Inside Brooklyn’s Best Pizza with Frank Pinello

- Feel like I need a Miller Lite or something out here in this lawn chair, right? I need a coffee though. I should go get a coffee. Hey folks. Martin here. I'm down in New York City, visiting one of my pizza heroes, Frank Pinello, at Best Pizza in Brooklyn. We're talking shop, we're eating great slices, and I'm really just soaking up Frank's big heart. If you haven't been to Best, it's seriously one of my favorite examples of this iconic New York-style pizza.

- [Frank] We pretty much focus on four main pies, the regular cheese and the Margherita, the Grandma, which I mean is my favorite, the veggie, which is the square, and then I would say our most popular pizza is that white pizza. It's ricotta cheese, caramelized onions, and we put some sesame seeds on the crust, which people seem to really like. It's a little nod to a pizzeria that I grew up going to when I was a kid.

- One of the things that I feel like differentiates you guys, and I want to talk just a little bit about like, what you see is like New York pizza, like the style and the hallmarks of the style and that stuff. But one of the things that I felt like of all the slices that I taste in New York, I feel like you guys have more fermentation flavor to me.

- Yeah, maybe. That might be so. You know, we spend a lot of time kind of developing the dough early on.

- Yeah.

- What was really important to me is that when people ate the pizza, that it was easy to chew, but also like, what the digestion was like afterwards.

- Yeah.

- And did it feel like it was glue sitting in your stomach?

- Sure.

- Or was it easy to eat and easy to digest? And I think what we ended up with was a pizza that, you know, when you bite it, you don't have to work too hard to chew it. Your jaw is not, you know, yeah, doesn't feel soft. But then like, it sits pretty light too.

- Yeah. Time is that ingredient that's not on any label.

- Right.

- But time is an element which brings flavor. Time is a way to show that you care because you take the care that's required to make something that, like you said, is flavorable. It's digestible. And when a dough has fermented that long, you know, it's producing, producing, producing these byproducts of fermentation, which we perceive as flavor. It's like the flavor of bread, right, is fermentation.

- Right.

- And so when you're adding those pieces in, to me, it's like you're infusing it with something that's more than just history. It's also like this delightful aspect of the pie, you know? And it's more digestible, like you said, it's like predigested, right? You know?

- Right. Right, right.

- I think a lot of times when people are complaining about bread today or the way that bread feels, it's because they're eating bread that doesn't have time.

- Right. And to me that was like, you know, you're talking about New York pizza, for a long time, if you walk into a pizzeria in New York, you know, it depends what decade you're talking about. But more recently, my childhood and into my early adulthood, you just saw these pizzas that had these like very, like, in my opinion, unappetizing look to it, where they just had this pasty white color and there was no bubbles. There was no characteristics in the dough that were attractive, in my opinion. And like now what's happening in like, the New York pizza world, I think the big difference is the fermentation and the pre-fermentation stuff that people are doing.

- Yeah, yeah.

- All the bigas.

- Yeah, sure. Sure.

- And really taking the time to let that dough build character. And you could just see it in the pictures. You know what I mean? Like, sure. When you eat it and taste it, you know. But just by looking at these pictures, you see the bubbles, you see all the characteristics and I'm just like, damn, we came a long way in like a short time actually.

- Yeah. You bring, you know, an honor to this craft.

- Thank you.

- Thank you, man. Thank you. That means a lot coming from you. I appreciate it.

- No, no I mean, I recognize the work and the heart. It's pretty special.

- Thank you so much.

- So glad to be here.

- Thank you for coming by.

- Can we go see some of the process?

- Let's go. Come on.

- Let's do it.

- Come on in, come on in. Adrian, who's our head pizza guy, is putting the pizza in the oven right now.

- [Martin] What are you aiming for, temp wise here? What do you like for a bake?

- [Frank] Early on, I thought that we would just blast it and do super hot, like Napoli, exactly. But we came to learn quickly that this type of pizza needs a little bit more structure. So we aim for like 700 degrees.

- Five minutes, and then you, something like that?

- [Frank] Exactly, exactly. Yeah, somewhere between, you know, four and five minutes. We're able to get two pizzas in there, you know, just because we make these big 20 inch pizzas.

- [Martin] And you do some Grandma.

- [Frank] So yeah, we do the Grandmas. The Grandmas are cooked like 90% in the wood fire oven. You can see it's got, but really for that bottom heat and a little extra crisp, we toss it into the gas oven for the last 10%.

- [Martin] Of course, of course.

- [Frank] And crisp it up. This is my favorite pizza. Plum tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella.

- [Martin] Is that because you grew up with that style or you're more of like a slice guy?

- You know what, there's anchovies in the sauce and I like that, a little bit of that flavor, the anchovies. I like it 'cause it's square and it's thin. I grew up with a much thicker Sicilian pizza. That was like, you know, but as this one kind of evolved into the pizza that everybody really loved, I loved it as well.

- [Martin] Yeah.

- And I don't know, there's just something about it, the simplicity I think I really like about it. All the mozzarella that we use here for the pizza, we make it from curd. So we have the curd come in in the morning. We usually doing like 120 pounds, 80 pounds of mozzarella every morning, balling it up.

- [Martin] Wow.

- [Frank] What we end up with is like, a medium moisture ball, and then we run it through a machine, like you would a regular block of mozzarella.

- [Martin] And it'll grate. No kidding. Okay, so it sounded like a hybrid between low moisture aged moz and like a fresh mozz.

- [Frank] Exactly.

- [Martin] So you get a little bit better melt-ability maybe.

- [Frank] Yep. It melts. I would say that's exactly one of the characteristics we like most about it is it really melts really nicely. Also, it kind of keeps that color. So you kind of get those little white spots. You get the darker spots.

- [Martin] Yeah.

- [Frank] I like the artisanal look of pizza. You know, I like the bubbles. I like the craziness.

- This looks so artisan to me. But like, also honoring the style, you know what I mean?

- Yeah, yeah, exactly.

- You're kind of like pushing it forward. not just sort of like doing what's been done, you know?

- Yeah. That was the idea. It wasn't to like, change the game. It wasn't to like reinvent the wheel. It was to do what we loved, but just kind of do it our way a little bit.

- Yeah. Amazing.

- Do you guys wanna see the production area in the back?

- [Martin] Can we? Can we? We don't wanna take too much time.

- [Frank] No sweat. I'm happy to have you guys here. It's King Arthur. You guys are like the man. You kidding me? I think King Arthur is so cool. Like how it's owned by the employees, like the long story of it, so interesting to me.

- [Frank] So we usually don't do anything on this except just the dough. These pores just get filled up with all the good bacteria, with everything. And it aids in fermentation. So when we put the bowl of dough back up here and we're rolling them and letting them sit, like, you know, it's good, these things that are in contact with the table. And it's, you know, they're all aiding each other.

- Yeah. It's all those elements. Like if you pull the pizzeria up and you move it someplace else, it's like, those are changes. You know what I mean? It doesn't have that quite, it's gonna make a great pizza, but it's gonna be like, a different pizza.

- Absolutely.

- A little bit, you know?

- You know, like growing up, like, so growing up, I'm from Brooklyn. My grandparents are like from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, we all lived on the same block, like 20 of us. And in my grandfather's building in the back, he had like this little room, right? And in that room, for me, it was my favorite room. Like he had his room and then he had his other tool room. We were all like, his tools were nice and organized. Right next to that was like the food room.

- Yeah.

- And that's where he made wine, right? So like the big wine barrel was in the back. I could smell it, just thinking about it, you know? But also, that's where he saved all the seed, right? That's where they hang all the pasta, all the dried pasta, all of like these little fermentation jars of like peppers and stuff were in there. So as I started learning a little bit more about baking, I went to the CIA and I started to learn a little bit more about really cooking. And, you know, talking about how good good bacteria is, that's where we used to hang all the sausage. You know, we had like these broomsticks, not literally broomsticks, but like sticks that we would, you know, make the sausage and the casings and hang them and right away, that good bacteria would jump on there, that white bacteria. And what I came to find out later on was like, that room, all those little things kind of aided each other, right? Like whatever was happening with the wine fermentation, what was going on with the seeds, what was going on with whatever else was in there, probably creating a really good atmosphere for all these things to happen. So any of those elements that we could add here, like whether it's just the table, you know what I mean, the wood table that is sucking it all up or using the same tins or, you know, that idea of like the mother dough going back in. Just, you know, I grew up with some of those elements and they really like, stuck with me when I started to learn about the science of this whole thing. So it was really cool stuff.

- You're the only person I've talked to who's talked about digestibility too, which is also Italian.

- That's very Italian.

- I was gonna call you on it before I was gonna, ah, that's really Italian.

- Yeah, yeah. You spent some time in Italy, I guess. But yeah, that's all they do in Europe, right? And especially in Italy is they talk about how they feel after they eat. And for business, it wasn't a bad idea either because people, when they eat, they don't feel stuffed. They don't feel lethargic afterwards. And instead of eating a slice or two, maybe they'll have that third slice, you know? That wasn't like built by design. Like, "Yeah, we're gonna make them eat more pizza." But the way that it worked out, it's good, you know?

- [Martin] Yeah, yeah.

- Can I give you a hug?

- Yeah, my brother. I'm so glad to meet you guys too. I'm really glad we got to spend some time together.

- So good, dude. What an honor.

- [Frank] When people ask me like, what makes a pizza good, to me, what I like about pizza is the acidity from the tomato and the creaminess from the mozzarella, right? It's like the classic combinations, peaches and cream. And when that balance is off, I don't love the pizza as much, like when people do a sweet sauce.

- [Martin] And then that little Christmas, it's like the triumvirate.

- [Frank] Yes.

- [Martin] The trifecta.

- [Frank] Exactly. Of the dough. Right?

- [Martin] Exactly.

- [Frank] And that savoriness of the dough, it's the perfect food. It's like, why it's so popular. You know?

- [Martin] As much as I love baking and feeding people, for me, it's at least as special to connect with bakers like Frank Pinello, who define themselves through the many ways they serve their communities, one slice, one bake at a time. This is Martin from New York City saying, happy baking.