As a wrap up to the Tour de Soft Serve 2.0, several tour goers went to 9 Miles East Farm for pizza. I don't know how you could walk around the farm, see the chickens, see the fields, meet the people working there and not want this place to succeed. It's beautiful and the people couldn't be nicer.
When I was lucky enough to be a judge in the All Over Albany Tournament of Pizza, the judging mantra was "judge the slice in front of you" meaning focus on the pizza being served and don't compare it to what your ideal pizza is. If you are looking for a whole grain pizza with hints of sourdough and incredibly fresh local toppings, you're really going to like this. Seriously, especially the pie with caramelized onions. I'm going to be adding those to my topping rotation.
That said, I've clearly spent too much time reading and thinking about pizza so I have some opinions...personally, this isn't what I think of when I think pizza - it's a little too much like bread for my tastes. In tearing apart some of the rim of the crust, I couldn't help but think a little pad of butter spread on this would be fantastic. If this pizza was a little thicker, topped the same way, cut into squares and served as the bread in a restaurant, you'd be thrilled and ask your server for at least one more plate of it. There was also a lot of extra flour on the bottom of the pizza. A lot of bench flour is used shaping and launching the pizza. I'd be very curious to see how this dough did in the higher temperatures of a wood fired oven. Maybe get a little char on the crusts.
The kids, fresh off the Tour de Soft Serve and still in the mood to rate things, swiped my phone to take some pizza pictures.
The Farmhouse (cheese pizza)
The Barnyard (cheese pizza with sausage)
The weekly special featuring caramelized onions
Casey made up some pizza score sheets with some paper in the car. Here's how the girls scored it.
Casey:
Crust 4
Sauce 3
Toppings 3.5, 4, 3 (cheese, sausage, onion/spinach)
Overall 3
Notes: Little spicy (pretty sure this is regarding the sausage pizza)
Allison:
Crust 4
Sauce 3
Toppings 4, 4, 5 (the 5 is for the onions, which she didn't realize were onions and tried anyway even though some spinach was present)
Overall 4.7
The visit to 9 Miles East was a really nice end to the Tour de Soft Serve. I'm glad we were able to go. We all had a great day.
They did a class at Honest Weight a while back on sourdough pizza. I don't remember if there were any samples eaten that night, but we all got to bring home some dough to make at home. I didn't like it very much.
ReplyDeleteI am going to miss pizza. For six long weeks.
Uh oh. No pizza for 6 weeks! Let me know when the 6 weeks are up. I'll hook you up with a welcome back pizza.
ReplyDeleteUh oh. No pizza for 6 weeks! Let me know when the 6 weeks are up. I'll hook you up with a welcome back pizza.
ReplyDeleteSo, your experience was similar to mine. How do you think it would be with white flour instead of whole wheat/high extraction?
ReplyDeleteI'm a big fan of the pizza cognition theory which basically says that whatever pizza you first really appreciate as a kid become "pizza" to you. This isn't what pizza is to me. I thought it was good but when I'm craving pizza this isn't the style I try to find. And they should get extra points for getting my kids to eat onion that isn't in onion ring form.
ReplyDeleteI think changing the flour to all white flour would change the pizza so much that a side by side comparison would be and apples and oranges thing. Maybe a blend would be a better comparison. I've tried 3 pizza flours from Restaurant Depot. All high gluten with protein contents ranging from in the 13 to 14% range. It's really amazing how different they can be using the same formulation and those are all white flours.
Even if a wood oven wasn't involved, I would be more curious to increase the oven temperature and decrease the bake time with no changes to their recipe. I think the shorter bake time would add some tenderness to the crust. I'd also scale back the bench flour. That extra bench flour would probably burn at a higher oven temperature.