to the end of engineering, you’re left
with hunch and trial and error, but those carry you much farther than people often
give them credit for.