An App for Eaters: Chef’s Feed

Never, ever wonder “what’s good here?” at a restaurant again. The app Chef’s Feed has recommendations for your city from the folks with a true and trustworthy appetence: local, noteworthy chefs. Hurrah. This app is awesome.

 

 

Field Trip! Live Oak Brewery Tour: Redux

Back in 2009, a couple of us Home Slicers got to tour Austin’s local Live Oak Brewery. This time, a whole group of us got to visit this bona fide, local alcoholic beverage producer.

“I am glad our staff got to see a local business making a quality beer that our patrons love. The guys are always welcoming and we appreciate the time they take to run us though their craft.” –Gabriel Bishop, manager

“As we prepare for a busy summer here at Home Slice, bringing with it a consistent demand for Live Oak Hefeweizen on draft, we thought it was time to head back to our buddy brewery to have a staff field trip over some quality beer and to introduce some new employees to Live Oak’s operation. A tour transpired, beers were enjoyed and we all walked away with a deeper appreciation for all things Live Oak. Thanks for the tour guys!” –Trey Ramirez, manager

Photos by Trey Ramirez

 

Top 10 of 2010: Most Ordered at Home Slice

When we were doing our lists for our ten favorite songs of 2010, we couldn’t help but wonder — what were the ten favorite food items of the year? It comes as no surprise, really, that pepperoni rules.

1. Pepperoni slice
2. Whole pizza pie
3. Cheese slice
4. Margherita slice
5. Sausage and garlic slice
6. House salad
7. Greek salad
8. Garlic knots and sauce
9. White pie with spinach slice
10. Pepperoni and mushroom pizza pie

Show and Tell: Real Pizza of NY App for the iPhone

Every September, Home Slice Pizza, as a staff, heads to NYC to re-up on slices and street cred. We’ve been 4 years now and collectively we have had a wider variety of pizza than many New Yorkers. I can think of one DAY all of us tried upwards of  two dozen slices from different pizzerias. It’s not uncommon for our New York friends or folks traveling to the Big Apple to ask for recommendations.

If you’re headed to NYC and you wish you could have a Home Slicer there to whisk you through the boroughs like the Ghost of Pizza Future; here’s the next best thing. Jeff Orlick, best know for his food blogging and 5 borough pizza tours, has created a real-deal application of the best pizzerias in NYC. Having been to at least a dozen pizzerias recommended by the app, and considering Jeff’s extensive pizza eating, I can safely say that this app will not steer you wrong. And to prove it, I headed all the way down to Sheepshead Bay with some friends (who were on their own pilgrimage to a great old school roast beef joint) to check out Delmar Pizzeria, a straightforward, no frills, old school shop.

Delmar is located in the southern most area of Brooklyn known as Sheepshead Bay, a good 9 miles south of Williamsburg. A couple miles before you get there, the streets widen and you feel like you’ve entered into the suburbs. Basically you have. People are warm, even chatty. In true NY style, they’ll give you brusque but friendly directions.

Delmar is known for it’s white pie, or at least that’s what the sign on the building says. But I’m a purist, and when I’m trying a pizzeria for the first time, I always get a plain slice. And it was good. Great crust, classic NY style pizza. The app was right on. I don’t think I’d take a trip all the way down there just for Delmar, but I may make a day of it and hit up Totonno’s, Papa Leone, and L&B Supmoni Gardens. A South Brooklyn extravaganza!

The Real Pizza of NY app has a list of pizzerias, or you can just check out what’s around you with the handy GPS map. There’s a comment section where you can share your thoughts and opinions with other pizza lovers and Jeff, the app’s creator. It’s absolutely worth the $0.99. Oh, heck, let’s just look at the screen shots!

Dough’s The Boss: An Interview With Phil Korshak

Dough. It’s the basis of pizza. Flatbreads are the building block of nearly every food culture. In any of its forms – roti, tortilla, naan, pita, pizza – it is an essential part of the international dinner table. What today we think of as fundamental components of pizza – cheese and sauce – were not there in the early days of pizza. And indeed are absent from some really incredible white pizzas today.  What makes pizza pizza is the dough.

I sat down with Phil, kitchen manager and sometimes contributor to this blog, to talk about dough. The process, the science, the art, and the truly finicky nature of the production of pizza dough. He’s a long time baker and dessert man and has been running the kitchen of Home Slice Pizza, and now More Home Slice, for over 4 years. On any given day, you can be sure he’s covered head-to-toe with flour, with a least one kitchen towel hanging out of each of his pockets. That he believes in the art of dough, no one could argue.

If you’ve ever met Phil, you will not be surprised that in just asking Phil to say a couple sentences for levels, my soundcheck turned out to be pearls of wisdom:

Phil: …the thing that occurred to me when I was talking to him, was that it really is like wen you’re getting up woken up in the morning. You know, if you wake somebody up and you poke them and you’re bitchy to them, then they’ll get up. They’ll do the stuff that you tell them to do. But it’s not going to be awesome. You’ll get what you’re talking about, but you’ll get it the wrong way. It’ll just be bad. Whereas, if you take some time with it and have a little understanding and plan a little and give yourself enough time for your dough to wake up and be cool and be relaxed and not be jostled into it’s day, then it’s going to be better.

So dough, so we had our version of a cold snap in Austin over the last couple of weeks and so what we had to do was take the temperature of our water and increase it so that the way we handle our dough could remain the same. We’ve been using a thermometer on the water since May. We got a huge heat snap and started putting dough into the ice and we started realizing that the dough was becoming too springy because it had been shocked. To go from that point to where we are now: to where it’s digital thermometers everywhere. Being really close and careful about how we make things and when we make them, how they get moved, where they get stored, what the timing is.

Tara: Right. You want to be romantic about it because, especially with NY style pizza dough, it is a romantic notion. But when it really comes down to it, there’s a lot of science behind it.

Phil: That’s exactly right. The difference is what are you doing and who are you doing it for? When I’m making dough for me and my wife, I measure nothing and I make it by the seat of my pants because I really enjoy the process of making the dough and finding out what it’s going to become. But you can’t do that here because our promise to people is that we’re going to give them exactly what they want, every time. And there is something awesome about making something by the seat of your pants because it’s going to become a tart rye bread or a bitter pumpernickel or whatever. But for pizza dough, like you said, especially when you think about just the quality of throwing dough around and why you do it.  When I was lucky enough to talk to Dom Demarco, he was real flat out about how useless he thought throwing dough is

T: It’s a pretty steep learning curve, throwing dough?

P: Unless you have talent. If you don’t, it’s a pretty steep learning curve. There are some people who simply have it in their hands. Jose [the current 2-year champ of fastest dough tosser from the Carnival O’ Pizza] is a perfect example of it.

T: I remember him practicing in the prep room for a year before he had his hands on dough. When did you start getting in to making dough?

P: When I got hired on the line as a salad maker who was going to learn how to throw dough. At the time, we were making dough in the prep kitchen which was directly left of the salad table. Whenever I was slow, I would go into the kitchen to help and to fell what this dough felt like. I had been making dough as a person since I was 12 or 13 and so I had some kind of idea of what bread did, but i’d never worked with that kind of dough before. It wasn’t until about a year in when I became a manager and responsible for how the dough was going to be worked with was when I really began to pay attention to how the dough was being made. So we had to learn fast.

T: So you guys were just learning on your feet?

P: Yeah. completely.

T: What surprised you about the process of making dough when you were learning?

P: I think that the mix between being really a real hardcore Nazi about your process and then having to still put your hand in it every time to make sure it’s reacting properly. You can do everything right and exactly the same way every time, but the pressure of air can be different, a hurricane could be coming, or something, and your dough is simply not acting the right way. At which point you have to figure out what your dough wants. And realizing that it’s this living, sentient being. That was the thing for me.

T: When you started at Home Slice, You weren’t a pizza man. What did you come in for?

P: When I started at home Slice I was an ex-barman and I came in to learn how to throw pizza dough.

T: So you walked in the door and said “I want to learn how to get into this pizza thing?”

P: That’s exactly right. I walked in the door and said “I want to work in your kitchen.”

T: Okay, the lore is I thought it had something to do with desserts. Did that come later?

P: It did. Well, I got the job and I wasn’t good at throwing dough. But I was lucky enough to get hired before it opened. I knew that they didn’t have anyone doing desserts, I’d been making desserts since I was a kid, and so I started bringing in cheesecake.

T: Okay so, how many factors – this may be a difficult question to answer – do you think go into making dough? Because there’s the recipe, I’m just guessing, and there’s got to be a ton of environmental factors.

P: Yeah, there’s the basic ingredients and the temperature that they’re at.  We ran into a batch of bad dough and we couldn’t figure out what it was, but then we figured out that the extra virgin olive oil was sitting next to the straight virgin olive oil. If they ball the dough really tight, especially the mediums, for the timing process that we have, if it’s tightly rolled you’re throwing these beautiful spirals and you throw it down on the board and it shrinks up. If your prep guy is having a frustrated day? There. You’ll see it there. But weather’s the big one, cold snaps, humidity.

T: What type of flour do you use?

P: We use a high gluten flour. There are different blends of flour that can be used as well. Look at the current phase of beautiful pizza, Neapolitan. Places like Keste. Which is amazing pizza. But the dough that they are making is out of a Caputo flour. It makes a completely different type of pizza. The way I tend to think about it is that the Neapolitans make Belle and Sebastian pizza. It’s really lovely and great. But the NY style pizza is like Lou Reed or the Ramones. It’s right straight ahead, and it’s from the heart, and you can play it loud.

T: Home Slice is NY style pizza and everybody says that NY style pizza is all about the dough. So, what is NY style pizza dough? What makes it different?

P: The thing that makes NY style pizza different than anywhere else is not really the water that’s from New York, but how the dough is treated, what kind of rise that the dough goes through, what type of flour your using.

A good NY pie is not going to use raw sugar. You’re looking at flour and yeast and olive oil and water and that’s it. The thing that I think is romantic about it is when you think about  where that kind of pie comes from and what that sort of pizza’s supposed to do, that’s bare bones ingredients. And then how you make something out of ONLY that. That’s really amazing. One of the other things that’s important in this equation is how are you cooking it. What kind of oven is it going into? and what’s the temperature at? The beauty of the coal oven of Lombardi’s – is their pie so great because their dough’s that incredible or because of what that oven can do to that dough? And it’s a little bit of both, honestly.

T: So right, there’s wood-fired ovens, which Neapolitan pizzerias use a lot, that I’ve seen. And then there’s coal ovens like at Grimaldi’s and Lombardi’s and then there’s deck ovens which you use at Home Slice.

P: Right.

T: And that’s not quite as hot?

P: Right. Although, Dom Demarco’s oven at Di Fara, He has it close to 800 degrees.

T: In a deck oven?

P: Yeah, in a straight-ahead gas Baker’s Pride.

T: Did you see the documentary about Di Fara?

P: Yeah. It’s beautiful.

T: He talks a little bit about dough.

P: Their dough. It’s amazing. It goes through a very, very short rise. But, he’s the master.

T: Is it pretty warm in there?

P: It is. In that part of the kitchen. But his dough recipe is fantastic.

T: Did you get your hand in it?

P: I did. It was incredibly sticky an beautiful. It made me want even more to try to work and make the Sicilian pie happen [at Home Slice].

T: Yeah I think you’d be doing Austin a favor that did know that they wanted in having Sicilian pie.

P: That’s really the exciting thing in food and what we get to do with it. To be able to pull this thing out of nowhere that needs to exist that doesn’t exist, that’s good magic, right?

Sorry I Ate Your Pizza, Homey

via Slice

This is a cute drawing I found on Slice.seriouseats.com. To be clear, Home Slice does NOT use anything partially-hydrogenated.

Eat Local Week: Arugula Pie!

Eat a pizza, save the world!

We, Home Slice Pizza at both the dine-in and More locations, will be serving an extra special pizza for Eat Local Week! Eat Local Week, organized by Edible Austin, will run this Saturday, December 4th though Saturday December 11th.

The Arugula Pie, our offering for Eat Local Week is a white pie with garlic, extra virgin olive oil, Pecorino Romano, and provolone cheese. When the pie comes out of the oven, it is immediately topped with fresh, organic baby arugula. The heat from the pie lightly steams the arugula. The pie then gets another sprinkle of olive oil, a lemon garnish and is served with fresh cracked pepper. It is a light and delicious pie. And a great excuse to have pizza as an appetizer.

Home Slice has participated in this city-wide event for the last four years. The goal of the event is for restaurants to incorporate an item from a local farm into a special menu item to be served during the course of the event. The idea is very simple: raise community awareness of the existence of local organic farms. The underlying principle is equally as simple; community nourishes community.

Eat Local Week, our winter fundraiser event, is an invitation to Central Texans to explore and celebrate the abundance of local food and to raise money for Urban Roots, a youth development program that uses sustainable agriculture as a means to transform the lives of young people and to increase the access of healthy food in Austin. This season farm interns have raised over 25,136 pounds of produce —donating 40% of that to hunger relief and selling 60% at farmers’ markets and farm stands run by the farm interns. -from Edible Autsin’s website

Our local purveyor for the arugula is Greenling, a delivery service for local and organic produce and groceries. Greenling will be bringing us out arugula from Animal Farm near LaGrange, TX. Animal Farm is a sustainable, organic farm that processes its own water and is dedicated to permaculture.

 

Hats off to Daisical Industries

Check out what Allyson, favorite Home Slice bartender, has been busy as a bee with:

At Home Slice we talk a lot about being bona fide.  With each new wonderful success (and the inevitable hiccups that come with growth), we strive to remain sincere in our approach to service, our product, our design, and most importantly, our attitude—no compromise.  Keepin’ it real is an ideology we always want Home Slice to represent.

We are in this business for the love, and we think it shows.   None the less, keepin it real is work! You have to constantly remind yourself to stop, put your head down close to your heart and listen.  Amid the din it can be really challenging to pay attention to your gut…unless its asking for a slice of white clam pizza.  I always hear that voice.

We are always on the lookout for inspiration and innovation to help us stay bona fide.  This past month, we were so excited to have found Daisical Industries, a well of creative, energetic inspiratto on East Cesar Chavez. Comprised of four distinct businesses, this wearable art collective is what the shopping and salon experience should be…. accessible, affordable, authentic, unique, thoughtful, and sincere.

The name “daisical” is an invention of Daisical Industries stylist Charlotte Belle, who felt the key to unlocking her personal success was to reject the disengaged, too-cool-for-school attitude common to many salons and boutiques.  To be daisical is to be thoughtful, considerate, conscientious without taking one’s self so darn seriously.  And so the high-octane creation machine was born, and after only a few weeks in business, and several fantastic events under their belts, their funward momentum just keeps picking up!

We were invited there for  the bridal shower of our longtime friend, Betty Stall, and the hospitality of the ladies that run this awesome shop was inspired, unusually spirited and definitely bona fide.

We sipped spiked punch, prosecco and enjoyed a gorgeous spread of nibbly things while getting manicures, trying on wigs and makeup, and digging through the racks of great (and affordable) vintage.   We laughed for hours, as each transformation walked out of the dressing room.  It was such an innovative approach to event planning and an unbridled celebration of our inner showgirl—we might even have to have Wig Month as a send up to the power of the wig to inspire the best time EVER.

So hats off to the ladies of Daisical Industries for being part of the Keepin It Real Movement!  We salute you!

Go check ‘em out at 2109 East Cesar Chavez…and tell Esther Bangs and Coco Coquette we sent you for a lil’ family discount!

Daisical Industries

2109 East Cesar Chavez

Tuesday thru Saturday, 11:00 am   – 7:00 pm

Aren’t these super cute?

We’re so in love with our new Home Slice magnets! They’re free, so come by and pick one up and you’ll always have our number handy for takeout. Large orders welcome. Even on Tuesdays.

Coming to a Home Slice near you!

After a summer of perpetual 105 degree Groundhog Days and heat-induced apathy, fall instills a crisp feeling of newness, of fresh starts, of things to come. Not known to rest on our laurels, new things are coming to Home Slice.

We just debuted the newest additions to our patio, a bar and a ping pong table.

This Thursday, October 8th, owner Jen Strickland will be interviewed on KGSR 107.1 at 8:15 am. Catch her with your morning OJ or on your ride to work!

In a couple weeks, we will have all of our t-shirts, pint glasses, gift cards, and various wares for online purchase.

December 5th is our annual Carnival O’ Pizza, where we have games, performers, and tests of strength and endurance.

Last but not least, we have begun construction on a take out pizza business next door to our restaurant where you will be able to get piping hot pizzas to order and slices 7 days a week!

Rock!