Try your hand at New Haven-style pie
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 turn-of-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.