DIY NY Pizza

All you New York makers can stop reading this right now. However, if you’re a maker who grew up with real NY pizza, then moved to a place lacking it, like, say, Los Angeles, this site is for you.

Jeff Varasano, a New Yorker in Atlanta, has spent years figuring out how to replicate the dough, get his home oven up beyond 800 degrees F, and perfect his sauce and toppings. His mile-long webpage chronicles it all in glorious detail so you can learn to do it yourself. I cannot look at his pizza photos without wanting to curl up into a ball, crying gently, waiting for someone to ship me back to 1983, to my buddy Carlo’s dad’s pizza place for a slice.

Heat is the real key to it all. You can’t cook a good pie in 15 minutes at 500F. It’s got to be more like two minutes at 850F. But most of us don’t have coal-fired brick ovens. What’s the secret? Hacking the safety latch on your electric oven and cooking with the cleaning cycle, which can get above 975F. You’ve got to be careful doing this, but isn’t it worth it? Your home’s got insurance anyway.

Jeff Varasano’s NY Pizza Recipe

There is also a wonderful online community of other home pizza makers, check out the New York Style forum on Pizzamaking.com.

6 Responses to DIY NY Pizza

Phillip Torrone on November 24th, 2008 at 5:39 pm said:

this.is.excellent!

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Kris on November 24th, 2008 at 5:53 pm said:

In college we used to make garlic bread this way, we called it “ghetto bread”, and it was truly wonderful. I can imagine that it would make beautiful pizza as well.

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Christian Conkle on November 25th, 2008 at 5:51 am said:

I’ve been making pizza using a simplified version of Varasano’s recipe for a while now. It’s brilliant, and after a few tries murderously easy to do as well. The slow-rise dough–which Peter Reinhart writes about in his bread and pizza books as well–is absolutely delicious.

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Rital on November 26th, 2008 at 2:51 am said:

That kind of pizza seems to me like our standard italian pizza, slightly smaller.
Of course, NY was an entry point for many italian immigrants. No wonder someone decided to start baking pizzas. Anyway, I found the name “NY pizza” as misleading and incorrect.

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John Park on November 26th, 2008 at 8:57 am said:

Rital, I agree, it’s very similar pizza. I based that title on the breakdown of the forums on Pizzamaking.com:

New York Style
Also known as Neapolitan-American style. Dough is stretched and/or tossed. Pizza has a bready rim that tapers down to a thin, foldable center.

Neapolitan Style
Mirrors the style of pizza popularized in Naples using 00 flour, few toppings, and very-high temperature ovens.

I grew in various parts of New York and spent many summers in Cassino, Italy, my mother’s hometown, and doubt I could tell the difference between the two.

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John Park on November 26th, 2008 at 8:59 am said:

(between the two pizzas, that is, not between the two geographic locations!)

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