Pizza Today - February 2025 - 46

Try your hand at New Haven-style pie
By Frank Zabski
N
ew Haven Style
Pizza was started
by the mass
immigration of
Italian immigrants
from Italy
to the U.S. to
chase the American dream and help
the USA during the Industrial Revolution.
Italians helped build railroads,
highways, make rubber tires, latches
and locks for doors, pizza boxes and
this roundish thing they made from
simple bread dough called pizza - or
" Apizza " as we call it in Connecticut.
THIS APIZZA WAS MADE WITH
TOMATO SAUCE, PECORINO
ROMANO, OLIVE OIL AND MOST
LIKELY ANCHOVIES. It was simple.
It was freshly baked. It was cheap.
The average Italian immigrant could
not read or write and definitely could
not speak the English language. They
also had little to no money. This all
lead to them being resourceful and
baking simple things with inexpensive
ingredients.
Pizza started out as a peasant food,
seriously. There is very little documentation,
pictures, reviews, etc. of turnof-the-century
pizza in the United
States. The only places you would find
pizza were in predominately Italian
enclaves/neighborhoods in the U.S.
New York's boroughs, New Haven,
Providence, Boston and Trenton, New
Jersey, were the primary enclaves that
had a huge population of Italians.
I consider myself an immigrant
baker. I'm not a trained chef, nor is
my formal education in the culinary
world. My professional background is
in IT. I am a serial entrepreneur with
one of my businesses being a pizza
truck.
I grew up in West Haven, Connecticut,
the city right next to New Haven.
As far back as I can remember, pizza
was a major part of my life. It was in
my blood, in my brain and many times
in my hand. I started making pizza
when I was 12 at my church carnival.
We made pizza fritta. Every day for
one week out of the year me and my
two Italian buddies came to make
pizza taught by an Italian immigrant
woman who showed us from scratch
how to make the dough, mill the tomatoes,
grind by hand the hard cheese
and use the large mixer.
I also had a pizza truck for three
years called Fired Up Pizza Truck.
It featured New Haven-style pizza,
dessert pies and professional music.
It was a crazy success, but I had two
other businesses at the time and one
of them had to go.
Two years ago, I started New Haven
Pizza School, and it went from zero to
120 MPH very quickly. Most of what
I do is teach consumers, but I have a
growing list of professional pizzerias
I consult with to make quality New
Haven Style " Apizza " .
BELOW IS A GREAT STARTER
NEW HAVEN STYLE PIZZA DOUGH
RECIPE. I wrote this assuming the
reader owns a pizzeria, and you will
be using standard 50-pound bags of
flour in your mixer. It is also a baker's
percent recipe so you can scale up and
down.
The goal is to create a very easy
bread flour-based New Haven Style
pizza dough. Many people and pizzeria
owners try to overcomplicate
things in general. I try as much as
possible to keep it simple. I believe
the simplicity is where the magic is
at and what I crave. Simplicity and
quality taste is what New Haven Style
is known for.
A large key to New Haven style is
to touch it as little as you can physically.
Do not over mix. Pre-mix is your
friend, the mixer is your enemy for
New Haven Style. It's a wet dough
with very little rise. It's meant to be
hand slapped or patted out and not
hand stretched, tossed or knuckle
stretched.
Traditional Wooster Street technique
(the street Sally's Apizza and
Frank Pepe's is on in New Haven)
uses a dough tray. It is hand patted,
moves to the peel for assembly and
then goes into the oven at 550-650 F.
600 F is the goal to bake the pie at.
Enjoy!
New Haven Pizza Dough Recipe
50 lb bag flour (100%)
34.17 pounds of room temp tap water
(68%)
.13 pounds instant dry yeast (.025%)
1 pound kosher or sea salt (2%)
Simple mixing instructions:
Combine water and salt in the mixing
bowl and whisk until you can't see any
more salt flakes/crystals.
Add flour, then IDY and sprinkle on
top like you are putting sugar on a bowl
of cereal. Do not dump the yeast in the
middle. Take a large wooden spoon/
spatula and pre-mix as much as you can
BEFORE turning the mixer on.
Turn mixer on lowest setting and let it
do its magic for 3-5 minutes. As soon as
the mix turns into what looks like mashed
potatoes, stop mixing. Let dough rest in
mixing bowl for 20 minutes. Come back
to mixer and hit dough again, turn mixer
on for about a minute until dough mix
gets smooth.
Ball and ferment for 1-3 days, or let
dough rise in bowl until it doubles in size
or 4-6 hours and then ball. I recommend
cold fermenting the dough for three
days. You won't see a huge rise so don't
get nervous. Take dough out 2-3 hours
before you will be making pizza for a
room temp final rise.
I hope this recipe finds you well.
Ciao.
FRANK ZABSKI Owns New Haven Pizza
School in Connecticut.
FEBRUARY 2025 / PIZZATODAY.COM / 46
http://www.PIZZATODAY.COM
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