Now, I will be the first to admit that I am a pizza addict.  A promiscuous pizza floozy.  If it was socially acceptable I would eat pizza every day.  Along with sushi every day.  Pizza and sushi every day.  While listening to the Smiths.  O.k… that’s a step too far.  But suffice to say that I love pizza.  Of course upon hearing this you might think that my pizza bar is set pretty low.  “He will eat any ol’ pizza and be happy with it,”  you’re thinking.  And this is pretty close to the truth.  BUT, just because I have a vast breadth of pizza experience does not mean that my pizza discernment lacks depth.  On the contrary.  I have a great love for pizza.  And because of that love I am an expert at knowing what constitutes a great pizza.

In terms of Sal & Carmine’s, they had me with the first slice.  And hundreds of slices since. 

Now let me just say that Sal & Carmine’s is a bit different than, say, Lombardi’s, Grimaldi’s or Patsy’s.  There is no 100 year old coal fired oven to lend its aged flinty smoke to the taste complexity of the crust.  Sure they have been in business for a long time, since 1959 if I am not mistaken, but there is nothing sacred or storied in their space or their equipment I don’t think.  Heck, they even moved a while back.  Maybe I am wrong.  But from what I can tell Sal & Carmine’s space seems pretty typical of New York’s many pizza joints.  It is small.  Only a few tables.  It sells whole pies but mainly slices.  It’s menu and its range are limited in that it has only a pizza oven, a counter and fridge to make and hold the dough and a cooler for drinks.  That’s pretty much it.

But the pizza that comes out of Sal & Carmine’s oven is quite frankly some of the best in New York city.  Easily within the top ten.  Possibly within the top five.  I am not sure what their secret is but Sal & Carmine’s crust has a character all its own that subtly sets it apart from other pizzas.  The dough of every pizza is multi-dimensional.  Thin and flexible in the center.  Then bubbling up into pillowy heaps toward the outer edge.  As if driving across the Great Plains the fields on either side of the road were covered in cheese with the Rocky Mountain foothills and muscular peaks of crust rising before it.  The crust itself, instead of charring to a hard dark outer shell, somehow maintains a light coloring of flour, slicked here and there with some of the cheesy oil that has found its way through a ‘mountain pass’.  When bitten into the crust has a slight bready give to it and then a satisfying toothsome chew.  With just enough salt in the dough to keep the taste buds dancing.  Thick in places, yet airy and pliable, a real pleasure to eat.  This is not crust that will get left behind by a picky pizza eater.

Sal & Carmine’s toppings are all fairly straight forward.  There is nothing fussy here like fresh basil or buffalo mozzarella.  But everything from the aged cheese to the pepperoni is good.  Really, though, it is the dough that takes all of the ingredients and toppings and elevates them to something very special.  I usually eat only the simple plain cheese slices so that I can savor the crust all the more clearly.  But whatever you order you can be certain that it will be good.  The one detail that Sal & Carmine’s does add to the diner’s experience is that they tie each pick-up order pizza box with a few wraps of red and white kitchen string.  Which I love.  I carefully untie the string and save each one I get.  Not only is it pretty but I have also then gone on to use it to tie the odd roast or bird. 

So what makes Sal & Carmine’s pizza so good?  The quality and taste of their pizza is simply astounding considering its humble home.  Pizza this good should be served to hundreds every day in a large restaurant.  But maybe that is the point.  Sal & Carmine’s is a family operation.  Brothers Sal and Carmine Malanga have been making pizza together for a long time.  Unfortunately Sal passed away last year.  But Carmine and grandson Luciano Gaudiosi (with the help of a couple other family members) continue to carry on Sal’s tradition and make the pizza every day.  So maybe it’s that family understanding, the familiarness of shared experience and values, that gives Sal & Carmine’s its outstanding flavor and character.  Its pizza dough mojo.  Sal & Carmine’s is run by a family that is not so concerned with growing the business, making lots of money or opening a second restaurant.  They just want to make seriously good pizza.  Which they do very well.

Since I was starting from a place of never having made a good homemade pizza ever, I had my work cut out for me.  So it has been slow going.  But that is fine.  Better to be methodical and zero in on the exact ingredients and combinations than to veer wildly from one idea to the next.  But in the process I inadvertently threw myself a curve ball.  The last time I was in Whole Foods buying some fresh mozzarella, I happened upon the freezer case loaded with Whole Foods’ own frozen pizza dough.  I wondered…. it couldn’t be that good could it?  But at $1.69 per pound I figured I should not let that wonder linger.  So I picked up a lump of the dough to try it out.  A couple days later I had still not done anything with the mozzarella so I figured I would thaw out the dough and put a test pie together.

After a couple hours thawing on the counter and then rising in a bowl, I turned it out, gave it a few whacks and stretched it onto a pizza pan.  Some tomato pulp, super olive oil, mozzarella, salt, more olive oil and dollops of pesto later and it was ready.  I had preheated the oven to 500 for maybe twenty minutes.  But then I switched to the Jim Lahey home method and turned on the broiler.  I threw the pie in and waited.  Almost immediately there was action!  Things started to bubble.  Things started to char.  I rotated it a couple times so that the bubbled cheese and dough wouldn’t catch fire and then pulled it out.  It looked fabulous - charred bits of dough, molten cheese, olive oil pooling – much to my dismay.  I cut it up and took a bite.  Ah!  A problem!  The interior of the dough at the middle of the pie was still a little unbaked.  Hmmm….  Acting fast I threw it all back into the oven but this time on the bottom rack in hopes that the dough would bake more.  After a few more minutes I pulled it out and took a bite.  Success!

Actually… amazing success.  Of course not quite a Grimaldi’s crust but pretty darn good considering it came out of my oven.  My immediate reaction was that of frustration.  What the heck was going on here?  How could this dough respond to the oven so much better than the dough I made?  Was it just the broil method?  Or was there something in the dough ingredients that made a difference?  Granted the Whole Foods dough seemed a little more complex than my dough.  The ingredients lists:  ‘organic wheat flour, filtered water, sea salt, yeast, organic cane sugar, organic dough conditioner (organic wheat flour, enzymes, ascorbic acid), organic semolina flour, organic canola oil.’  Was it the sugar?  The ‘enzymes’?  The fact that it was all pretty much ‘organic’?

And then there is the price.  At $1.69 for a pound (454g) it is hard to beat.  Homemade pizza dough is not expensive but it can take up some time.  So $1.69 is a small price to pay for some ready-made dough that leads to a very good pizza.

Which leads me in my frustration back to the perennial homemade pizza dilemma:  Why try at all?  Especially in a city like New York, there is good to great pizza just about every four or five blocks.  Maybe it is best to just leave the dough and pizza making to the professionals.  And if anyone living near a Whole Foods can get good pizza dough for just 10.56 cents an ounce (28.3g) then why bother?

So why do I still want to continue to try and figure out homemade pizza for myself?  I think it comes down to one thing – because it is there.  I have lots of other kitchen skilz.  Why would I not be able to figure this out?  Sure I don’t have the big super-hot pizza ovens or a custom built brick walled coal or wood burner.  But I have a good oven nonetheless.  There has got to be a way.  I see this homemade pizza quest as a great challenge.  And it is a challenge I will continue to slowly chip away at.  At least now I will have some decent pizza to munch on while I do.