- We're here at Ops in Bushwick,
with our good bud Mike. We're gonna make some pizzas today. - We're here because, A, we love pizza, and specifically your pizza, and second, because not all
meat goes well on pizzas. How can you use meat where it's
not the center of the plate, but it's actually part
of something larger? - That's what we're
always thinking about is how to get something finished that's like, totally-balanced and hitting
all these little things. We want fat, acidity, not too dry. We do a square pie, that's a
little bit of a thicker dough. Maybe like a Neapolitan-style
dough that's super thin. - Brent, would you like to show us what we have brought today? (mimics angel noise) - Our smoked jowl bacon. Guanciale, fennel, and garlic sausage. Pepperoni! - Man, you crushed it. - Capicola, mortadella, lamb bacon, and our porchetta di testa. - So you essentially have
the jowl bacon right there, but then you have like, the ear, the tongue right there, the cheek. It's the whole head, de-boned, seasoned,
rolled, and then cooked. - I guess let's just
think about, you know, how these things are gonna go together. The fat, the spice. How we're gonna balance that with other ingredients on the pizza. - I think we should do
pepperoni pizza as our baseline. It's delicious, and I wanna eat it. - I'm pretty excited to
also just do a lamb bacon. It's not everyday you see lamb bacon. I've never even heard
of it going on a pizza. I've never heard of lamb
really on a pizza before. - Well, it's a strong flavor, it's like, when you taste lamb,
it's like, that's lamb. That's only lamb. - How long does it take to
cook your Neapolitan-style pie? - Two minutes. - So I think we should probably
do these really, really thin to make sure they crisp
up and really cook. - You know, the main difference
between our pizza dough and most other pizza doughs
is that we don't use yeast. We use a starter culture that we feed and kind of develop here, so you just have to be
a little more delicate than we usually would be with pizza dough. We start the dough-making process
around 3PM the day before, and then we are open at 5PM the next day. - [Ben] Do you find a taste
difference or a benefit, structural benefit, to letting it go longer
than that eight hours? - Again, it's more of,
like, a stability issue. We want it to be really good
at 5PM and still really good at midnight, when we're still open. We got sauce on there,
I've got a cheese here, we call mozzarella. - Ooh. You heard of that? - No. What is it? - I just thought it
tasted so good on pizza. I thought we'd use it. - Huh. Why is pepperoni the
ubiquitous meat topping? I have no, I guess, I feel like it's fatty. Even a bad pepperoni is pretty good. - Yeah, and you can find it anywhere. Shimmy it off, pull back fast. - What he's doing now is
he's cookin' the pizza. It's in the oven. Just hanging out. Whoa. So what next? - I'm super excited about
the porchetta di testa, 'cause I feel like,
kind of like pepperoni, it's a thing that can merge
the world of charcuterie and pizza, and make something that's like, better on a pizza than
it would be on its own. - [Mike] Di testa would be
cool to make a white pizza. We have this provolone. And maybe mushrooms would be cool with it. Would just go really well with the spice and everything on the di testa. A little fattiness, a little spice. - I already don't like how this is going. Mike! Fix it! And then I took the pizza off of the peel. - Whoa. Holy (bleep). That looks amazing. - I was thinking the
lamb bacon might be cool on a red pizza. Onions, I think you mentioned. - [Ben] Yeah. - The onions which I think
makes a lot of sense, like the sweetness is gonna be really nice to kind of offset the
strong flavor of the lamb. Maybe even some olives. - [Ben] You're crazy. - [Brent] I love olives. Let's do it. - [Mike] I was thinking just
cheese post on this one. - [Ben And Brent] I like it. - [Mike] I don't think
anyone would complain if there was cheese on it. I just think it'd be cool to try without. We're gonna use a little bit of olive oil. It's gonna be really tasty. - Shimmy and a shake! (whistles) - The lamb bacon just kind
of, almost disintegrated into the tomato. That's great. We're hungry! Trying the pepperoni first. - It's been sitting here for a while. - Viewer, stop judging us. - We had to make a
couple more pizzas, but. - Wow, that pepperoni has so much flavor. - It's almost too much flavor I would say. I think it'd need to be
even thinner than that. To like really, really blend in. - I love our pepperoni but,
(bleep) that's a lot of flavor. - [Mike] So this is the porchetta di testa white pie with mushrooms. - That one I feel like the meat is more, the cheese, the funkiness of
the provolone that you used, like really, really works well. - That's great, that's balanced. You taste all of the ingredients. The fat is really
round-tasting but works well with the funky provolone. - Yeah, it's interesting. It's like, sometimes
you don't wanna do like, funk on funk on funk, but like, sometimes it really works. - Different funks can
work together in harmony. - So I thought maybe the salami would
disintegrate a little more, but it really is staying
true to character. - [Ben] Alright, so we got
lamb bacon, olive, onion, and, what was the cheese? - [Mike] Pecorino Romano. And tomato. - Delicious, but I already
think we could've done more lamb. - It could've maybe been a little thicker, which might've given that, you know, more. The olive has so much flavor to it. - We still have all these meats over here. We need to go gonezo and
make a meat-lover's pie. - I also feel like we
should do a meat-lover's how much is too much pizza. - But we're thinking about
making it kind of like a, almost like a deli
Italian combo too right? - Yeah. - So, I think capicola, mortadella. - Can you Italian sub a pizza? - Exactly. - So this is the square pie. As is traditional in New York
with grandma pizzas like this, the dough itself was pre-baked. A little bit of wild oregano. - You wouldn't put
sausage on an Italian sub. - But it will offer a different texture than all of the sliced-up just layered. That's true. - That's true, Ben. (laughs) So we have right here mortadella. - Great. - Capicola. - [Mike] This is the one I
don't know what it's called. - [Ben] Salami cotto! Salami cotto yeah! - [Mike] So these three, plus
we're gonna do pepperoni, and we're gonna do sausage. Is that right? - [Ben] Oh man. Can you
pitch it a little bit more? - Yeah, like that. - [Ben] No, not like that. Like that! - You guys think we should
put shredded lettuce on it? - I actually do think. - [Mike] Maybe some red
wine vinegar, raw onion, which we already have, dried
oregano or anything like that. [Ben] I'm gonna go ahead and call it, that we are like, reinventing
the wheel on square pies. On meat-lover's pies. - We've just been reinventing
the wheel in general. - Yeah. - We just made the wheel a square... pie. - [Ben] Went kinda heavy
on the acid, because, I don't know if you guys noticed, but there are five meats on that pizza. (wincing noises) - [Brent] Yeah yeah yeah! (jazzy music) - [Brent] Holy (bleep) that's delicious. - The salad really brings it all home. - I thought it would be too much. It's really not. - [Mike] The meat stock
is kind of awesome. - It tastes like a fried Italian hoagie. - If it's so many vegetables,
like five vegetables, or five meat items, they
start diminishing each other a little bit. But these are actually doing really well, and holding up together very well. - And maybe the thicker the toppings, the thicker the dough
you wanna try to use. - I didn't come here thinking, like, let's put lettuce on a pizza, but I'm really really happy we did. - You should keep making pizza Mike. For more episodes of
Primetime, click here. - Click it. Or he keeps eating. He's still eating. Click it. Now. Or he keeps eating. Click it. Sometime soon.
