Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>Mark Bello: Alright. Welcome everybody. My name is Mark Bello. My assistants: the
lovely Jenny over here and that's Sam. A little bit about what I do. Any pizza makers in the
house by the way? Yes. What are those? Kind of like a? Like bagels, is that what you're
talking about or English muffins?
>>male audience member #1: I try.
>>Mark Bello: Try. Alright. Other pizza makers? Dough makers? People that make their own dough?
Yep. So, so my business is called Pizza a Casa Pizza School. We also affectionately
call it the Pizza Self-Sufficiency Center and uh, well in a nutshell what happened,
I'm born here, Mt. Sinai Hospital, and grew up in West Chester and then Essex County,
New Jersey. So I love the pizzas of New York, New Jersey, New Haven, has anyone been up
to New Haven for pizza? Yes. Pepe's or Sally's? Or both, right?
>>female audience member #1: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: And Modern, right, so. But, so I love the pizzas from here and I found
myself in college in St. Louis and then grad school in Chicago, and you know, when I was
out there, I mean I loved the Midwest, but to say the pizzas were not the pizzas that
I grew up eating. You know, in all fairness to deep dish, I mean though my bracelet does
say "death before deep dish" on it, I, I will enjoy a slice of deep dish when in Chicago,
but to me, it's more of a casserole than it is, you know, the thin crust sort of slices
I grew up eating. So when I went over, when I come home to visit my parents, you know,
Thanksgiving break, winter break, straight from the airport; my favorite slice shop in
Milburn, New Jersey, La Strada Pizzeria is still there. Then throughout the visit I would
go to all my favorite spots throughout New York, New Jersey. If you guys later on wanna
geek out about like where to go, if you want to tell me some new places, I'm down to hear
it. And not only to eat pizzas, but to get extra pizzas, because I had this whole system
of transporting slices back to Chicago. You know, each slice, first of all, don't close
the box till it's perfectly cool, so you don't, you know, get the pizza all soggy. Then wrap
each slice tightly in foil, individually, tightly in foil to prevent freezer burn, and
then into a Ziploc labeled into my mom's freezer in Jersey and then back to Chicago in my suitcase
in one of those soft cooler bags. So I did this for a while. My friends would, you know,
tease me and simultaneously they'd sneak into my apartment and steal slices out of the freezer.
So, you know, I've cooked all my life. But one thing I'd never done is I'd never done
anything involving yeast, because I was intimidated. Was the yeast gonna work, was it not gonna
work? And a good buddy of mine, a guy named Neal, grew up working in the pizza biz since
he was like 14 years old and we were out late one night, you know we could go to a White
Castle, we were starving, we could go to a White Castle, we could go to a diner and instead
you know Neal's like "this pizza thing is ridiculous, you should start making your own."
So we went to the supermarket and bought the yeast and the flour and the cheese and all
that and so began this quest on not just how do you make a pizza at home. But how do you
really get like a dynamite crust? You know, good balance of crispiness and breadiness,
good balance of flavor and all that, given the limitations of your, your home kitchen,
you know? Does anyone have a pizza oven? Yet, right? That's what we like to say. So what
I was doing was playing around with a, I had an electric, domestic, you know, home oven
in my apartment. And we, these late night sessions would start, you know about sunrise
we'd still be checking out slices and all that. So today for the class what I've got
here, this is a 500 degree electric portable convection oven, so essentially simulating
what your home situation is. And in our classroom and we're gonna cue a video in a second here,
what we have is we assemble a group of folks, you know, it's, it's a lot of fun because
people don't really know each other before the class starts and at the end of class everyone's
swappin' slices, e-mail addresses, all that. And anyway, what we teach is how to, you know,
get this great pizza given the limitations of your home kitchen. So you'll notice in
the video our oven is just an electric domestic oven. It tops out at 525 degrees and that,
you know, maintaining the heat in your oven with a good baking stone in there and then
paying attention to the little tips and techniques that we impart in the class, you know, will,
will show you how to how to get this great pie. But anyway, do you guys wanna cue that
video and take a look?
[music begins]
>>Mark Bello: Well my name is Mark Bello and this is my place, it's called Pizza a Casa.
Pizza a Casa means pizza at home. This is something that can easily people get together
with their friends and their family and they say, let's, let's make Pizza a Casa. And so
here it's a cooking school and what we do is we, very specifically we teach people how
to make a really dynamite pizza given the limitations of, of the home kitchens. All
kinds of people come to our classes. Some people are practicing pizza makers who want
to just take their pizza making to the next level and other people have never touched
flour in their life. And everybody, after the four-hour class that we have, leave pizza
proficient and able to replicate this in their own ovens.
[pause] During the course of our pizza class, we're
gonna teach you all the little tips and techniques that really get a dynamite crust, great balance
of flavor, given the limitations of your home oven. So you know the lessons that we have
past all of the limp, lifeless, soggy pies that I had to endure and just take you right
to the, to the main event.
[music ends]
>>Mark Bello: So that's our space. We're down on the Lower East Side. If you guys know the
Doughnut Plant, we're very, you guys familiar with the Doughnut? Oh yeah, trouble. We're
a couple doors down, right next to Kossar's Bialys, there's sort of a round food theme
going on where we are, so. Ok. So I'm gonna make three pizzas today and three different
pizzas. Actually six in total because they'll be enough slices for all of you guys to have
a little taste. And then also we did a menu for the TGIAF. Has, have people had the sandwiches
yet that we did or the vegetable dishes and stuff? Oh, ok. Yeah Jason and his crew were
rockin' those out. So the first pizza is Margherita, you know. The very, the classic, you know,
tomato sauce, mozzarella, basil pizza, which by the way very intentionally the colors of
the Italian flag. To me the Margherita represents like the perfect pizza. And when I go to a
new place, whatever sort of you know quail egg, truffle, shaved asparagus thing they're
gonna tempt me with, I have to get a Margherita, 'cause that's the equalizer, you know, just
to see how it is. And, and this pizza really I think also demonstrates the fundamentals
of how to get just a really great pizza, again, in your home oven. Something I like to say
a lot is "less is more." You know? And you'll see. So first of all here's our dough, nicely
risen up in the container here. And very simply I can point you to our dough recipe on the
web site as well. Smooth surface to work your dough. And I dust this with some all-purpose
flour. And then remove the dough, gentle to not tear up. Yeast has been doing all this
nice leavening in there and you want to maintain that. Alright, a little flour on the top.
Something I like to tell people too is an amoebic pizza tastes better than a circular
pizza that you overwork to make a circle, because you know really just hammering that
pizza to try to get it perfectly symmetrical, you're taking all the, all the breath of the
yeast out of the dough and it gets very flat and that's where you get your cardboardy crust.
So, you know, I'll show you how to get a circle and it takes a little practice, but don't
be fixated on it. If your pizza starts looking like the shape of Alaska or something like
that, it's all good. Alright, so first thing, just a very gentle touch, I'm just patting
my dough down. And I press it all the way to the edge. I don't have to force a thicker
outer edge to get that that puffy handle or in Italian called the cornicione. I just leave
the center ever so slightly thicker because as my circle gets bigger, the center's gonna
thin and I want to leave myself a little bit of slack in there. Alright, so my hands fit
on there nice, I wanna check is this movin' and groovin' on the marble, so I give it one
more, it's like in between periods in a hockey game, Zamboni comes out, smooth that up and
then nice glide. Alright, and this is a move that I picked up about three years ago just
totally by accident. I got to make pizzas in this Italian restaurant with a wood-burning
oven, and the first night I went, I was, the chef invited me to come, I'd never cooked
in a wood-burning oven, made some pizzas, they apparently were good enough to send to
the customers. The customers didn't send 'em back, so that was a good sign, so they invited
me back the second night and little did I know that the pizza chef basically considered
me now trained, so he just didn't show up, Saturday night. So I'm there and I'm totally
in the weeds, trying to, you know, keep up the pace. And the owner comes over and shows
me this move and I have since dubbed this the DJ, because it reminds me very much of
sort of like a record scratching sort of a routine. But very simply you're just pulling
the outer edge of the dough to stretch it into a circle, so one hand is just applying
enough pressure just to hold it so when I pull it, it doesn't slip out from my hand.
And I'll show ya. [pause] You see the dough is spinning around by itself as I go? [pause]
Voilá. Cool. Anybody?
[applause]
>>Mark Bello: That's it, alright. So, ok, so I'm gonna stretch out two of these, so
I can get a peel here and this is some semolina flour. This is what I'm gonna use as a release
on my peel, the big spatula thingy, also called a peel, p-e-e-l. If you don't know any of
the terms that I use today, you can Google them. No, just kidding.
[laughter]
>>Mark Bello: Like you've not heard that before. Sorry. Alright, let me stretch this guy out
here and then I'll start demonstrating that. Ok, once again, circle out. Some flour down.
[pause]
>>male audience member #2: So thin semolina, right? The sort of thing that you use in pasta.
>>Mark Bello: The, I'm sorry?
>>male audience member #2: Thin semolina, right? The sort of thing that you use in pasta.
>>Mark Bello: The semolina is a coarse, it's the like the durum wheat that used for like
making pasta.
>>male audience member #2: There is also the coarse semolina that’s the texture of [inaudible].
>>Mark Bello: Texture of?
>>male audience member #2: [inaudible] you actually can see the grains.
>>Mark Bello: Yeah. These, you know what later on I'll, I'll give you a shake of this. It's,
it's pretty gritty. I mean essentially it's like ball bearings on there, that's gonna
allow the pizza to roll right off of the peel. The other thing I like about semolina is that
a little bit of it is gonna stick on the bottom of the crust, and so it toasts, and you get
this nice added textural crunch. And it also gets a kind of a nice, a little subtle nutty
flavor to it when it toasts.
>>male audience member #2: [inaudible] two brands of semolina, the finer or the coarser,
I'm trying to figure out which one.
>>Mark Bello: This is the coarser of the two, yeah, that I'm using here. I buy this, I mean,
for pasta making it's the same stuff that I use, this is the Italian stuff.
>>male audience member #2: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah.
>>male audience member #2: The coarse, it's like grits.
>>Mark Bello: Oh, like. Oh, ok. You know like in New Haven they use cornmeal to dust their
pizza peels, and they make it work, I mean, because I find cornmeal accumulates a lot
on your, on your baking stone, starts to burn and you know I mean I love a charred pizza,
but it gets this sort of bitter thing going on. They know how to rock it in New Haven,
I don't know, but for me the semolina I find is utili, you know works great for releasing
the pizza and then also gives you that nice texture and added flavor. Ok. Thank you, sir.
[pause] Alright, all these little imperfections, or perceived imperfections here, leave 'em
be. 'Cause you know if you start to sort of overwork this here, that's where you're gonna
get that flat cardboardy crust, and if you leave that, that's all gonna rise up and be
beautiful and bready and crispy. In a few minutes you're gonna taste this. Fresh mozzarella.
This is from a place in Little Italy called Alleva, which is actually the oldest Italian
cheese shop in the United States. They've been making mozzarella since 1892. But you
know, if I don't have my, my Italian you know mom and pop shop mozzarella, in the supermarket,
you know, we would be buying the low moisture, whole milk balls of mozzarella. Not the part
skim, the whole milk, more flavor and it's gonna melt a lot better. And you're gonna
see, you don't have to use a lot to actually get this going. So I'll cut this in some slabs.
[pause] This here and get my sauce prepped as well. So the sauce too. Crazy simple. And
I stirred hours to figure this out. But basically this is something that's called passata, which
is a, means puree in Italian. It's an Italian tomato puree. But your, your pureed tomatoes,
good quality tomatoes, and this is you know about a $3.00 bottle right here, I can get
about six pizzas out of here. [pause] Some nice fresh garlic. And then with either a
garlic press or a microplane, one of these graters here, what I do is per bottle of passata,
which is a 28 ounce bottle, or if I'm doing canned, canned pureed tomatoes, it's a 28
ounce bottle, or 28 ounce can, three cloves of garlic grated in there. So yeah, what I
like a lot about the microplane is you get that nice paste going on. So that's gonna
melt right into the sauce. [pause] And that's sauce. Simple, eh? You're gonna see, it actually,
this is gonna cook on the pizza in the oven. So right now if you were to taste this, you
would be tasting that garlic for the rest of the day, but for the six to ten minutes
that these pizzas are gonna bake, it's gonna, you're gonna have nice bright tomato flavor,
the garlic's gonna be there.
>>male audience member #3: So if you go to like the store and get like cans of Hunts
crushed tomatoes or whatever, it's the right consistency?
>>Mark Bello: Yes. Some tend to be a little thicker than others. This is puree as opposed
to crushed. Crushed is a little bit thicker preparation. And different purees have like
different viscosities, I mean this is kind of what I'm looking for. But you know it's
just sort of a trial and error thing, you know, find a puree that you like. And it doesn't
have to be you know like fancy imported Italian, I mean of course these are delightful tomatoes
and I've got another bottle up here if anyone wants to come up and take a taste. But you
know a lot of domestic brands, California brands, Canadian tomatoes. We, we hosted a
tomato tasting event at our shop and winning tomatoes, Luigi Vitelli from Canada for the
whole peel, so. You know, so first thing that's going on my pizza is not the sauce, it's actually
the cheese. This is a point often in our classes where people you know coming in during the
meet and greet they're like, oh, you know I'm a pizza maker, but one of the problems
is my pizzas never cook right, you know, they're gummy, they're soggy, they're undercooked,
like what am I doing wrong? And at this point in the demo, they're like, wait a minute,
you're not gonna put more cheese on there? And that's the thing is that overtopping the
pizza, the pizza doesn't cook. So, and how did I figure this out? Totally by accident
because what happened was. You wanna start breaking this up here? Sam, if you guys. I'll
do that. I figured this out because like one day, you know, I was hungry, I had a ball
of dough. I had a little mozzarella, I had a little sauce. Not as much as I normally
would use to make a pizza, but I made it anyway. And it was the best pizza I'd ever made. And
then I realized, that was my big "ah ha" moment, like that's what I was doing. I was basically
suffocating my pizza under too many toppings. So it's a pretty cool thing to figure out
that, you know, if you use less your pizzas come out better. So I mean that just equals,
you can eat more pizza. Alright, so second, my sauce. [pause] And it's also, it's not
about like a full opaque blanket of sauce here. I wanna allow the pizza to breathe as
it bakes. And when this is finished, and you'll see the finished product, all that sauce and
that cheese nicely spreads out. It's also where six years of art school comes very handy.
Tell who my favorite action painter was. Alright. I'll get the pecorino on it in a sec. [pause]
So I'm just kind of dotting it here and there on the cheese. You know if the cheese was
to go on the top, what would happen is, instead of it melting and spreading out, it would
just basically bake in place, so you'd have these sort of toasted, you know, islands of
mozzarella. But this is gonna allow the crust to bake through in the beginning and by the
end everything should be all spread out very nicely. And then the last thing that's gonna
go on before baking is some pecorino Romano to give it a little nice saltiness there.
[pause]
>>male audience member #4: [inaudible] have salt in your sauce?
>>Mark Bello: The sauce? This contains salt, this bottle, but it's pretty mild. And most
purees like in a can do not. And what I say is just throw a teaspoon in there. Because
the salt's gonna come later. There's less than a teaspoon actually of salt in each dough.
The mozzarella, and I have more of this too if you guys, you know, post demo wanna come
up and taste the raw ingredients, is not super salty. It's sort of the combination of all
the ingredients together. You know a lot of times in cooking, you don't wanna add your
salt until the end because all the ingredients come together, things cook down and all that.
>>male audience member #4: So the one teaspoon for the bottle or [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: If, for, if I'm doing a one teaspoon per 24 ounce bottle or 28 ounce can
of tomatoes. And then the salt comes later. This, the pecorino Romano, you guys know this
is the cheese we all love to you know grate on our pastas, shave on our salads, and here
I just give this a nice blanket of pecorino. And the microplane again just gives me a nice
snowy blanket here. All things told it's about a half an ounce of cheese, pecorino. Less,
whenever I weigh this, the mozzarella, it never exceeds three ounces and it's about
three to four ounces of sauce. Alright, I'll hand this off to you guys. [pause]
>>Jenny: Do you want me to do it or do you just wanna?
>>Mark Bello: I got it, yeah. I'll do that. [pause] And you notice I'm taking the pecorino
all the way to the edge, 'cause when you get those little toasty bits of pecorino on the
edge of your crust. The end of the party, what they call in the biz the bones, like
the stack of crusts that nobody wants to eat. Barely, no bones. Ok. So. Check on my pizza,
how's this doing?
[loud noise from oven]
[pause]
>>Mark Bello: Alright.
>>male audience member #5: How long do you have to preheat the stones for?
>>Mark Bello: I like to preheat my stones for an hour. Now that is a much, that's a
longer preheat time than pretty much any oven requires, but you know you're preheating the
stones, not just the oven. The thing that's good though is that once you get those stones
heated up, they are one I mean they act, they give you that sort of brick oven effect where
they're gonna crisp the bottom of your pizza and pull moisture out of it, but additionally
they're like a capacitor that's gonna keep that heat in your oven, so if you pay attention
to just keeping that oven door you know open as little as possible, those stones are gonna
help your oven, you know, it doesn't have to work as hard once it's preheated. You know
it takes say a half an hour for your pi, your oven to heat up and then the stones need a
little bit more time to catch up. But once they're there, that's really where you're
gonna get you know the crust that, that you're gonna see in a moment here.
>>male audience member #6: So like I noticed you gave the pizza a little shake on the paddle before you dropped it in.
>>Mark Bello: Yeah.
>>male audience member #6: Is there a way to save it if you realize you don't have enough
>>Mark Bello: If you're stuck?
>>male audience member #6: Semolina on it?
>>Mark Bello: Yeah. And it's good to figure that out beforehand, then, you know. So what
happens if, you know, if it is stuck, you're gonna see it kind of hang on that spot and
you can basically just lift it up and then just toss a little semolina under there, or
if it's a really sticky situation, you know I'll just dust another peel with semolina
and then do sort of a transfer. And if it's a really like, you know, point of no return
situation, I'll roll it up, put it in foil and make like a little calzone, so. Yeah.
[laughter]
>>Mark Bello: Calzones are tricky because they do take longer to cook in your home oven
and you know to get the inside all melted and warm on the outside before it's overcooked.
So what I like to do is start 'em in foil and cook 'em for about 15-20 minutes and then
unwrap them on the stone and then finish them, you know give them a nice toast.
>>male audience member #7: What's the temperature of the oven?
>>Mark Bello: This oven, the dial goes up to about 500 degrees.
>>male audience member #7: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah. I set, you know at home you want to set your oven as hot as it's gonna
go. And I do not advocate hacking your oven, by the way, like you know, wrapping the thermostat
in insulation or you know what's the other one?
>>Sam: The self-cleaning mode.
>>Mark Bello: The, yeah the self-cleaning mode.
>>male audience member #8: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: How are those pizzas lookin'?
>>male audience member #9: The broiler with the door closed?
>>Mark Bello: What's that?
>>male audience member #9: The broiler with the door closed?
>>Mark Bello: The broiler, the problem is, is that you're, you know usually the broiler
is up top, so what it's doing is it's just raining heat down on the top of the pizza,
so. So that's one of the things. But again, what you're gonna see is done with no hacking.
It's all, you know, straight up. And you know the oven that you have, I mean gas or electric,
no name whatever, you know, what, what's important again is a decent, you know, a nice thick
baking stone and then proper adherence to, to these principles here. Next is, I'm gonna
do a pizza for you guys, it's potato rosemary pizza. [pause] In fact.
>>male audience member 10: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: How thick? About, well these stones are a clay mixture called cordierite.
These are about half inch thick stones right here. So you know the thinner stones you,
what you run the risk is I mean they'll get to temperature, but once the pizza hits it,
it's gonna pull the temp, the heat out of it and it's not gonna rebound in time to properly
cook the bottom of your pizza.
>>male audience member #11: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: You know it's on an oven by oven basis. At the shop we have, they like,
we have an electric oven, very even heating, and I like how convection works. For the class,
however, I just teach on bake. Like the most fundamental, basic, you know, of oven functions
to show that with, with no fancy bells or whistles you can really get a great pizza.
But you know what I say at home is you and your oven will become very good friends, you're
gonna learn if it's like extra hot in one corner, so you know you have to rotate your
pizza mid-baking and things like that. So whereas my, the oven at the shop, I do like
convection, you know when I do catering gigs and I'm using someone's kitchen as my pizzeria
that night, I often find that convection can be uneven heating, it's just on an oven by
oven basis. And please like bring on more of these questions, I can totally geek out
on ovens with you guys, flour if you want to talk about it. I used to work at Murray's
Cheese, you guys know about, down on Bleecker Street, so, don't get me started about cheese.
>>male audience member #12: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: One of the tricks that I've seen with the broiler, if you wanna get like
a really nice dark underside of the pie, is preheat your oven like you normally would,
so it's all evenly heated and then at the very end, like 10 minutes before you're gonna
get your pizzas in there, throw it on broil and get that stone extra hot and then you
can get the pizza in there and then you'll get that nice charred underside.
>>male audience member #13: What if, if you have a gas oven with a broiler that's underneath.
>>Mark Bello: Alright, so here's a little hack that I, well no. At home we have a gas
oven and it has a broiler below and when I turn that to broil, I have a little laser
thermometer that can tell me the temperature of my baking stones and I've seen my stones
get upwards of 600 degrees, so that's kind of cool. I'm surprised that no one has yet
built an oven. How they looking?
>>Jenny: Good.
>>Mark Bello: Good? Ok. Ok. That you know it would just I think be a matter of insulation.
You know. The ovens that we have in the shop, actually generously provided by Viking, great
oven. We've actually been keeping count of our pizza making and since the store opened
April 15th of 2010, we have made what, what have we?
>>Jenny: Five thousand eight hundred and one.
>>Mark Bello: Five thousand eight hundred and one pizzas in our oven. We've got a little
clicker to count and that oven is going strong. But one of the things that Viking said was,
"Now Mark, don't cook on the cleaning cycle." So I promised I would not. Yeah, there are,
I've seen plans on line how to cut that latch when, so when the cleaning cycle, you can
get the door open. Do not advocate it. Alright. You know what guys? If you wanna start on
that as well, so if you noticed guys, so these potatoes here, what I've got is raw red potatoes,
which I soaked in a little bit of extra *** olive oil, and grate a clove of garlic in
there, and then a little bit of salt and some fresh rosemary.
>>male audience member #14: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Oh yeah.
>>male audience member #14: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah.
>>Jenny: Sorry.
>>male audience member #15: So did you mandolin those?
>>Mark Bello: Yeah, I have a very simple mandolin. Just like one slice fits all, a sixteenth
of an inch. It's about the thickness of a dime. And so they're raw, and then just sort
of steeped in this oil and rosemary mixture. And notice my application too. I'm not like
overlapping or shingling these on there. What I'm doing is I'm doing more of like a tiling
or a cobblestoning of the potatoes, allowing the crust again to breathe. And also if, if
at any point like I'm overlapping the potatoes, that's a spot where I run the risk of the
potatoes not cooking all the way through as it goes.
>>male audience member #16: So there's obviously a lot of [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yes, this is where I contradict myself because I don't like to put the oil
like on the Margherita and most of my pizzas until the pizza is done. Because what happens
is you put the pizza.
>>Jenny: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah. You wanna pull that out?
[pause]
>>Mark Bello: >>Alright.
>>Jenny: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Give it a little bit more, yeah. I'll get it in one sec. So with oil. The perils
of putting oil on in the beginning. One of the things is it just sinks down into your
pizza, so you know, you still get all the calories, but you don't get that really nice
finishing touch, so what I'll do is when that pizza comes out, just a drizzle of the good
Sicilian stuff here. And, and also a peril of putting oil on ahead of time if you've
ever been in a pizzeria and your eyes are stinging or it's like kind of hard to breathe
and you're like, what's up? It's, it's usually either some sort of fat, oil or, or excess
flour burning in the oven. So if the oil hits your pizza stone, your fire alarm is going
to go off shortly thereafter. With this one, the oil actually clinging to the potatoes
and also clinging to the rosemary kind of, well buffers the rosemary from burning and
then also kind of just helps to, to, these aren't soaked in oil, they're actually just
kind of have a nice you know outer coating of it right there.
>>Jenny: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Alright. Alright. Let me look in.
[loud noise from oven]
>>Mark Bello: Put this one on there.
[loud noise from oven]
>>Mark Bello: Alright, hand me those peels and I'll get these guys in while I'm yapping
about Margheritas.
[loud noise from oven]
[loud noise from oven again]
>>male audience member #17: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah, for two reasons. I mean one just so all of the, you know, elements
kind of gel together, but two because of the dreaded pizza mouth, which is when you bite
into that slice.
[laughter]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah and you just trash the roof of your mouth for the rest of the night.
So yeah, during the class like this is the first pizza we eat, it's usually about an
hour and a half in. You know we've made our dough, our dough is set aside to rise and
people are, you know, I can just see the hunger in their eyes and I'm like talking about basil
and not bruising it and everything and I know they're just like, will you cut the pie already?
And I'm like, totally, hey, I'm stalling so you guys don't burn the roof of your mouth.
Ok. So the basil. Basil, very delicate herb. Chopping basil is a no no. It will bruise
your basil. Either tearing the basil or using, I like to use a pair of snips. You know instead
of pouncing down on the basil with a blade, the scissors are just gently cleaving through
here. How many people do we have? Because I want to cut this in enough slices so everyone
gets a sliv. What's the count?
>>unknown: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah. Well it would help 'cause I gotta do my, my math here for my pie chart.
>>unknown: [inaudible]Thirty.
>>Mark Bello: Thirty?
>>Jenny: I've got 30.
>>Mark Bello: Ok, I'll cut 16 slices. That's perfect.
>>unknown: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Ok. Sixteen slices of each.
>>unknown: Plus those guys back there.
>>Mark Bello: Oh, I'll hook those guys up later, I got extra doughs for you, I, yeah,
I know what's up.
[laughter]
[pause]
>>Mark Bello: Ok. So, basil's on there, the heat from the pizza is gently waking up the
herbaciousness of the basil, here's my good Sicilian oil, just a nice controlled drizzle
on there. That, when I've measured it, it's about a half a tablespoon.
>>male audience member #18: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Oil? You're gonna taste it in a second, it's just the beautiful like cherry
on top. Yep. Cutting the pizza. Your grip. This is sort of your traditional grip. Work
at a pizza place and you'll notice your wrist will start to hurt cutting multiple pies like
this. The grip I like to employ is like this, I kind of call this like my gangster-style
grip right here. It's uh, gives me just all my force can be concentrated directly down,
so I just hit that pizza and then just roll and I got a nice clean cut without it skating
all over the place. Do you guys hear that crisp sound? As I'm going across, so. Sixteenths
on this. [cutting sounds] Alright, Jenny, you wanna? [cutting sounds] Walk that out.
[pause] So it's very quiet. That's, what do you think? Is it good?
>>male audience member #19: So the bread-type people are all about you know the [inaudible]
and high-gluten flour.
>>Mark Bello: Yes.
>>male audience member #19: And all that kind of fussing with the dough.
>>Mark Bello: Yes.
>>male audience member #19: [inaudible] Do you think it helps?
>>Mark Bello: Yeah, I mean, well so this dough was made, this has had about 36 hour sort
of a rise on it. And the fermentation you know that occurs in that. In our class we
teach what's called a quick-rise dough, which is like make your dough, set it aside to rise,
it's ready to work in about 45 minutes. This is also what a pizzeria calls emergency dough,
which is like, uh oh, we're running out of dough, make some more dough fast. But you
know, a lot of pizza makers, and myself included, I like the extra sort of depth of flavor you
get with a dough that has time to rest and you know this fermentation that occurs, the
chemistry between the yeast and the flour and everything else. So if I'm doing a party
or something, I plan to make my doughs a day and a half, two days in advance or something
like that.
>>male audience member #20: It must also make the dough easier to work.
>>Mark Bello: Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a number of things. When the dough is actually
straight out of the, out of the container on a quick rise, it's like this pillowy, it's
malleable and really, really, you know, it's actually very seductive and it's kind of hard
not to just wanna dive into it, and just you know flatten it out again, but it's nice to
work. But you know I actually a lot of times with my doughs I pull 'em straight out of
the fridge and I work 'em cold. You have to, it takes a little more practice, you have
to be a little bit more aggressive to stretch it, but you know, you really get rewarded
with a nice crumb, like the little pockets of air in there and nice bubbles and stuff.
But did you guys notice with this pizza, I mean you know given it was still pretty thin,
there was still, you know some air. What'd you think of it? Was it, was it good?
>>male audience member #21: [inaudible]
[applause]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah? Alright. Cool. Thank you. Good. This is always in the class the moment
of truth, like if people, you know, so far we're batting a thousand, but if not one of
my favorite spots, right up the street. But um.
[laughter]
>>Mark Bello: So, so first of all the crust. You guys like the crust? The amount of cheese,
was, did it satisfy your cheese tooth? You know, did you, and you, did you think like
given how much I didn't put on there, right? What about the sauce, you know? Garlic, tomatoes,
you know nice balance. And what about just the balance in general of the flavors? Like
nothing overwhelming, everything just kind of in sync? And the oil, did you, did you
enjoy the oil that fini, yeah, isn't that nice, that little fini, and that, that it's
not a ton, it's just that finishing drizzle that again at the end so you really can taste
that. Let me check how these guys are doing here.
>>male audience member #22: How long [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Until it's done. 'Cause it.
[laughter]
>>Mark Bello: No, that's totally the answer, because every oven is different and like depending
on you know how good I'm about getting the oven door closed as fast as possible, you
know, so it's anywhere in my ovens like six to ten minutes. And you know, in, in the classroom
our oven very even heating, pizzas go in there, pretty much don't have to do anything unless
there's an ingredient that's gonna go on later on in the bake. You know, this is another
important thing is certain ingredients are going to burn or overcook if you put them
on at the beginning, so they go in later. And at home actually, our oven, we, the back
right corner is the hottest part of the oven, so I know that even though, you know, it's
gonna be, like I don't have to look at the pizza for five minutes, but then I know at
five minute point I need to give my pizza a turn, so it cooks evenly. Now doing that
I don't like you know open the oven door and go, huh, or get my tongs and kind of eek it
along. I get that door open, I get it on the peel, I pull it out, I get that door closed.
Then I make my adjustment, and then get that back in. So again, always maintaining that
heat in your oven is a good thing. Pizzas will cook quicker and they'll cook better.
Ok. So this guy, how's it looking? Good. Alright. A minute more? Ok. I'm gonna start stretching
out for the final pizza, and we're actually gonna do a sweet pizza for you guys. This
is a class favorite. In fact, I can tell the total Nutella addicts in our classes because
when it's time to make, ah, there you go. When it's time to make our pizzas, they just
go straight to this pizza, like they don't start with the savory, they just dive right
into it. So this is a fun pizza. It's a banana roasted on the crust and then for a nice crunch,
you know I was using pine nuts and then I found these, have you guys ever had the dry-roasted
peanuts from Virginia? Like again, another raw ingredient you're welcome to come up and
taste later. Like unlike any peanut I've ever had. These nice salty, crunchy peanuts complimented
by the caramelized like bananas on there and then the finishing touch of the Nutella, it's
a, it's a wonderful thing. So see that come together in a sec, I promise. How are the
potato guys looking? I want to give them a nice, nice toast on there. Pretty good? Alright
let me get this guy stretched, we'll get another peel. Other things with stretching the dough,
by the way. So throwing the dough. You know the pizza purists will say, throwing dough
is forbidden. And one of the reasons is a crust that is hand hewn, you know I don't
know if you, there's a light behind me, but if you can see this sort of you know interplay
of a little bit thicker here, and little bit thinner there, that's where you get that just
nice different you know the different textures and flavors going on in your crust, where
a crust you know made by centrifugal force and flour in your eyes, is very uniform across
the way and just very soulless. Now that being said, you know, it's fun to throw dough. We
actually keep a practice dough in the store, it's made out of silicon, so if aspiring you
know Olympic pizza maker athletes want to try it, they don't have to risk losing one
of their precious doughs in the process. I'm sorry?
>>male audience member #23: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Oh, yeah. Oh, I have friends who compete in these competitions. They're
insane, the things. They'll like flip the dough, it'll roll behind the head, they'll
catch it on the other side. But when they make me a pizza, I'm like, do it on the table
please. So.
[laughter]
[loud noise from oven]
>>Mark Bello: I think we could go just a little bit more on this guy. [pause]
>>male audience member #24: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: When I'm doing a quick-rise dough, so I wanna get my yeast like kicking
into gear that much faster, just a pinch of sugar to feed it to proof it. But when I'm
doing a cold rise, I don't use sugar. It's very simply flour, active dry yeast is what
I'm using for this, not instant, but the active dry, water and salt and a little bit of oil.
And actually I've got for you guys some dough stirring spatulas with our dough recipe printed
on the handle, we give these out in class, so, you can take it and try your hand.
[scraping sound]
>>male audience member #24: Is it heresy to use store-bought dough?
>>Mark Bello: It's not heresy to use it, but what I find a lot of the times is
>>male audience member #24: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah. You know, a lot, so another thing people come into the class and they
say, you know, I've been making pizzas but one of the problems I have is I stretch it
and it shrinks back, and you know, and it's like impossible to work, what am I doing wrong?
And it's not necessarily you. The person making the dough that day maybe like you know, got
a phone call, left the mixer on too long, the dough is over-kneaded, you know the glutens
are overdeveloped and you've got this hockey puck that's impossible to stretch. So, I actually
did a class once at a, at a culinary center in a supermarket where they said you know
we want to do like an abridged class using our dough. So I took their dough home and
I made some pizzas with it and it was great. It worked really wonderful, so I was like,
cool, you know? The day of the class, disaster, or dough-saster, and so, so I had my jar of
yeast with me and my kit and we busted out the flour, and we made our dough on the fly.
So really, you know when you, when you make your own dough, you know the dough. You know
the hydration. You know it's gonna work the way that you expect it to. Pizzeria dough,
too is nice and it's convenient, but often that dough is formulated to work in your pizzeria's
you know like six, seven, eight hundred degree oven and it's a completely different animal.
Where this dough, really, you know, ideally, just totally sings in your home oven. Alright
Jenny I'd say get those guys out now.
>>male audience member #25: What's your basic [inaudible]. What's your basic flour? What's
your flour [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Am I allowed to name names? I guess I said Nutella, right? So, for all
my pizzas, actually whether I'm doing a dough that's gonna be going in a home oven or I'm
doing like a you know fire-breathing dragon, like 850 degree wood-burning oven, I just,
is, I like to use an all-purpose, an unbleached and an unbromated all-purpose, so a good quality
all-purpose flour and personally I use a brand called King Arthur, which you know, yeah,
see, I say the name and people, it's like it has this cult following.
>>male audience member #26: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Not, you know, well their all-purpose is actually a higher protein content than
a lot of all-purpose flours, it's somewhere in the vicinity of 12%. I find it works great,
you know. You know in the beginning I was playing around with all sorts of flours, I
got the, the double zero, you know or the doppio zero, the flour that you know by the
rules of Neapolitan pizza making you must use to make your, your pizzas. And definitely
for a pizza that cooks you know in like under a minute in one of those super hot ovens,
that's where you get that really nice crispy exterior and that nice pillowy interior. But
you know I made the dough according to all of the Neapolitan rules, the half an hour
of kneading, the double rise, all the stuff, but baked it in my home oven and the results
were, were less than stellar. So I started playing around with bread flours, pastry flours,
you know high gluten, all this stuff and then I would assemble friends and family for my
blind taste test focus groups and I'd make like four Margheritas, and each Margherita
was made with a different batch of dough and you know the one that came up on top was the
all-purpose flour dough. [pause] Alright. [pause]
>>male audience member #27: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: That was a little bit more fresh rosemary on there. So again these potatoes,
when they went on, were raw. [pause]
[cutting sounds]
>>male audience member #28: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: I'm sorry, what was the question again?
>>male audience member #28: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah, you know, I, I, you know, so much of pizza making is trial and error,
and just figuring out how to get that balance and when it should cook, you know? And I find
that, that the potatoes reach the finish line at about the same time when the crust does,
you know. This is where certain ingredients, like I do a pizza actually one of the things
for the happy hour is we basically, we're not doing pizzas, but we're doing panini,
which are essentially reverse engineered pizzas in sandwich form and one of them is this pizza
that I make that's smoked mozzarella with tomato sauce, sun-dr, and sun-dried tomatoes.
And the thing is if the sun-drieds go on in the beginning, they're gonna burn before the
pizza's done. So what you want to do is about a minute to spare is get that pizza out and
then dress it with the sun-drieds, and then back in for a quick warm up. So. What do you
think? Do you like it? You'd think like you know starch on starch it's just gonna be this
really you know Atkins nightmare pizza here but very, I mean crisp and just really really
light. This is a very tr, classic Roman pizza. You know in Rome it's the patate pizza and
some versions are simple like this, some they do a little bit of mozzarella, some they do
some caramelized onions. In class, I like I show this as a demo pizza and then I encourage
people to be creative, and you know they I see things like pancetta going on top, Ricotta,
like different things like that, but again stressing that whole mantra of less is more,
you know. If you overload the pizza with too many things, I mean, the flavors are gonna
compete, but also the pizza underneath, or the potato underneath all those toppings isn't
gonna cook. I mean did you find those potatoes cooked to your liking?
>>male audience member #29: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: In this guy? Yeah, you know I'm kind of a, I'm ah looking at the pie overall.
I mean one of the things when I when I get an oven, I bust out my laser thermometer and
I check, when I cater I carry this thing with me, you know on a holster on my side just
to check, 'cause I don't know if I'm doing two pizzas at a time, like I'm doing here,
what this person's oven, how it behaves. So I get a quick read on the stones, and these
stones are pretty much in the same temperature range, so I know they're gonna you know come
out right about the same time. And just experience and kind of like smell and spidey sense kind
of you get like weirdly. It just, make enough pizzas and you're gonna see they just get
better and better and better. Ok the banana that's going on here. I like to pick bananas
that are riper than I would, you know, put on my Cheerios in the morning. Because the
riper the banana, the more sugars that you've got in there and what's gonna happen is when
that bakes on there, the sugars are gonna come out and they're gonna caramelize and
you get that really nice flavor coming out of that. And just like the potato pizza, I'm
gonna lay these banana slices out tiled, not overlapping, so they cook through nicely and
Jenny and/or Sam, if you guys could distribute this one right here, I'll trade ya. [pause]
Banana peel makes a nice cutting board as well, you can just kind of hang on to it like
that. I call these my MacGyver meets Martha tips.
>>male audience member #30: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Oh. You want my honest opinion? I think, wheat, wheat, I love whole wheat,
you know I really, I love whole wheat bread and I love, you know, tuna salad on whole
wheat, but I find with, you know like I wouldn't put pastrami on banana nut raisin bread and
I feel that mozzarella and tomato sauce just doesn't harmonize with the flavor of whole
wheat. And, and reading on whole wheat, I mean a lot of the things I've learned, one,
you know, when you make a whole wheat dough, you have to cut it in half with some all-purpose
flour in order for you to get that gluten development and that being said you're still
gonna get sort of like a lumpier kind of mealier crust. You know, and reading, some of the
things that I've seen that you know unless it's an issue of like I had a guy in class
who by doctor's orders had to eat all whole grain things and I understood, but in terms
of the absorption of nutrients, you know, you're not gonna absorb anything more from
a whole wheat than from a good quality all-purpose. And then you know you're getting a compromise
in the texture and the flavor. The one thing you do miss is your missing your fiber and
that, you know, you should get elsewhere. But you know I've yet, I've still been playing
around, I've been playing around with these white wheat flours, have you guys seen those?
Yeah. To see what I could get. And what I recommend is that if you're doing a whole
wheat crust, whereas I would never attack this dough with a rolling pin and just totally
flatten it out, the whole, I was doing this whole wheat crust with this guy in class and
we ended up, we were having a really hard time stretching without it just totally lumping
and tearing up, so we took a rolling pin to it and made it really flat and then it came
out very crispy and then the sweetness of it wasn't like overwhelming, and that was
really nice. There's some frozen pizzas that I've seen, like there's one that Whole Foods
sells called American Flat Bread. It's like a $12 frozen pizza, which is you know, kind
of expensive, but really dynamite, and it's made with a flour that's called a white wheat,
which is, I, from what I understand it's a, it's a flour that's milled like to an all-purpose
and then the germ is reintroduced back into it, so you're getting that, the nutrients,
or supposedly.
>>male audience member #31: Or you can take a vitamin.
>>Mark Bello: Or you can take a vitamin, yeah. But you know, going with a flour that is not
a bleached flour and not a bromated flour, and actually you should Google bromating and
see what that says, Or actually King Arthur, you can e-mail their baker's hotline and they
will tell you it's a
[laughter]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah. Seriously.
>>male audience member #32: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: You guys have enough?
>>Jenny: Nope.
>>Mark Bello: Oh, sorry. Full on banana.
>>Jenny: Shall we just [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: What? Yeah, yeah.
>>Jenny: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Alright, and so, and with this pizza, like I was talking about, ingredients
that go on later, the nuts go on towards the very, very end, just to get a quick toast.
If they go on in the beginning, they're gonna burn before the pizza is done. And the other
thing, the Nutella, actually, I don't even like to bake because often it's gonna dry
out or it's gonna burn and it doesn't taste so good that way.
[loud noise from oven]
>>Mark Bello: That's good. Alright.
[loud noise from oven]
>>Mark Bello: So, and this is a pizza actually that I do like to do a little bit lighter.
You know, a little bit lighter on the cook so it's a little bit breadier, I feel that
really just compliments the flavors with that. When I'm making my pizzas, you know, I, I
start, this is an eight ounce ball of dough right here, now risen up, you know this is
a sixteen ounce pint container, you can see the dough's pretty much doubled in size. But
depending on the pizza I'm doing, you know, limited a little bit by the size of this oven,
but that first Margherita I tried to go a little bit on the crispier, breadier side
in parts, where as on that potato one I wanted to go real thin, so you just got that nice
kind of crispy thing, so you know every pizza I make, whether it's a savory pizza or a sweet
pizza, it's the same dough. And how, you know, the, the diameter in which I stretch it, because
they're all, you know, roughly eight ounces in weight, is gonna dictate if it's gonna
be a crispier pie or a breadier pie. So you kind of find too, you know with your pizzas,
what, you know, what kind of crusts you like or what kind of crusts you feel compliment
the toppings that are going on there. The Nutella. To, how do you get Nutella in a jar
like evenly spaced on a pizza? Well, what I used to do is like I'd just seriously with
a knife be trying to like, it was just a mess. And then a friend of mine showed me this trick,
you take like a little sandwich baggie and like a coffee mug and you stretch it out and
lay it on top of the mug and then grab a spoonful of that and just kind of stab it in the center
of the bag and you're able to just pull it off cleanly without like filling that zipper
with Nutella and then when it's pizza making time, just a little snip off of that and that's
your piping bag. And then depending on your love for Nutella, you know, you can chew the
bag after that to get every last drop out of it.
>>male audience member #33: Why [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Why, I'm sorry?
>>male audience member #33: Why [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Heat it up? You know this I usually just put it in a warm spot in my kitchen,
like we've got it in a cupboard like above one of the fluorescent lights there, just
enough warmth so it's malleable. But I find with Nutella it's tricky like often for the
amount of time that this is in the oven if the Nutella's on there, it's gonna burn before
the pizza's done, so. And a lot of ingredients too that would burn normally like if just
left alone, in suspension will work really nice. So for example like garlic, you know,
on a pizza? Grate, if I was to grate just raw garlic or shave it right on top of the
pizza, you know, most likely what I'm gonna get is bitter burned pieces.
>>male audience member #34: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah. Yeah. But what you can do is take that garlic and grate it or with
a garlic press into something like some Ricotta or something like that and spread that around
and that will be a buffer to keep the garlic from burning, you know. The herbs. I don't
like to put like my basil didn't go on my Margherita prior to baking because, you know,
it would either dry out or burn on the top of the pie or it just sinks into the sauce
and cheese and just gets all grayish-green and lost there. But the rosemary too. The
rosemary, you know, that sprinkle of fresh rosemary on the pizza at the very end, but
the rosemary that was already on the potatoes here, just with that light coating of oil,
is gonna buffer it and keep it from burning, so. How we looking on these? [pause] Alright,
that's good. [pause] One of the things too, I was, oh, hello? The, did you turn that mic
down just when I was drinking? You guys are good.
[laughter]
>>Mark Bello: Wow! That's amazing. [laughing] What if my stomach rumbles, will they hear
it or is it only, you know, 'cause I'm a little hungry right now. So the menu upstairs, I
was talking about how it's the pizzas reverse engineered into sandwich form, but I like
to think of my pizzas also the other way. It's like there are flavors that I like in
another sense that I then, in fact, the, the smoked mozzarella, sun-dried tomato pizza
that I do that we have the panino upstairs for you guys to try out, it was originally
a sandwich that I had had and it was so great, I thought this should be, you know, I actually
never liked smoked cheese or sun-dried tomatoes. I found smoked cheese was, you know, I associated
with that sort of rubber brick that comes in your holiday gift basket, you know. And
then the sun-drieds were always like whole preparation in a salad, you bite into it,
it's all too much at once. And, but then I had this, this sandwich and it was just like,
it was given to me for free, I wouldn't have bought it, you know. And then I just cooked
it up and it was delicious. And, and the sun-drieds were chopped up, so you know one bite you
didn't get the whole sun-dried in your mouth and just the balance of the smoked cheese
with the sun-dried tomatoes in this sandwich, which also has a little bit of balsamic vinegar
on it, it's just fantastic. So what I like to teach in the class, like as far as the
recipes for the pizza, it's more a list of ingredients, listed in the order in which
they go on the pizza. You know, less about quantities, more about just imparting a sensibility
to people about how pizza successfully comes together. An example of this is a pizza.
>>Jenny: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Looking good?
>>Mark Bello: Yes. Alright. Give that, we can get those on there and [pause]
[loud noise from oven]
>>Mark Bello: That looks great. [pause] Alright, so here are those lovely Virginia peanuts.
Can you guys see the nice kind of, there's the camera, that nice kind of toasty caramelization
that's going on there? So when's Goggle gonna invent internet that you can smell?
[laughter]
>>Mark Bello: You'll.
>>male audience member #35: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: What's that?
>>male audience member #35: [inaudible] It's bad. it's going to be really bad.
>>Mark Bello: Yeah.
>>male audience member #36: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Actually, you know what? When we're done garnishing these, we'll pass these
peanuts around just so you guys can have a little snickety-snack and see what they're
like. Alright. You wanna reintroduce that into the oven?
>>Jenny: I would love to.
>>Mark Bello: Alright. [loud noise from oven] Alright, bingo. What's that?
>>Jenny: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Oh, yeah, ok, well they can have them on the pizza. I spoke. You just
want them, I know it, so. Alright peanuts will come around in a second on the pizza.
Ok. So back to sensibility with pizza making. So there's a pizza that I, that I make I call
it the pesci affumicati. If you have an app for translating, you know it'll tell you that
that means smoked fish, you know. But it's totally a bagel and lox pizza. You know one
morning I had dough, I had Russ & Daughters, you guys know Russ & Daughters, right? Lovely
smoked fish. I had some sable and I had some Norwegian salmon and I had you know all the
accoutrements that, crème fraiche and the capers and red onion and all that kind of
stuff. So I knew that if I baked you know this smoked fish on the pizza, that was, that's
heresy right there, you know. So what I [someone sneezes] did is I, bless you, rolled out my
crust. Now if you bake a crust completely naked with nothing on it what's gonna happen
it's just gonna completely balloon out in your oven, dry out, it's gonna you know be
like a cracker that will shatter when you cut it. So some sort of a buffer to go on
there before you bake, so what I did with my mandolin, some red onion and just did some
slices on there. So the onion kind of sat on the pizza, you know gave up a little bit
of moisture, it steamed the crust. I threw on some poppy seeds as well, 'cause that's
how I like to roll with my bagels. And then, and then baked that and baked it to a little
bit of a lighter more kind of bialy-like crust, which is actually the way this one's going
as well, and then out of the oven, allowed it to rest, so it wouldn't basically melt
my crème fraiche, and then the crème fraiche went on and then the capers and then the salmon
and the sable. Ridiculous, in a good way. Ok. So, let's pull those guys out.
>>Jenny: Alright.
>>Mark Bello: You think? [pause] Oh yeah.
[various noises]
>>Mark Bello: So I'm just cutting off the tiniest little corner here on the bag.
>>male audience member #37: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Pastry bag? You know I just, it, one day just we didn't have pastry bags,
we used these and you know these, get 'em in the supermarket, they work great. I mean,
check this out, you just kind of squeeze it down like so.
>>male audience member #38: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yeah, and for the classes we've got our pre-dispensed Nutella amounts. And
if you're nice we let you have a second bag. [pause] Now I always have to just resist the
urge to rush this and then have an exploding Nutella bag in my hand. Once again, art school,
thank you. [pause] Alright. You guys have been such a nice audience, I'm gonna pull
out a second bag of Nutella.
[audience whooping]
>>Mark Bello: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. [pause] Alright. You wanna start cutting that one up?
>>Jenny: [inaudible]
>>Sam: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Actually you can use the podium over there. So my dough's like totally Leaning
Tower of Pisa right here, exploding. [pause]
>>Jenny: You're cutting it into sixteenths?
>>Mark Bello: Sixteenths. [pause] You guys know the comedian Mitch Hedberg? He had, one
of my favorite routines that he does, he said that he went to get a slice of pizza and the
guy gave him like the smallest piece. He said if the pizza was a pie chart for what he would
do with his lottery winnings, he got the "donated to charity" slice.
[laughter] Or Yogi Berra. He said, told a waitress you
know, cut my pizza into six slices instead of eight, 'cause I'm not hungry enough to
eat eight slices.
[laughter]
[pause]
>>Mark Bello: You ready? Alright. [pause] Oh yeah.
>>Jenny: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Yep.
[sound of cutting pizza]
>>Jenny: Ready?
>>Mark Bello: Yep. [pause] I'm gonna drink.
[laughter]
>>Mark Bello: Anyone wanna lick the pizza wheel? It's sharp actually.
>>male audience member #39: How do you sharpen them?
>>Mark Bello: You know this one, this is a commercial one and I've had my trusty side
arm like for ten years and though it has a couple little nicks in it and stuff. Super
sharp. And then for this model, which we actually carry this in our store. It was funny because
the company that manufactures these doesn't typically sell to, doesn't sell to retailers,
only to restaurant supply. So I didn't have the cred, you know to do it. But I wanted
to have the, so in our shop, in addition to the classes, we have a little gear store for
where to get you know our favorite pizza stone, our tomatoes, all these things. So I had to
sort of court them to get to use, you know, to get their product. Anyway, we have their
product there. They do sell a replacement wheel. I've never had to use one, because
you know unless you're like a high-volume pizzeria, these are totally bullet proof.
What I like about this pizza wheel too is the model number, is the P-1-7-7-A, so visualize
that. Yes. Sense of humor, yes. My buddy Neal, the guy who you know a decade plus ago we
made those pizzas in Chicago that first night, he is saving up for a P177A tattoo like Old
English font across his back, apparently. So, the company of course wants a picture
when that's done, so. What do you guys think? You like it? Yeah.
>>male audience member #40: I love it.
>>Mark Bello: I'm not a super sweet tooth, but this one definitely, you know, I make
an exception. You like those peanuts? Is that a nice, they're really you know crunchy, salty,
nice compliment with that. So I imagine that you guys are probably still hungry, 'cause
we had a couple slivers. What's going on upstairs is that smoked mozzarella, sun-dried tomato
panino, also another panino, which is done with taleggio cheese, which is like a funky,
rich, you know cow's milk cheese from Italy. You guys know it? It's kind of funky in smell,
but its bark is worse than its bite. It's really rich creamy buttery cheese, with honey
and white truffle oil on there. And that one's crazy pizza. I actually, I did a menu for
a café at this auction house and they banned that sandwich because it was, the aromas were
too distracting for the auction that was going on I guess. But it's a good one. You know,
it's, it's, yes there's truffle oil on it. And truffle oil often is a red flag. I see
it in a menu and I, you know, it's often used like gratuitously, it's like, oh, it'll be
gourmet if I douse it in truffle oil. But this one I think qualifies as actually working.
I think there are actually children named after this particular combination, so that
says something about its powers. And then also we did we did little sliders with our
sausage recipe. It's ground pork with fennel seeds, chili flake, garlic and a little bit
of salt and actually if you taste these and you like that sausage, shoot me an e-mail,
I'll be happy to share the recipe with you guys. And then a couple of vegetable dishes
as well. So hope you guys enjoy that. I guess, what time do we have?
>>male audience member #41: Quarter past.
>>Mark Bello: Quarter past? Oh, wow, so I was pretty good. Any other questions? A couple,
I know you know we've had actually five, has anyone here been to the class? Because we've
had five groups from Google come and I'd say we have a dozen people at a time, a dozen
to sixteen, so that's probably at least half your company, right?
[laughter]
>>Mark Bello: Anyway, we do, we would love to see you guys down on the Lower East Side
if you're ever like just in the hood going to the Doughnut Plant, pop in and say hello.
If we've got some pizzas coming out of the oven, we'll gladly throw you a slice. Yeah.
So.
>>male audience member #42: [inaudible]
>>Mark Bello: Good. Thanks guys.
[applause]
>>Mark Bello: Thank you. And Jenny and Sam [inaudible] and Steve.