Dairy

If we were one of those pizzerias that give wacky names to each pie, this mixed mushroom pizza would be called “The Vegas Guys,” or “Peter’s Pizza.” Our editor, Peter Gethers, has a group of guys he goes to Las Vegas with every year for some sort of guy reunion weekend. They meet in Los Angeles and the tradition is that they choose a different restaurant to eat dinner in the night before they leave for Vegas. I’m flattered that for the last few years, they’ve quit chowing around and held their dinner consistently in the private dining room in the Pizzeria, called the Jack Warner Room. They were particularly excited about this pizza. It’s a pretty straightforward mushroom pie, but the fact that we roast the mushrooms before adding them to the pizza, and the combination of taleggio and fontina cheeses that top it, make it especially flavorful.

Long-cooked broccoli is one of my all-time favorite vegetable preparations, so I had to find a way to work it onto a pizza. Normally I don’t like broccoli on pizza because whenever I’ve seen it, it’s just been dropped onto the pizza raw, and often with a whole mix of other uncooked vegetables that don’t go with each other or with pizza. Here, the broccoli is cooked until it has a buttery texture, so it works with the crust instead of just sitting on top of it. We use a mix of mozzarella and caciocavallo cheese, a Sicilian cheese similar to mozzarella that has been dried and aged for a few weeks, so it has a funky aged flavor that goes well with the broccoli. If you can’t find caciocavallo cheese, look for scamorza, or use all mozzarella in its place.

This is my number-one favorite Pizzeria Mozza pizza, and it’s a direct rip-off of the Norcia pizza they serve at Pellicano. Sausage and panna, or cream, is a classic combination in Umbria. The summer I discovered this pizza I ordered it every time I went to Pellicano, in an effort to figure out what was in the white sauce that was smeared on the crust. When I asked, they told me “panna.” I knew panna was cream, but I couldn’t understand how they could put cream on pizza. Finally, I went back to the kitchen to see for myself, and what I saw was that the cream had been whipped, making it spreadable. Whipping cream for a pizza was such a foreign idea to me that when I started playing with pizzas for the restaurant, I tried to avoid it. I made this pizza with crème fraîche and later with mascarpone—anything not to put whipped cream on a pizza—but the whipped cream was definitely the best.

Clam pizza, a Connecticut tradition, is one of the specialties at Lombardi’s in New York City, and having my first clam pie there is one of my most memorable pizza-eating experiences. We use a combination of Parmigiano and pecorino to finish this pizza, but if you want to use only one, pick your favorite.

This was one of the original ten pizzas we served at the Pizzeria. I knew I wanted to offer a potato pizza, and I love the combination of potatoes and Gorgonzola.

No matter how creative we like to be with our pizzas, we also have a big place in our hearts for the classics such as this—essentially a pepperoni pizza with roasted chiles added for extra kick.

I’m generally turned off when people describe food as being “sexy,” but sexy is the best description I have for this warm, luscious, pillowy raviolo. The word raviolo is the singular for ravioli, and this is one big, square raviolo filled with ricotta and a raw egg yolk. We are not at all ashamed to tell you that this is a direct rip-off from Michael Tusk, the chef and owner of Quince restaurant in San Francisco. The first time I had it, I thought it was one of the best things I had ever eaten, and for sure the single best pasta dish I’d ever put in my mouth. When our servers bring this to the table, they suggest to the guests that they cut into the raviolo starting from the center so the egg pours out onto the plate into the pool of browned butter that the raviolo sits in. It’s sexy. What else can I say? We recommend you use farmfresh eggs with bright orange yolks. You will need a 3 × 3-inch fluted cookie cutter or a fluted pastry cutter to make these.

I created this pizza, an upgraded take on “Hawaiian pizza,” typically made with Canadian bacon and canned pineapple, for my son, Ben. When he was growing up, that’s the pizza he always ordered and I cringed at the combination every time. When I opened up my own pizzeria, I wanted to come up with a pizza using the same or similar ingredients that would please both Ben and me. We start with fresh pineapple and slice it paperthin so it caramelizes in the oven, and we use speck in place of Canadian bacon. But what I think really makes this pizza is the addition of jalapeño peppers. Their heat cuts through the sweetness of the pineapple.

Francobolli is Italian for “postage stamps,” and that’s what these small, filled pasta shapes look like. They are filled with braised short ribs that we whip with Parmigiano and then top with a simple tomato sauce. The reason for you to make this is the same reason we make it: to use leftover Brasato. This recipe makes more ravioli than you will need for four servings. You can either freeze the remaining ravioli or double the sauce recipe. If you double the sauce recipe, toss the sauce with the ravioli four servings at a time. Ricotta salata is ricotta cheese that has been pressed and salted. The result is a hard, bright white grating cheese with a much stronger flavor than fresh ricotta. Matt got the idea to bake the cheese in a very hot oven, which gives it a smoky flavor.

This classic pizza is a Margherita with prosciutto draped on the pizza after it comes out of the oven. I added arugula because I love the combination of arugula and prosciutto.

Pellicano offers a meat lover’s pizza, so I felt I had to offer one, too. Our version should be called a “pork lover’s pizza” because all four of the meats we put on it—fennel sausage, salami, guanciale, and bacon—are pork.

Before we opened the Osteria, Matt made all of the dishes he wanted to put on the pasta menu for us to taste together. When he made this dish—his version of a classic from Puglia—I was absolutely convinced that the pasta program we were committing to was a good idea, and that Matt was absolutely the one to execute it. Evidently I’m not alone because this has been our most popular pasta since the day we opened. The chard you will prepare for this dish makes more than you will need for four servings, as does the Fennel Sausage recipe. It would be a good recipe to double and serve to a crowd—just remember to prepare the sauce and toss it with the pasta in two separate sauté pans.

Our prettiest pizza, this is the one that customers are most likely to point to when they see it being carried through the dining room. The squash blossoms are laid out over the surface so they bake into the crust, and the pizza ends up looking like a painting. We put the burrata on after it comes out of the oven, and I love the cool creamy cheese on the hot, crispy pizza.

Years ago my friend Paul Schrade gave me a wooden pasta stamp, which I never used. Since I’m a baker, I occasionally thought about using it to make a pretty cookie, but I never thought to use it for its intended use: to imprint corzetti stampati, or “stamped coins.” Then about a year after Mozza opened, when I’d run out of projects to nudge Matt about, I broke out the stamp and told Matt to get to work. Rather than follow the traditional Genoese route of serving corzetti with green beans, potatoes, and pesto, Matt came up with a version of Pasta alla Norma—Sicily’s most famous pasta dish that combines tomato sauce, eggplant, and sheep’s milk ricotta—using the corzetti in place of the spaghetti or penne traditionally used. We use Japanese eggplant and slice it into medallions, which work really nicely with the flat “coins.” No Italian in his right mind would ever take a shape from Genoa and toss it with a sauce from Sicily, but that’s one of the advantages of being American. Though we try to be respectful of tradition, we are not bound by it. Think of it as Italian fusion—and enjoy.

Just as you would order a baguette to judge a bakery, Margherita is the pizza to order to judge a pizzeria. Not only is Pizza Margherita the original pizza Napoletana but it has all the elements you want to look at: the sauce, the cheese, and of course, the crust. It’s our biggest seller.

Polenta, which is cooked cornmeal, takes the place of mashed potatoes at the Italian table as a comforting, starchy side dish. To cook polenta correctly, you have to go by the texture, not the time, as the cooking times will vary depending on how the corn was milled and how fresh it is. We start with a whole-grain polenta, Anson Mills Rustic Polenta Integrale. Like any whole grain, it still has the germ and the bran, which gives it a more earthy flavor. It takes about three hours to cook so it’s definitely something to save for when you’re in the mood for slow cooking. We cook the polenta—with all that stirring that polenta is so known for—until you can’t feel the grain under your teeth. The texture of the finished polenta is almost custardy. Matt uses Italian sparkling mineral water to make polenta because he thinks the minerals in the water add to the flavor of the polenta. When making the polenta to serve Brasato al Barolo with Polenta and Horseradish Gremolata (page 230), omit the Parmigiano-Reggiano in this recipe.

Ribollita is a classic Tuscan soup traditionally made with leftover minestrone thickened with chunks of stale bread. This version is something quite different, and it’s based entirely on the one they serve at Ristorante Da Delfina, a wonderful ristorante in a tiny village nestled in the hills just outside Florence. It was described to me as a fried soup, so the first time I ate it, I didn’t know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they’d turned the soup into something wholly unsouplike that I could eat with a knife and fork. The way we make it, after cooking off the liquid, we thicken the soup with bread, we chill it, and then shape it into patties that we pan-fry in olive oil. We serve it as an antipasto but it could be a side dish or, served with a green salad, a light meal. I often recommend it to vegetarians, and to make it vegan, just omit the Parmigiano rind. One of our inveterate recipe testers, Tracey Harada, tested this recipe about eight times to get the flavors perfect. Cavolo nero, a variety of kale, is one of the defining ingredients of any ribollita. You can find it at specialty food stores and health-food stores, but if you can’t find it, use another variety of kale.

The perfect example of how good a few simple ingredients, combined and prepared correctly, can be. When we can get it, our preferred variety for this is radicchio di Treviso, which has an oblong head. The roasted heads look so pretty lined up on a platter that they make the perfect addition to an outdoor meal served family or buffet style. As always, the quality of the balsamico you use is essential to the quality of the finished dish.

When I was building the Pizzeria menu, I wanted it to be a true Italian pizzeria experience with a nod to the Italian-American pizzerias that I grew up eating in. With those American pizzerias in mind, I felt that we had to offer meatballs. What I really wanted to serve was a meatball sandwich, but as strongly as I argued for it, Matt argued against it. He softened over time and finally, two years after the Pizzeria opened, I got my meatballs—not as a sandwich, but as an antipasto: a bowl of meatballs served with buttered semolina toast on the side. Today they are the most popular antipasto in the restaurant.

The first place I was served fava bean pods, as opposed to shelled beans, was at Zuni Café in San Francisco. When they came to the table, I thought it was such an interesting idea, and when I tasted them I found them delicious. When you serve them this way, you want to use only tender, young, small pods, as larger pods will be tough and fibrous. If you can’t get young fave, use jumbo asparagus instead. In either case, this is a spring dish.