this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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As a pizza enthusiast who's lived in NY, Chicago, and multiple foreign countries, I have to disagree. I don't think it's the water like people say, though NYC's filtration system is completely unique, but you've got thousands of people all trying to perfect a similar style within a few square miles of each other, all within a city that has a very different culture and economy than any other in the US.
I think that that culture and competition alone lead folks to develop traditions and techniques that don't happen elsewhere, and I think it's also likely a commerce thing. NYC has the foot traffic to support dozens of shops making dozens of 24-inch pizzas, cooking them 65%, and then finishing them to order in a 700⁰ oven that stays preheated all day. Size of the pizza affects how the crust cooks, how they use the oven affects the even heating and final texture, along with a number of other tiny variables that only really make sense to do that way when running a counter service booth for 15 million people.
Much thin crust pizza is similar enough, but I think folks who taste no difference between NY style pizza in and outside the city are probably not putting their full palate into it, and are probably just hungry for/happy with anything with bread, tomato, and cheese. And hey, fair game.
Sounds like we agree that the water is doing nothing! It's all about the restaurant making it.
I've had great pizza in New York and awful pizza in New York but the same goes for the other cities I've visited/lived in. My favorite standard topping pizza is actually from a restaurant in a suburb
All those variables that go into making a successful counter service booth for 15 million people might actually make the pizza quality worse than somewhere else where people have more time to get things right. Like, parbaking a pizza doesn't improve it over just baking it fresh?
It sounds like they would, but techniques of scale (and, oddly enough, cooking things twice) are one of the reasons restaurant food always tastes different, and often better, though certainly often worse, than home cooked food. Parbaking or parboiling before finishing in an oven or pan is a really common way to be able to control texture and browning while also getting an even cook. Restaurants will do it with rolls, potatoes, steaks, large cuts of fish, and a lot of fibrous vegetables. With bread/crust, it changes how flexible and crispy it is, because water evaporates differently if it's cooked twice for 5 minutes versus once for 10 minutes. With fries, it allows the inside to get soft rather than dry while the outside gets extra crispy. It offers lots of benefits, it just doesn't make sense to do outside of a professional kitchen making dozens of servings at once.
Of course, plenty of restaurants go the opposite direction with how they take advantage of scale, and they make everything as cheap as possible and wind up as an Olive Garden knockoff, but good restaurants, fancy or not, make good food by using it to their advantage.