How Master of Molecular Gastronomy Wylie Dufresne Brings Science to Pizza — ICONS: Pizza

Wylie Dufresne is not your typical pizza-maker. The award-winning, fine dining chef-turned-pizzaiolo pushes the possibilities of traditional pies at Stretch Pizza in NYC. At this slice shop, you’ll find soy sauce in the dough, smoked eggplant in the sauce, and Ritz crackers in the meatballs.

Credits:
Producer: Connor Reid
Directors: Connor Reid, Murilo Ferreira
Camera: Murilo Ferreira, Shirley Chan
Editor: Michael Imhoff

Executive Producer: Stephen Pelletteri
Supervising Producer, Operations: Stefania Orrù
Supervising Producer, Development: Gabriella Lewis
Audience Engagement: Frances Dumlao

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– Pizza’s about umami. Everything about a pizza is, sort of, soaked in umami: tomatoes, cheese, yeasty flavors. You’re building this umami bomb and that’s why we all love pizza, ’cause we all love delicious. I’m not traditionally trained as a pizzaiolo, as a pizza-maker. I’ve been a professional chef here in New York City

For the last 32 years. I was in fine dining for a really long time and then casual dining and I was in the doughnut business. And I’m looking at pizza through a slightly different lens than some of the more traditional pizza-makers here in the city.

We don’t have any of the constraints that maybe some people that want be more traditional, more classical, have. The sky’s the limit here. Cooks come to me with an idea, I say, “Let’s try it. Let’s have some fun here, guys.” So this is our dough room. The process starts with our biga.

The biga is similar to a sourdough starter. You ferment this group of ingredients, you let them get to a certain point and then you take most of it, you leave some behind, you add it to your pizza dough, you mix it, and then you keep that little bit alive

And it can live for centuries, in fact. But what happens with our biga is, you mix it and you use it all and then you start again the next day and mix more and use it all, and so there’s nothing left. So you can see, like, this is all that fermentation,

All that activity, all those bubbles in there, all that structure is happening. It really has some good wake-you-up funk. Our dough guru, Jimmy makes our dough five days a week here. We put our biga in here from the mixing bowl. It’s water, olive oil, flour, some more yeast,

Some more salt, some sugar, some diastatic malt. It’s all going in there and it’s gonna get mixed up. We have a chart right here. This has got every pizza dough recipe, every batch since the first day we opened. Keeping track of the temperatures is really, for us,

Very important and fundamental to monitoring the dough, being consistent with our dough. To do something well, you have to understand what’s at play and that involves really trying to be analytical about the dough and what can we do to make better dough and never being satisfied with the dough that we’re making.

We don’t go to what they call full windowpane, where you could really, really, really stretch this thinly without it breaking because we want the gluten to develop over time as we put it in the cooler over the next four days. Then we drop a specific amount

Of dough into the divider, gonna turn the dough out, he’s gonna press it evenly into the corners, and the dough is cut into 30 equal size squares. From there, we confirm the weight to make sure it’s accurate and from there it goes into the rounder. This one saves us some time.

Once he gets a couple of trays, he’ll roll ’em into the cooler and then that’s where they’ll spend the next 3, 4, 5 days. I mean, we’re always trying to make better pizza tomorrow than we did yesterday. I don’t know that that’s the bumper sticker that we’re gonna put on the website,

But that is our ultimate goal and obviously that’s where it starts, right? Pizza starts with the dough and from there we can do all sorts of fun stuff. We do a square pie. So we take our pizza dough, we make a larger ball of it, then we stretch it into a Sicilian pan.

We leave it out for 18 to 20 hours ’til it’s proofed nicely and then we bake it in the deck oven. – So these are our square pies. They’ve been resting and proofing and now we’re gonna blind bake them. If you pull up too fast, the dough will go with the lid

And then you catch these air bubbles under the dough, and then rather than getting contact and getting a nice crispy bottom, you have these pockets that are no good. These are gonna go in actually at 475 for about 20 minutes. – What I love about our square is that

To me it has this like, Stouffer’s French bread pizza vibe. It’s like a brioche and a focaccia went on a date. – [Tobias] These have been in for about 18-20 minutes. – You can see they’re nice and light, golden brown. This is what we’re looking for in our squares.

It’s got some nice height. These have now been baked and then we lay down some sliced cheese, then some of our house sauce, then some shredded cheese, and some cupping pepperonis. We give them a second bake, and then after that they’ll sit here

And as soon as they get an order we’ll give ’em a quick flash and finish ’em with a little bit of 30-month aged Parm, and send them on their merry way. – We’re gonna start meatball prep. This is for the pull-apart meatball sliders and our meatball marinara as well.

– So it’s a 50:50 pork and beef meatball. They’re both 80:20 blends of meat to fat, and we’re gonna then mix that with some grated onions, some eggs, some cheese, some nutritional yeast, some MSG, some Ritz crackers. Breadcrumbs are a very common ingredient, but Ritz cracker is the Parmesan of cracker,

It’s the king of crackers, right? It is the ultimate cracker. So we just felt like it was a little bit of an improvement upon the standard breadcrumb. – I’m basically looking at the bottom of the bowl trying to make sure that any Ritz crackers, Parm, is fully incorporated in there.

As soon as I see that, I’m gonna turn it off ’cause you don’t want to overwork the meat. It gets all bouncy and tough. Then we’re gonna weigh ’em out and ball ’em. We weigh ’em out to about 50 grams. We can fit 70 meatballs on one tray. I love the meatball Parm.

I mean, we call it meatball marinara. I think it’s cool that we have parts of the menu that are different, you wouldn’t see at a pizza place, kind of out there, crazy ideas. I mean that’s kind of Chef’s specialty, and then you’re always gonna find classics that you’d find at pizza places

And I think that’s a cool combination. So these are all done. We’re gonna bake ’em off and then they’re gonna be ready for service. – We were excited to put sliders on the menu. Our meatball is, maybe, not classic Italian and maybe more Swedish-leaning,

But we’re still trying to be respectful of the art of making meatballs. And we put it on a delicious bun, and some delicious Wisconsin brick cheese. It melts really well and makes for, we hope, a delicious, fun way to have it. It’s pull-apart and it’s like a pizza shop staple.

So we see stuff like that as not only an obligation but an opportunity, a place where we can have fun, where we can make something delicious, make something that’s hopefully best in class, but also a little whimsical, a little bit fun. So this is Olga. She’s officially the world’s greatest prep cook.

She’s the heart and soul of the basement. She’ll cut off all these mushrooms that we slice and we serve raw with some butter, lettuce and some radicchio, some sliced raw onion. And then we have our Old Town pizza, which is a riff on a classic, the Old Town Bar and Grill,

Which is nearby, and I have a lot of personal connection to. The Old Town is based off of a sandwich at the Old Town bar. It’s been a famous classic New York institution. They have this sandwich, it’s a grilled cheese sandwich on pumpernickel bread with sauteed mushrooms

And Muenster cheese and it’s just super delicious and I thought it’d be fun to make a pie out of it. We use New York as our inspiration a lot. I use my past, my culinary history, but I also like to use New York City as an opportunity for a place to find inspiration.

We’re aspiring to make a New York-style pizza, and classically, a New York pie is 18 to 20 inches roughly. It’s baked once, taken out, cut into slices and then when you order your slices, they’re re-fired. We’ve spent a decent amount of time trying to figure out

How we can get that twice-baked pie on a single bake because we don’t have the luxury of pre-making pizzas and hoping people come in and order those. We got to the point where we realized we couldn’t bake the pie for its entire life cycle at a single temperature,

And so we began splitting time between a higher and a lower temperature. And we’ve been tweaking it quite a bit, but for the last couple of months we’ve been at around 620 for half the time and 535 for the other half of the time, and what that ideally yields us is a pie

That feels like that New York slice. It’s baked twice. Our tomato sauce is straight down the fairway. It’s not too sweet. This is the base for all of our red pies, square or round. This isn’t a crazy, crazy, crazy recipe and we’re just adding some really nice dried oregano,

Some dried garlic, bunch of olive oil and some soy sauce, actually. We put soy in there because we think that pizza’s about umami. – So we’re pulling the eggplant out of the oven. It’s ready to get peeled and then smoked, and then that becomes the sauce for our Oddfather pizza.

– So the Oddfather is one of our earliest pies. It gets its name from like, classic Italian flavors. It’s zucchini and eggplants, garlic. It reminds me of the Goodfellas scene, you know, the guys in the prison slicing the garlic. But we take eggplant and we roast it in the deck

And then we smoke it. So you can see we’re filling it up nicely. You can see why we wrapped it pretty tight. We don’t want any smoke to come out because that’s just flavor loss. – Yeah, that just sits there until you can’t see the smoke anymore and then it’s ready to blend.

– We take a garlic confit that we blend in with the smoked eggplant and make a sauce. So we lay down some shredded mozz, then we lay down some of that nice smoked eggplant cream. We put down the zucchini, drizzle it with some oil and we bake that,

And when it comes out, give it a little bit of crunch ’cause everything’s kind of soft. We wanted to give it some texture, so we take tempura crumbs, finish it with some fresh parsley, some really beautifully 30-month aged Parm, more olive oil, and that’s our Oddfather. We are here with a national treasure,

Scott Wiener from Scott’s Pizza Tours, probably America’s greatest resource on all things pizza. Among his great, vast knowledge, the largest single collection of pizza boxes. – We take people around pizzerias, tours of kitchens, explanations of dough process, tomato selection, cheese preparation, history, science, culture, everything.

And I stumbled on this fact that said something about how two-thirds of the three billion pizzas eaten every year in the United States are served out of a box, and I just started saving interesting boxes that I saw and that turned into having a few hundred of them,

Which turned into writing a book about them, which turned into a Guinness World Record, which turned into Chef Dufresne calling me up and saying, “Can I put some on the wall?” and me saying, “Yeah, I don’t have room in my apartment. Take ’em all.”

These are all generic boxes from all over the world. There’s 19 boxes and I think it represents 12 or 13 different countries. What pie are you into lately? – Maybe let’s do the Reading. – The Reading? – I love that pie. – The Reading is another one of our pies

And it takes its inspiration from another sandwich, a classic Philly sandwich. The Reading Terminal mix is like a roast pork and a jus and you get it on a proper Italian sandwich and it starts with a roast pork that we rub with a bunch of dried spices,

Then we roast it in the oven, cool it, slice it on the slicer. We lay some grated provolone down, then we lay the pork down. Then we take some broccolini that we blanch and saute real hard with a bunch of chile flakes and chop that all up.

Then we bake that off in the oven, finish that with a house-made chile oil and a little, again, some shaved Parm, send that out. It’s pretty awesome. So, enjoy. – Smells freaking great. When I first look at a pizza, the visual impact is always interesting to see, that balance of topping.

This is an even browning, it’s not like a super hot flash bake. It’s very common right now to see post-oven Parm. You also get this nice visual, it’s like this freshly fallen snow. Pretty nice. Next thing you do is, I look at the cross-section just to see what’s going on.

Nice big open crumb structure, like big bubblage, which is just a sign of full fermentation. I love a pizza like this ’cause it’s, it’s essentially a roast pork sandwich pizza, but when you eat it, you don’t think, “Oh well, this is one food on top of another food.”

It really is owned by the pizza. – So this is our Stretch sauce. It goes with our chickpea fries as well as the dipping sauces for our crust. – And we offer five dipping sauces that you can order on the side in an effort

To reduce the boneyard that builds up on the plate. We would like people to eat the crust. – The base of the sauce is actually just a little bit of our white sauce, which is based around the classic halal cart sauce that you’ll get on the corner.

Then we got roasted red peppers, a little bit of Calabrian chile, some maple syrup, my favorite ingredient. And we got some garlic powder, some salt, and that’s just gonna get blended. First time here with us? – Yeah. – You can get a veg and a meat,

You can get a square and a round. Hopefully a lot of choices. The name Stretch, it serves a the number of functions. When I started making pizza, I realized that I could make this beautiful dough, beautiful dough, and completely screw it up by not stretching it right.

I could go to all the trouble, I could waste four days worth of work because I couldn’t stretch the damn thing correctly. And it became really important to me to get good at it. Making great pizza is not easy by any stretch of the imagination, and it takes incredible dedication and hard work

And I wanted to focus a little of that on there. And then, of course, there’s the notion that we’re trying to stretch a little bit of the possibilities, stretch a little bit of the opportunities, stretch the way you could think about a pizzeria, about a pizza, about what you could do.

We wanna have a little bit of fun, we wanna be a little bit playful. We wanna stretch the possibilities. New York is full of great pizza and what I want is, I want people to say, “We’re gonna come back to New York for another pizza tour and we cannot miss Stretch.”

“We gotta go to Stretch,” and say like, “I gotta put this on my list next time I’m in town.” Like, “When I think about pizza, New York City, Stretch is on the list.”