Posted on 07/02/2008 2:04:16 PM PDT by John Jorsett
The guests file into Jeff Varasano's Buckhead home with bottles of wine, and he greets them warmly. Mostly, they're first-timers.
"I've only met three of these people," says Varasano's partner, Heather Stokley, surveying the nearly two dozen eager souls who have scored an invitation to the evening's pizza tasting. "They're friends of friends, Internet friends. There's such a big list of people who want to come."
Over the past two years, Varasano pizza supplicants from across the city, the state and the country have beaten a path to his oven door. Some out-of-towners have spent the night in his guest room. According to Varasano, the former CEO of a well-known pizza chain once jetted in, tried a few slices and left town the same day.
All this for pies that he tops with mozzarella from the local Publix and bakes in a jerry-rigged KitchenAid electric range wrapped in so much tin foil it looks like a moon lander. Varasano, a software engineer by training, claims his pizzas are as good as any in the country. This fall, the city can put that claim to the test when he opens an actual pizzeria in south Buckhead.
Most fans discover Varasano, 41, through his Web site — a now-legendary reference text for the pizza-blogging demimonde. He first posted this 22,000-word opus in a single, near-infinite scroll in late 2004. It got picked up by the Web directory Boing Boing over a year later, and it promptly got so much traffic it crashed his server.
"It's one of the sickest things ever to hit the Internet," says Ed Levine, a pizza expert who now hosts Varasano's page — slice.seriouseats.com/jvpizza — on his food community, Serious Eats. "It's like the 'War and Peace' of pizza blog posts. And the thing is, Jeff does it in this really geeky way."
Oh, yeah. Varasano — a software engineer who set out to "reverse engineer" a pizza as light and gently charred as the one he considers New York's best — has refined his technique over the past eight years and via umpteen thousands of pies.
"I didn't set out to run experiment after experiment," says Varasano, adding that one attempt melted all the plastic off a toaster oven. "Every one I thought was going to be the one."
A pizza wasteland
His intensive trial-and-error methodology hasn't resulted in a recipe as much as something more like a mapping of the pizza genome.
How did he do this? Why did he do this? What would motivate a techie who was supposed to develop the next big thing in database management to give his life over to pizza?
That's easy. He moved to Atlanta.
A Bronx native, Varasano had always taken good pizza for granted. But then on a fateful day 10 years ago, he walked into a metro Atlanta chain that boasted "New York Style Pizza," ordered a slice, and ...
"And I felt like I was in bizarro world," says Varasano, shuddering at the memory. Everything was wrong with it.
He tried more Atlanta pizza and responded with "condescending disgust." When he went home to New York, he began scouring the city for the best, the archetype, the ur-pizza.
He found it at Patsy's, a classic old-time joint in Harlem. What made this crust so good? He brought some home and baked it in his oven. He used some as a starter for his own batch, convinced that this step was necessary for great dough.
Varasano had his plate full with his software, a pro-ject for which he had raised $3 million in venture capital. But his mind kept wandering back, obsessively, to pizza. Surely, he could crack the code.
Geek god of pizza
To understand the Varasano mind and its approach to problem solving, it helps to know a couple of things:
• One: At the age of 14, he set the U.S. Rubik's Cube record with a time of 24.67 seconds and then published "Jeff Conquers the Cube in 45 Seconds: And You Can Too!" This achievement was noted during an assembly of his freshman class at Yale.
• Two: He is prone to saying things like, "I can watch two ducks fight over a piece of bread and go home and apply that. I see connections that other people can't."
Speaking of which, guests at Varasano's gathering this evening have to gently compete for the pizza slices as they come out a bit slower than usual.
His oven, which would much rather be baking a casserole at 350, is balking. Set to the clean cycle, its temperature climbs to 800 degrees. A tray of ice water in the cabinet above works to keep the oven's thermostat from shutting the party down. Varasano takes regular readings of the oven temperature with an infrared thermometer that looks like a ray gun; as soon as it's high enough, he can bake a 13-inch pie in just 90 seconds.
Varasano slips a foil coverlet over his pizza stone for a minute. "The stone's got to be cooler than the top because the top is radiated heat," he explains. The mysteries of heat conduction revealed themselves to him one night as he was cooking a steak, and it was a breakthrough for his pizza.
The pizzas emerge from the oven puffed with blisters, speckled with char and as light as clouds. His guests, collectively, swoon. They eat for free; their word-of-mouth will be priceless.
Taking his pie public
As people wait for the next pie, they mingle. One group compares pizzerias they've visited in Rome. Deborah Duchon, the food anthropologist familiar from the Food Network's "Good Eats," remarks, "I thought the flavor combinations were very interesting."
Indeed, along with his unique technique, Varasano has developed trademark recipes. One pie has ricotta, arugula and lemon; another holds dates, walnuts and rosemary. All are listed on prototype menus he passes out to the crowd.
Stokley — Varasano's good friend and a partner in the pizza business — directs guests to two laptops set up on pedestals. One presents the Web site in semi-digestible chunks. Another flashes fan mail from all over the world. "You come China, make pizza for profit," reads one.
Investors have approached Varasano about setting him up in the pizza business, but he and Stokley are planning on going it alone when they open this fall in the new Mezzo Atlanta building on Peachtree. Disagreements with partners, he claims, doomed his software business.
Isn't he nervous about the pressure of running and cooking in a restaurant?
"No," Varasano says. "Once I learn the brick oven, it won't be too different from what I do here."
Levine, who has tried all the best pizzas in America for "Pizza: Slice of Heaven," his definitive book on the subject, says the proof will be in the pie.
"Jeff thinks like an engineer," Levine says. "Things will be different when he's actually doing it in real time and not as a high-flying chemistry/physics experiment. If he can do it successfully on the fly, that's what will make him a great pie man."
>>>>Are all of the chains that bad in comparison to these little pizza shops? <<<<
You know, I almost always was happy with the little family-owned shops in Boston and the Boston burbs, they knew how to do a decent pie. Most of them were Lebanese or Greek and also had decent subs and gyros and salads.
But here in DC Metro it’s different.
First of all, pizza PIE does not mean pizza CAKE.
They cannot do a proper crust and fail from the outset. Forget about everything else from there.
Last month we went to NYC to take in a Yankees game. We went for four days and let me tell ya---I loaded up on pizza.
My sister lives in Philly and I have had some really good pizza while visiting there.
I left NYC for good in 1980, and I haven’t had a decent slice since.
I made bagels from Peter Reinhard’s The Bread Maker’s Apprentice, using diastatic malt syrup, and they tasted every bit as good as NYC bagels.
I even sent some to my girlfriend’s family in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, near the heart of bagel country, and they all told me it was as good as a New York deli bagel!
I haven’t been able to get the same with pizza, though. I suspect I need higher temps. The best pizza places I know, like La Sorrentina, Gino’s, etc., all cook at extremely high temps, in stone ovens at 900+ degrees.
Ed
I moved to Boston in 1980, and I lived there 22 years.
There is no - I repeat, NO - pizza in Boston.
Top Three Reasons We Moved Back From Northern Ohio:
1: No good pizza
2: No good bagels
3: Lake Erie Water
New York was no paradise, but sheesh....
When we lived in Atlanta, my favorite pizza place was Rocky’s. They were the first in the area to use fresh mozzarrella. I loved that pizza. I understand they are gone now and a Mellow Mushroom is in it’s place. Too bad. We also liked Fellini’s.
In Raleigh I like The Point at Glenwood. Their Ala Vodka pizza with peas, proscuitto and mushrooms is yummy as is the Camelleri or Stragioni.
pizza ping
Check out the webpage. I think it’s post 2.
Thanks much for the link. The man is a little on the OCD side, eh?
I was stunned while I read this this morning.
Not because of the pizza but because the AJC is .75 cents now.
Can’t wait to see what the Sunday edition will be.
I have eaten my last Pizza Hut product.
Someone ought to face charges for something like that.
First of all, pizza PIE does not mean pizza CAKE.
They cannot do a proper crust and fail from the outset. Forget about everything else from there.
Right ... I'm in Texas which probably sounds like it is the Antarctica of good pizza places. Found a REALLY good hole in the wall pizza joint today that looks like a mobster owns it and the 'bread' served was good enough to eat from the oven with nothing else. First decent small place I've found in a long time.
|
There are some mom and pop pizza places here in FL that are good ... I had PH this week for the first time in years ,, asked for heavy sauce ,, they cut back on the already skimpy cheese quota to compensate,, the bread was reasonably good but the overall pie was really gross ...
You can actually get a good pizza from Papa Johns and Domino’s if you know the owner/manager ,, they all skimp on cheese and don’t cook them long enough ,, “well done” meaning browned cheese really helps the flavor...
Good looking crust, but too pasty. Where are the big air bubbles?
|
The secret is in the water. Ditto for rye bread,Italian bread,etc.
Nope. There's some darned good authentic BRICK OVEN pizza here on the NJ shore. A thinner crust, real (fresh) mozzarella cheese, fresh basil, slightly spicy tomato sauce. YUM! No NY water used in the making and tastes as good as the pizza I used to get at a little pizza place near Bloomingdale's.
Pizza piled with 'stuff' and gobs of 'cheese' isn't pizza IMO. It's cholesterol-laden garbage.
|
The best pizza I have eaten so far was in Portland, OR at a placed called A Pizza Scholls. Had to wait an hour to get in but it was well worth it.
Heh...no kidding.
I’ve been kind of working on my home (pseudo-Chicago-style) pizza recipe, and can sort of relate to his process...but he is about 1000% overboard by comparison.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.