Come to the Atl and have some pie!

A New York Expatriate’s Magnificent Obsession: Pizza

Jessica McGowan for The New York Times

CAUTION! Jeff Varasano makes blistered pizzas in Atlanta by disconnecting the safety latch on his oven’s cleaning cycle.

Related

Times Topics: Pizza

Enlarge This Image

Jessica McGowan for The New York Times

JEFF VARASANO woke at 2:50 a.m. so he could get to his kitchen, measure precise quantities of water, flour, salt and yeast on a digital scale, and then mix them together. Sixteen hours later about 30 guests would be arriving, and they would want pizza.

Since moving from Manhattan to Atlanta in 1998, Mr. Varasano, a 42-year-old software engineer, has been looking for the kind of pizza he left behind in New York. Finding nothing close, he has spent much of the past decade trying to reverse-engineer what had been his favorite — from Patsy’s in East Harlem — in a home kitchen oven which, like nearly all consumer models, has a maximum cooking temperature roughly half of the 1,000 degrees pumped out by the coal-fired pizza oven at Patsy’s.

“I came to the conclusion pretty early on that their pies were cooking in 4 minutes and mine were cooking in 15 minutes,” making dense and chewy pizzas, he said. “And so I just went on this quest for more heat.”

He could, he thought, rewire the oven’s internal thermometer to switch hot signals for cold ones. “I started to think I was going to burn the house down with these tricks,” he said, “and then I came upon this idea of running it on the cleaning cycle.”

That epiphany, four years ago, allowed Mr. Varasano to finally produce a pizza as good as he would get in New York. He took a photo of that pie and posted an account, with mad-scientist specificity, of his six years of experiments with flours, mixing techniques, yeast cultures, canned tomatoes, cheeses and oven temperatures.

He has continued to make updates to the single-page Web site, slice.seriouseats.com/jvpizza, as he has turned his attention to different aspects of pie theory. The post is now less pizza recipe than the ravings of a pizza madman, 20,000 words of obsessive text in something like the crude Web style of the late ’90s. It has made him, perhaps, the Internet’s foremost homemade pizza maven.

Many of Mr. Varasano’s guests would be meeting him for the first time, having stumbled upon his Web site in their own quests. After corresponding via e-mail about this type of flour or that brand of mixer, they found themselves invited to this latest in an endless series of “pizza tastings.”

Whether it would be a success depended on Mr. Varasano’s seriously abused oven.

Electric ovens, which are what Mr. Varasano uses, clean themselves by maxing out their heating elements and incinerating spilled food. To prevent injuries, nearly all have safety latches that engage during cleaning to prevent someone from opening the door to, say, insert or remove a pizza. Mr. Varasano overcame that obstacle by snipping the metal latch with garden shears.

Pointing the laser sight of his $250 Raytek infrared thermometer, he found the pizza stone on the center rack in his cul-de-sac home in Atlanta was as hot as a New York pizza oven.

“It’s not so much about heat as it is temperature differential,” he said as he peered into the top compartment of his double oven. The stone needs to be about 150 degrees cooler than the air in the top of the oven, he said, so the crust beneath the sauce can cook before the bottom burns.

Over the past few years, he has devised a jury-rigged system to regulate the temperature of an oven that must, by now, think itself spotless. To cool the stone, he places a baking sheet on top. In the cabinet above, a fan blows over a tray of ice and water to cool the oven’s electronic console.

In the steel floor of the lower oven, there is a jagged, dime-size hole, made when an errant piece of superheated topping melted through. One window pane in that oven’s door is shattered, destroyed after a drop of sauce fell onto it at high heat. There is a long list of wrecked equipment — two more oven windows, three mixers and food processors, one internal fan. The oven has been shorting fuses lately. It’s getting harder, Mr. Varasano said, to make up stories for the oven repair guys.

As guests arrive, he engaged his one functional oven, and prayed. There was, in the room, the feeling of a happening, a kind of speakeasy anticipation as the oven’s temperature climbed.

Mr. Varasano was visibly nervous. If the oven were to break (again), he would pan-fry the 28 balls of dough he had been nursing for the past 16 hours into sugar-coated doughnuts.

The first pizza, mozzarella with basil, slid in and then out again in under three minutes. Over the next three hours, a dozen different pies slid on and off of Mr. Varasano’s peel, including a surprising arugula with lemon juice, a terrific clam pizza and a pie with oregano, black pepper and an elusive tanginess (the source of which was kept secret).

The oven overheated and shut down three times, the last outage lasting long enough to prompt doughnuts. It’s possible that it may join the other casualties of pizza, but there is something noble about sacrificing an appliance for one’s art. On his Web site, Mr. Varasano tells would-be pizzaioli that he’s not recommending they use their ovens this way. “Use this section with caution,” it reads, “i.e. no lawyers please.”

That warning may not be necessary. Mr. Varasano said: “I would say that one of the two or three most common comments I get is ‘Dude, I’d love to do that with my oven, but my wife would kill me.’ All the time.”

Freed from such personal restraints, Mr. Varasano has followed pizza-making to an abnormal level of compulsion.

Today, Mr. Varasano is hoping to translate his latest obsession into something more, by opening a pizza restaurant in Atlanta, perhaps as early as this fall. Whether his passion will survive the nightly grind of the restaurant business remains to be seen.

Chris Bianco, another ex-New Yorker, whose Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix is among the most acclaimed pizzerias in the country, said after reading the Web site that he could tell that Mr. Varasano was on the right track.

“I do like that he figured it out on his terms, and I honestly learned things the same way,” Mr. Bianco said. “I could train a monkey to make one good pizza, but I think it becomes an artisanal product when we are truly engaged in the process.”

DAY TWO NOLA

We slept with the windows open and wake to the sounds of the St. Charles Trolley passing. Today we will find the Indians.

We walked a couple of blocks from the hotel and had coffee and a bagel. Looked at our maps and decided the game plan. Last year we saw the Downtown Indians, this year we will try to see the Uptown Indians. The newspaper says both will be parading, but time and location details are sketchy.

We headed to Bayou St. John around 10:45. It’s only about a 10 minute drive and we arrive at the corner of Toulouse and Hagen Avenue. Home of the Parkway Bakery and Tavern. They open at 11. Perfect timing. We order two double Bloody Marys to go, you can do that in NOLA. These drinks are really good. Just the right amount of heat, olives and pickled string beans. Perfect. So, with Bloody Mary’s in hand we walk across the street to Bayou St. John. We don’t see any Indians or crowds of people, but it is a little early and we are not worried. Walking down the Bayou, people are kayaking, walking their dogs and just enjoying a beautiful morning.
We sit for a minute and a car stops and asks us “if we are waiting on the Indians’. We said yes and they said they were too, but saw no signs of them around and that they were going to head downtown to catch the other group. We decided the same thing.

We get in the car and drive across town - takes only a few minutes. Park in the same place we did last year. People are gathering. You can just feel something is happening.

Bought a beer at the neighborhood convenient store and started walking up the street. At one of the main intersections, lots of folks are gathering, pickup trucks selling food and drinks from the back. There is a Full bar of liquor in a green pick up truck.
















Can’t pass that up. Two shots of tequila and a couple of beers. We are just walking around looking at the sites and Stacey has to go to the bathroom. This neighborhood doesn’t have gas stations with bathrooms or port o lets for that matter. I tell her to follow me and that she’s gonna have to go behind a building. It’s Sunday and we are walking around the block and there is a small Community Church. Some members are sweeping and getting ready for services. I ask them if my wife can use their bathroom. They are very nice and let her. God bless them.

Back to the main intersection, another round of tequila and the Indians have started to arrive. Some are already in costumes, others are getting dressed. It is a family affair. The Chief, the scouts and spy boys. The colors are incredible.
















So we walk a few blocks with the Indians as more and more show up. The crowd is much larger then last year and there are a lot more Indians. One group of Indians decide to go a different route so we follow. Straight down the street, block after block making lots of noise. House after house folks come to the front porch to check them out. We spend about an hour or two walking with the Indians and decide we have had enough. We need food.

It’s a long way back to the car. We go looking for something to eat. We come across a little corner store with a sign that only says “FOOD”. That’s what we want so we stop and get more fried chicken, red beans and rice and biscuits. It was good food, but not as good and Man Chu.
Back to the room to eat as none of these hole in the wall joints have a place to sit and eat. We have a suite so it’s no problem. We eat and lay down for a minute thinking about a nap, but soon we realize we are in NOLA and not to sleep. We can sleep when we’re dead.

So Stacey put’s on a pretty purple dress and we head to the French Quarter. Sure the Quarter is all about tourism, but if you know where to go you can drink cheap and with the locals. We go to The Chart Room. Last year, our friend Harold took us to the Chart Room and we decided to go back. It’s a small hole in the wall bar with good music on the juke box and cheap drinks. The bartender, Will, is funny as hell. It’s not what he says so much as in his action. He tries to wait on three people at one time, while making drinks for another person. He fills all the drinks to the very top of the glasses and liquor spills out all over. He likes to toss mixing tools in the air, but doesn’t catch half of them. If he doesn’t like some song that people have selected from the juke box he turns down the volume and takes a vote of people that want to continue listening to a song. Says it’s a democracy and then selects another song. Funny. Some tourist from England start to leave and don’t tip. Well, Will the bartender follows them out to the street yelling at them the whole time “limey bastards don’t come back”. As Will takes his place behind the bar again he explains how he did that for all the other bartenders in the Quarter. He says where he used to tend bar he couldn’t do that, I think he’s getting even.

I met this guy that came and sat next to us at the bar. His name was Chris. Sometimes you meet someone and talk to them and it makes you feel like you missed out on something. When some guy sitting next to you at the bar tells you he quit his job as an architect, left Nashville and came to NOLA and helps run a soup kitchen it makes you think. It reminds of you how tied down you are to job’s and bills and house payments and such. Chris said he thought he would do a couple weeks at a soup kitchen, five months later he is still there and I run into him Sunday night, his only night off.

Well we need food again. The drinks are good, cold and cheap, but we need food. We had read about a new place, Cafe Adelaide and the Swizzle Stick Bar. It is one of Ti Brennan’s restaurants. She of the famous Brennan restaurant family. It is named after her mother and is in some big, fancy hotel. It’s a real shinny place and when we saw it we thought we had made a bad call. But, we took a seat at the bar which was empty and looked around the restaurant, which was empty and spoke with the bartender who seemed empty and we were sure we had made a mistake. So we thought one drink, a quick look at the menu and we were out of there. Well the menu looked great and we found out the bartender, a native of NOLA, was moving to Wisconsin soon. No wonder he was in a bad mood. Anyway we ate, boy did we eat. Check this out.
We had a Corn Dog. Well that’s what they called it. It was a large Shrimp wrapped in Tasso, skewered and deep fried. Served with Asian sauce. It was awesome.

Then we had Oysters Benville. Well that’s what they called it. It was fried oysters on a couple slices of french bread smothered in a creamy spinach sauce. It was awesome. Then we had Gumbo, well that’s what they called it and that’s what it was and it was awesome. Then we had Biscuits and Gravy. Well that’s what called it. It was a cat head biscuit split open with andouille sausage smothered with Foie gras gravy and it was awesome. We then had Shrimp Curry and it was okay, not as good as the other dishes, but it didn’t suck. Then I went to the kitchen and applauded the kitchen crew. They liked that I think. There were only three of them and the chef had been carrying the food out to the bar himself. He told me they had sent all the help home cause it was so slow. I guess the word was not out yet cause this was very good food.

Then we went back to the hotel and went to bed.

Amen.

NEW ORLEANS DAY ONE

We’ve come to see the Indians, but don’t think I haven’t been thinking about food for the last two weeks.

We thought about renting bicycles for this trip, but in the end went with a car rental. First place we hit is Tujague’s. Tujague’s is the second oldest restaurant in New Orleans. It sits at the corner of Decatur and Madison, in the French Quarter. I have been to Tujauge’s before, but it’s been 25 years. I had been reading about it and we put it first on the list, cause that’s what ya do when you first get to New Orleans, ya get a Bloody Mary. The bar was beautiful nothing else but time and cigarette smoke can make a place look like that. Tujauge’s was not crowded at 11 a.m. which was nice, but they didn’t do lunch and the drinks we’re only ok, so after two and one to go we set out looking for a photo exhibition and tacos.

We found the Taco joint and it was closed so we went instead to the photo exhibit.

I had read about a Micheal P Smith exhibit at The Historic New Orleans Collection. Click on them and read all about this awesome show. They do good work. Michael P. Smith was a photographer and also helped start the music hall Tipitina’s. He documented New Orleans from the inside. The exhibit was broken down into different parts with titles like Spirit world, Rhythms of the street, Jazz funerals, Mardi Gras Indians and Tipitina’s and Musicians. It was a beautiful show and most all the photos were in black and white, fitting for New Orleans.

So we left the photo exhibit and came across the Royal House. It is an oyster bar and just what we needed. It’s a nice place, not a hole in the wall which I prefer when in NOLA, but we bellied up to the bar and ordered a couple Bloody Marys and a dozen raw oysters. The oysters came fast and there were 14 of them, the drinks were a little slower. So we ate and drank all that and ordered another round. Again 14 oysters and two Bloody Marys. But, don’t think we were just wasting our time with oysters and “just ok” Bloody Marys. No, we were talking to the guy shucking our oysters, we were talking Fried Chicken. We ask his favorite spot for fried chicken and before he could answer we offered up what we had read about. He agreed they we all good, but he said his favorite was a place his daughter always wanted to go to. Some little gas station turned food store that served all kinds of fried food. Blue building he told us, on the corner of Esplanade and Claiborne.

So we paid our tab and found our car and sure enough it was on Esplanade, so we flipped a “U” and found Claiborne Ave. There it was, Gas Station, serving nothing but fried food and cold drinks. The place was really busy, people were everywhere. Ordering food, selling cd’s and stuff from the trunk of their car. We ordered 25 fried wings and right away they were passed through the window of bullet proof glass. We get in the car and start eating, damn they were hot and good. So we headed back to our hotel, stopped and got a six pack of Abita beer, checked in and ate everyone of those wings. That was good fried chicken and just what I had been wanting for a while. I always want fried chicken, I love it.

We then did what anyone would do at this point, we opened all the windows in the hotel room and there were a lot of windows as we had a 2 room corner suite on the fifth floor. We opened all the windows and got in our king sized bed and slept for two hours.

When we woke it was dark and we did what anyone would do at this point, we went looking for more food and drink.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, enough with the food and drink, but this is New Orleans and you just can’t get this stuff anywhere else in the world. Local oysters, 150 year old bars, fried chicken from the corner gas station. If ya can get it somewhere else then you not in New Orleans and that’s the difference.

So we set out for a new place, Butcher. Butcher and the Swine Bar is the latest effort from Chef Donald Link. He already has Herbsaint and Cochon under his belt and now Butcher. Just around the corner from Cochon, in the warehouse district, we find a brightly lite space with lot’s of white tiles. Butcher serves house made Salumi, all pork sausages. 18 different kinds of sausage, house cured for your pleasure. Butcher also makes it’s own mustard, two kinds, and they pickle their own veggies. You get the idea. They procures their cheese from the local cheese monger. This is serious stuff and very good. We have a plate each of meat and cheese, with house made mustard’s and house made crackers. I’m trying different beers and Stacey is trying different white wines. After we consume those two plates we order a sample of the Pate and the two different rillettes. One is duck and one is pork. When the chef serves them she tells us she added a little hogs head cheese ’cause it is “so good”. This is a beautiful plate of food and all so good, just like chef said. Only problem was after a day of eating we could not quite finish it all, we tried but just couldn’t.

I was ashamed and told the chef so.

STOP THE MADNESS

The have taken most all funds for the art’s away and now they want to take away the dollars to develop green space. Read below and send a email to one of the names at the end of the article. Speak up and help save a job and a park.

Flordia Department of Environmental Protection - Office of Greenways and Trails

Florida residents: Florida’s nationally renowned trails program threatened. Act now!
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection recently announced cuts to the state’s Office of Greenways and Trails, effectively eliminating this nationally renowned program. Speak up now for Florida’s trails!

Speak up for Florida’s Office of Greenways and Trails
During a Senate General Government Appropriations Committee meeting on Thursday, March 19, 2009, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) announced devastating cuts to Florida’s nationally renowned Office of Greenways and Trails (OGT). While other FDEP programs are being cut 20 percent, this proposal would:

* slash 33 percent from OGT’s budget;
* cripple citizen input by killing the Greenways and Trails Council, and;
* eliminate 84 percent of the OGT Tallahassee Office staff.

In addition to rolling back the pro-trail clock by at least 10 years, this measure will threaten nearly $50 million of hard-earned development money for Florida’s future trails by eliminating the positions that are responsible for administering these funds. This timing could not be worse; on-the-ground activity is ramping up to create green infrastructure and jobs associated with economic stimulus projects. The negative ramifications of this cut are far-reaching.

Please speak out against this injustice below. In the March 19 meeting, the public was only allowed 45 seconds of public testimony. Trails and greenways supporters deserve more than 45 seconds to make their voices heard.

If you are not a resident of Florida, you cannot use the OGT link - however , I did copy the “standard email” from the site and sent direct to email address of Legislature.

I am asking for you to show support for the Florida Deparment of Environmental Protection - Office of Greenways and Trails.

Suggested email addresses -
Governor Crist Charlie.Crist@myflorida.com
Lt. Governor Jeff Kottkamp, Jeff.Kottkamp@MyFlorida.com
Bob Ballard, Dep Sec, DEP, Land and Recreation bob.g.ballard@dep.state.fl.us
Secretary Michael Sole, FDEP, Michael.Sole@dep.state.fl.us
Senator Carey Baker, Appropriations, baker.carey.web@flsenate.gov

SUBJECT - Support the Office of Greenways and Trails

Sirs,

Please move quickly to save the nation’s best state trails program and, with it, $50 million of future trail development funding.

These attacks will roll back the trail progress clock by at least a decade, reduce citizen input and abolish our nationally recognized state trails legislation.

Not only will valuable staff resources be lost, but this risks trail development funding and green infrastructure jobs at a time when our state needs them most.

This month began as one of celebration, with the Governor’s Office declaring March as Florida Bicycle Month and ended with the FDEP proposing the

abolishment of the very services that make Florida a nationally renowned bicycling state. Please save Florida trails by making fair and measured

reductions that don’t single out the Office of Greenways and Trails!

FROM SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES

Article Tools Sponsored By
By SAM SIFTON
Published: March 17, 2009

The restaurateur Lou Amdur was leaning over his bar the other day at Lou, in Hollywood, uncorking some biodynamic deliciousness made in a French garage and talking about a few of the experiments he had going in his home up in the hills. Some weirdly flavored vinegars. Absinthe. House-cured bacon in the kitchen of the wine bar, a few pots of pork rillettes. It all sounded complicated and fantastic — a portrait of a food artist at work. Amdur shook his head. “None of this is art,” he said. “It’s craft. And craft isn’t all that hard. You can learn to do it.”
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Recipes: Fish Tacos (March 22, 2009)
Zachary Zavislak for The New York Times. Plate and white bowl: Global Table.

He was being modest. Amdur is a talented cook, in addition to being a wine guy of the first order (and the husband of Manohla Dargis, a chief film critic of The Times). But he was not wrong. As he went on to say, art is to craft as brain surgery is to a butcher’s work. Art is genius, or magic. Craft is observation and research multiplied by practice. It’s learnable by anyone.

Put another way, in the context of this space: you can learn to cook fish at home, if you ask the right people how to do it.

Dave Pasternack is the right people. He is the chef and an owner of Esca, in the theater district of Manhattan. He has an affinity for cooking fish that approaches the surreal. You might give him a barnacle, a grouper liver and three grains of sea salt, only to have him return to your side with a plate of food good enough to make you laugh out loud. His skill is that of an alchemist, or a magician. But unlike such characters, Pasternack also knows how to teach technique. The success of his restaurant is dependent on that ability. If a piece of monkfish is ethereal when he makes it for the lunchtime rush, it better be when the young cook he hired makes it at dinner, too. That’s how restaurants work. Consistency matters. It’s the most important thing. And it can be taught.

Today’s sermon is a recipe for fish tacos, that great meal of the Baja Peninsula, a taste of summer in spring. It benefits from time spent at Pasternack’s elbow, from the tacos served at, among other places, El Siete Mares taco stand on the eastern end of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and from practice runs in a Brooklyn home kitchen. They are simple to make, no more complicated in fact than a hamburger or a mess of pancakes, and they are considerably more flavorful.

Really. Here is the Sunday exhortation: You’re going to make fish at home, it’s going to be easy and it’s not going to take up your day or destroy your kitchen. The recipe is going to work. Trust the process. That’s Pasternack Rule No. 1. You’ve got to get over the fear.

“The first thing you want to do,” he said in the kitchen after lunch, “is you want to find a thick fillet of fish. You want a nice, thick fillet so you can develop the color and the crust.” Pasternack speaks in a soft Long Island bark that turns any conversation into an intimacy, a prelude to something possibly criminal and certainly fun. “Ask for the large,” he continued. “They have large in the back. They always do.”

What kind of fish in particular? For tacos, something fresh and white and firm. Emphasis on the fresh. Out in the cold waters off Montauk, the cod bite is on and the flatties are coming soon: big doormat flounder caught on hooks and line. Montauk snowshoes, they call these monsters, and if you see them in the market, it’s time to make tacos. That’s Pasternack Rule No. 2: Buying the fish is half the battle.

Rule No 3: Crust is crucial. You want, at home, a fish taco that has the crunch and texture of the deep-fried version available at the beach in Ensenada, though with better flavor and less mess.

Let us return, then, to our thick fillet, now dredged in seasoned flour. Pasternack, as if talking to a dishwasher out of Puebla he has just promoted to a job in front of a stove: “You want to make sure the bottom of your pan is completely covered in fat. It’s on a medium flame. You add a pat of butter for flavor, and you put the fillet in the pan. You turn it to medium high, and you watch it cook until it turns a deep golden brown on the bottom. That’s like three, four minutes. Then you turn it. A minute later, you take it out, put it on paper towels, season it with a little salt.”

This works, and how. You could do it with cod or char, and kings would cross mountains to honor you. But with flounder the goals are more modest. Fried in strips and served onboard warm corn tortillas with a simple salsa, a pinch of fresh cabbage, plenty of lime and a cream sauce you might want to punch up with some chopped chipotle, these fish tacos can turn a cold March night into bluebird summer, transporting you from spring chill into deep humidity and bliss.

Some of the sights of NOLA 3/22/09

Blog Stew

Yesterday was the last full day of winter and it was 75 degrees today.
Also, remember, when you die your not gonna say “wow, I wish I would have spent more time working”. So ……….

Saturday I’m going to New Orleans and I know it’s gonna be hot. I’m taking nothing but white cloths. I’m taking white linen pants, over sized white cotton shirts, white “v” neck tee shirts and white buck shoes. I don’t wear hats much, else I’d find a nice white hat to sport.

Tonight Stacey and I are going to a fund raiser for the ISAW/UAPO foundations. Click on it to learn more about it. There will be a auction and a dinner. I donated this painting to the auction.