(upbeat music) - The style of pizza that I
make is rooted in Neapolitan, but it definitely has
evolved over 27 years. I started making pizza
when I was 15 and I'm 51. This is a life's work. (upbeat music) I've used a lot of different flours. Today we're going to
use some of this flour from north of Italy. I'm constantly changing my techniques. The idea's set on where I'm trying to go, but the recipe is changing,
the flour percentage mixtures. I mix a lot of different flours every day. So here's the mother, the madre. I have a starter, a mother in
Italian, it's called a madre, and that's just flour and water. And we refresh that every 12 hours. This is what's going to make
the flour-water become pizza. This is what helps raise it. You can see it's super healthy. Look at that dough structure in there. Those starters evolve into
becoming wherever they live. It's alive and it's always changing. Now it's starting to
settle, so we're losing it. You can see it's kinda
now sticking together. Now that we've gone into
it, we made it collapse. So this needs to be
refreshed for tomorrow. This is going to go in the dough. This is going to get mixed
throughout the raw flour and then we're going to add water. And those three things together
will start to spread around and create the gluten. Right now, all we've been using is New York tap water, unfiltered. The water's important, but it's also a little bit of
a myth where people are like, "Oh New York bagels." All this, all that. There's so many other components. The water is definitely a part of it, but it's only one part of it. This is Sicilian sea salt. It's the only salt that I've
been using for 27 years. If you add this in the
beginning of the dough, it doesn't come out the same way. The secret is to add more water in like the last five minutes of the mix. For many years, no pizza
makers were doing this. This is rooted in ancient
French bread-baking techniques. I spent like my youth reading every single book
I could about baking, and there weren't really any great books about pizza-making then, so I was reading books about bread-baking and French bread baking
and Italian bread-baking, creating my own techniques on what I thought would
make the most awesome dough. Look at how wet this dough is. Look at this. Using dough this hydrated
and then not putting it in a refrigerator really
makes it very sticky. It's very temperamental,
but I think when it works, that's where some of the
magic lies in what we do here. I started trying to make
naturally leavened bread and dough since the beginning, like when I was like, you know,
probably 12 or 13 years old. I had been going to Naples with my family, I fell in love with it. It's where my family's from. I had never tasted
anything like it in America because the ones in Naples
were so different in taste that I just was like, "Oh my god, I have to figure
out a way to make this." (exciting music) I've had this same scale since I started. Yeah, it's like duct-taped together. And now I'm cutting and weighing it. I just started to go to Italy
and just be obsessed with it, with every detail. And I grew up in an era
where there was no internet, and so there was no,
everything you wanted to learn, you had to read and you had to research. I used to have all these
photographs on my wall. So me with like my mom, like you know, with like different
pizza makers in Naples. People were like, secretive about stuff and that also is something
that turned me on about it. You know? I don't know. I just started slowly
becoming like obsessed with baking all day, all night at home and eating bread like a maniac. So this is the folding. It's another old kind of baking technique, where you fold the dough over to kind of stall it for a second before I go back in and ball
them into the actual shape. (gentle music) It's easy to make one good pizza, but do it day after day, year after year. I mean, I still make
every single dough ball in the restaurant, 27
years of being in business. Every day it's slightly different. You constantly have to be aware and paying attention to what it needs. They need different things
to still come out good and sort of be consistent from
when we started to the end. So it's muscle memory, but it's also really being
present and being aware. I think what's so intimate
about making pizza is that every day you can
just like do one little thing and you have a completely
different product. To get to be in a place where
you understand those micros that go from "this is a good
pizza" to "this is magic" is years and years of work. So these guys we're going
to let live somewhere to raise for us. After we dump out what we need to make the pizza for the evening, we leave some mother starter left. Now I'm going to refresh that
with more flour and water. Right now it's on a cycle
of about every 12 hours. And then I'm going to
add some fresh water. And I'm going to break up
the mother that's in there. You see, there it is there. This is like partially
what's going to give, like, everybody their own, you know, beautiful unique taste to their product. The natural sugar that's
in wheat and the protein and then the water is the catalyst that kinda makes it all
come together and work. Now it's going to sit here at
room temp for about 12 hours. Here it is. And then in 12 hours
it'll hopefully be here. Maybe not, and then we have a problem. You never really know. There is an element to this
that's always kinda like, "Dear God, I hope it works." All the old bread when they
would have it proofing, they would cut the cross
in it with a razor blade. That was to let the gas escape, but also they did it in the
sign of the cross for good luck. So I'm definitely superstitious. I mean, you know, I got
it all over the place. Anything we can do for a little good luck. (upbeat music) We just got our buffalo
mozzarella for the week. We're the biggest purchaser of buffalo mozzarella in the whole city. I've been using this mozzarella from this family outside
of Naples for 25 years. For me, on pizza, the way
that buffalo mozzarella melts and the flavor profile is second to none. If all we have on a
pizza is tomatoes, basil, garlic and mozzarella and olive oil, all of them need to be
as good as they can be. You're going to see if there's
a weak link in that mix. The base sauce that we use,
we use San Marzano from a can. There's a flavor that only is
found grown in San Marzano. It's not overly sweet, it's more acidic. We drain all of our San Marzanos. I only want to use the tomato. This brand, Casa Marrazzo, the area that they can grow
these tomatoes in is so small, just south of Naples. The ground there is very rich
because of the volcanic soil from Vesuvius and they also
don't over-water the product. Some of the reasons why the tomato has such an incredible flavor. And then we take the ends off. And it's just another step to try to make things as good as we can. How do we get this tomato to be as close to a fresh summer taste
experience as possible? This is all you need to do. You just drain them, cut the
ends off and go like this. And here's your tomato sauce for pizza. The less that things are
manipulated, the better they taste. (upbeat music) This oven is made in
Naples, they're handmade. This is called an Acunto. Every little inch inside that oven makes the pizza cook differently. You see the interior is all white? Tomorrow when we start the oven back up, as soon as we start the oven, it's going to get covered in soot. So then what you do is you fire the oven until the interior is white. Once it burns all the soot off, then you know that it's
hot enough to cook in. That was like a really,
really ancient technique. That's how you would do it 'cause they didn't have thermostats. So then we keep the fire
going in the center like that. And then little by little we move it over. We always have the fire on the left side. These ovens were designed
basically like you know, over 2000 years ago, and they still are, like there's nothing to change on them. They're perfect. What we're using at Una right now is, I would say 70% oak, and the rest is a mix of
birch, apple, cherry, maple. The wood doesn't really
add that much flavor to it because the flame and the smoke
kinda circulate like this, which is what you want it to do, but it always stays like
this high above the floor. It's not like we're smoking it. The main thing for me with the wood choice is finding wood that burns really good. As years have gone on and the
dough gets more hydration, I have to cook it a little
bit slower each time. (cheerful music) Here's the dough. How much bigger these have gotten. Very delicate to work with. You see? Oh my god, these are so light. This dough today that we made is super, super easy to open and super loose. I mean, look at that. It's basically raising
and adjusting itself as it's sitting there
before I even top it. I'm going to make us some Margherita. So we're using those San Marzano tomatoes. We like to have everything
equally balanced and every flavor to come through. And then some course sea salt. Some fresh basil. Olive oil. (cheerful music) So this is the shavings. Something that's very,
very actually traditional, only in the city of Naples. You don't want to like, add
wood every time you bake pizza because then you're going
to overheat the oven. It gives a big burst of
temperature, a big burst of flame, but it's only for a few seconds. Making pizza the way we do it is such a fleeting moment
of happiness and perfection. And the more you do it, the more you're aware of
all the imperfections in it. And so there's this constant, like, the next shot is
going to be maybe the one that's like going to make me
feel like, "Woo, we did it." Pushing it too far and
then we end up with a dough that's too wet or it's ripping or it's baking wrong
because it's so hydrated. But when it works and it
comes out the way it should, I think that's what
creates the special taste that we have here. (upbeat music) There's the crust. Look at the inside. It's a good one today. So this time we'll do a Filetti, another one of our pizzas that
we've been doing for years. This one is buffalo mozzarella, fresh garlic, our house olive oil. And there it goes. (upbeat music) It's very rhythmic, making pizza. The micro adjustments that make
it magical are all rhythmic. Just these tiny, tiny little things that go from being okay to great. The only way there's oxygen
going into this baking area is through this little mouth opening. Occasionally going like this keeps pushing up the fire a little bit. You're like, forcing
air underneath the wood and you're getting it to light up more. The balance that we're always looking for is to not overheat the oven,
but ride right at that line. We need the floor to be hot,
we need the air to be hot, we need the wall to be hot, and we need an actual flame burning, which puts some of the char
marks around the dough. So it's just this constant, like, variation that we're riding through. This is the one that I
love probably the most and it's the Cosacca, the one that allows the beauty
of the tomato and the dough to come through. A nice amount of sauce. This spoon was my grandmother's and every single pizza that
I've made since I'm 15 years old has been made with this spoon. Some coarse sea salt and fresh basil. I've been making dough
throughout every part of my life. I've been married, divorced, had a child, both parents passed away, and the one consistency
through that life to this point is that every week you know where I'll be. This is where I feel my best
and what my purpose in life is. So this one just gets Pecorino Romano. This is my favorite pizza. This is what I would feed
a newborn baby or myself, which I'm kind of like a baby. My goal is not to open 10 restaurants. My goal is to have one restaurant and keep making it better
and better and better. If you spend 30 years of
your life doing something, you're going to start to find
your own voice within that. It's like a real gift in a sense to be like, doing the same
work for 30 years and be like, "This is so exciting. I can't wait to try to make today better." 'Cause I'm not stopping. I'm going to keep fighting
to be good 'til I drop dead. (gentle music)
I love that even though he isn't in Naples he still takes his inspiration and ingredients from there. He's clearly so passionate about traditional pizza even if he's making it in New York.