Pizzeria Delfina

Last Sunday brought divine weather to San Francisco, along with the opportunity to make a great day in the Mission nearly perfect with a visit to Pizzeria Delfina. I've been looking forward to this visit after hearing rave reviews of both Pizzeria Delfina and Delfina--the sister restaurant located next door.

Both restaurants are owned by Craig and Anne Stoll. Craig has just been nominated for a James Beard chef of the year award, and with pizza like this, it no wonder--this is some of the best pizza I've ever eaten.

The pizzeria was busy even at three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. All the tables were filled with happy diners, but luckily some space was available at the bar. This provided an excellent vantage point to watch the pizzas being made, and to meet the folks making them.

Anthony Strong is the pizziaolo, and was kind enough to let me take photos of my visit. They are cooking up some *kind* pizza over there at Pizzeria Delfina--it's like being in Naples!

Anthony Strong, pizzaiolo at Pizzeria Delfina. Brandon, who made my pizza, just calls him "jefe". Just keep making these great pizzas, I'll call you whatever you want!

Here is some time-lapse photography of my pizza being made--the best I could do with the camera in my iPhone. I ordered the pizza Napoletana--tomato, anchovies, capers, hot peppers, olives and oregano. 

This is Brandon making my pizza (according to Brandon, I'm the first person ever to remember how to spell his name correctly!)

Here is my glorious pizza headed into the oven...

And checking on it a few minutes later...

And finally perfect, and ready to cut--go Brandon!

And finally, the moment of truth: this pizza was fantastic. Crisp, thin crust with slightly puff, chewy edges. The crust had a very slightly yeasty complexity, and the crispy chewiness had me saying, "Scandalous!" out loud. To wit:

Mmmm. Scandalously good!

In addition to the great pizza, they've got some pretty amazing antipasti in the display case and several great wines to choose from. 

Alright, enough said--get yourself over to Pizzeria Delfina as fast as you can--this place is fantastic.

Outrageously Good Pizza Sauce Recipe

It goes without saying that you should be using fresh, local and organic ingredients whenever possible. Just do it--your body, neighbors, local farmers, and friends you cook pizza for with thank you.

Outrageously Good Pizza Sauce Recipe

Note: This recipe is for times when you want a zesty, powerful sauce. The garlic will speak to you here. Toppings used with this sauce will need to bring powerful personalities of their own to the party!

Ingredients:

Extra virgin olive oil

Ridiculous quantities of chopped garlic

About 4 cups of tomato puree

A significant quantity of good red wine

Herbs & Spices: 

Lots of oregano

Judicious quantities of red chilies, salt and fresh ground black pepper

Possibly: a tiny bit of sweetener, depending on the sweetness of your tomatoes

Saute the garlic and spices briefly in the olive oil. Before the garlic browns, add the tomato puree and red wine. Heat through and taste--if it tastes like it needs a little sweetener, add a tiny bit, stir and taste again. If you add too much, it's all over. :)

Simmer the sauce until it thickens. How thick, you ask? Well it depends somewhat on how hot your oven will be when you cook your pizza. If you're cooking at 800F (you lucky, you) then leave your sauce a little thin. If you're cooking at a paltry 550F, it can be a little thicker.

That's really it. 

Wood Fired Pizza

I baked pizza in a wood fired brick oven last weekend thanks to my kind and adventurous friend Ross. It turns out that in his veritable jungle of a backyard in Los Altos stands a nicely appointed oven.

This was my first time closely examining one of these, and I was impressed. It had a built-in digital thermometer system for monitoring the oven temperature at six different spots in the oven. It also had a nice built-in gutter for sweeping ash easily (which we of course didn't notice until after we had cleaned out the ashes from the previous use).

Ross had never used the oven, but has heard that the previous residents of his house would fire it up regularly and then host the neighborhood for much baking and feasting.

Once we had it cleaned out, we set about lighting a fresh blaze. Naturally, neither of us had any matches or a lighter. After a failed attempt to ignite some paper using the electric stove in the kitchen--which resulted in much smoke in the kitchen but no flames suitable for carrying to the backyard at high speed--I made a quick run to a convenience store for a lighter.

The oven was stocked with several bags of hardwood charcoal, but we thought we would try first with the kindling that accompanied the box of small almond wood logs--four of them in all--I had purchased on my way over (those readers that know anything about firing up one of these ovens will also know at this point how misguided I was in this first attempt at using a wood fired oven ).

After a few attempts, we finally got the blaze going. Just to be on the safe side, we also filled a chimney starter with charcoal and lit it, with plans to add those coals to the fine almond wood blaze at some point.

Well, it turns out the almond wood I paid top dollar for was not seasoned, and it really wasn't going to burn without significant additions of more catalyst. That's when we became more serious about the charcoal option.

What began with a few handfuls of coals turned into an entire bag of charcoal going in the growing inferno. At this point, we were thinking we had some blaze going, and the oven would surely be hot enough to bake pizza in an hour or so. We had started early in the morning, and it was time to break out the espresso!

Initially we thought the thermometer system was broken. It seemed stuck at 52F. Oh well! It seemed plenty hot peering in through the door of the oven. After about 30 minutes, though, it seemed victory was most certainly at hand--the temperature at one of the sampling points was now over 100F! Great!

Well, sort of. The temperature grew slowly to around 200F, and then slowed further. It seemed we needed to add more fuel to the fire. Bag number two of hardwood charcoal went into the blaze (we're talking 25 pound bags of charcoal!), along with the rest of the unseasoned almond.

The temperature finally topped about 350F after another hour, and we were burning through fuel at a rate that had me feeling embarrassed for our outlandish addition of CO2 to the greenhouse gases of the rest of the US. We were also causing quite a bit of low-level wood smoke in the neighborhood, so much that at one point we thought the sirens in the distance were actually several fire departments coming to drench our oven--and this dream of wood fired pizza--with water from fire hoses. Luckily, the sirens wailed past the neighborhood and on to more important fires.

While I had read that it can take many hours to heat one of these ovens to serious Neopolitan style pizza making temperatures of 800F-900F, I guess I didn't really believe what I had read. Well, dear reader, take it from me: it takes many hours and a lot of fuel to get one of these ovens really hot!

As luck would have it, the oven was hot enough--at least in the spot covered by our mass of burning coals--to cook pizza. This was good, as we were getting hungry, and I was growing impatient--wood fired pizza already!

So we went ahead and prepped the first test pizza--a simple one with sauce, cheese, and oregano. We pushed the coals aside and in it went, at last!

And this is when I knew that the oven was no where near hot enough. The first pizza took nearly 8 minutes to cook, resulting in a delicious but slightly bready first round.

That's the end of part one of this story. Part two, which I may detail someday, includes 50 more pounds of charcoal and 10 more balls of pizza dough!

Artisan Pizza on the Peninsula!

Friends that have tried my artisan pizza have been asking me for this recipe for a while now. I'll start by posting the images, and add in the details of the recipe soon.