Paulie Gee's Iconic New York Pizza

- [Paulie] So how we doing over here? All is well?

- Good. Yeah.

- Sorry to catch you with your mouth full.

- Very good, yeah.

- You've been here before?

- It's delicious. Yeah. Well, keep coming back. Please.

- I've been craving for it.

- Thanks.

- [Customer] You're Paulie Gee, right?

- The Paulie Gee.

- Yeah.

- The man, the myth, the legend.

- I thought so.

- Hey, bakers, it's Martin, and I'm in New York City, hitting some of my favorite pizza parlors. First stop is Paulie Gee's, where I think you'll find one of the most tender crusts in town. Paulie, good to see you.

- Good to see you. Come on in.

- Thanks, buddy. You grew up in the city, right?

- [Martin] I did. Yeah, I grew up right here in Brooklyn. We moved away for 35 years.

- Where?

- Central New Jersey. I was in IT, and I got a job out there, and I finally realized that I had to do something that I loved, not something-

- Yeah.

- That I, just what I chose to do and was bad at.

- Yeah.

- Because when I was in corporate IT, I disappointed a lot of people.

- Yeah.

- It really wasn't for me.

- [Martin] Yeah, look at all these smiling people now though.

- [Paulie] Most importantly I'm smiling.

- [Martin] Yeah, that's good.

- You know, I always love pizza. I love New York's. This style of pizza.

- This style. Yeah. What are the hallmarks of New York-style pizza?

- Well, it's like a cheese slice.

- Yeah.

- It's just tomatoes, and, you know, good cheese.

- Yeah.

- Classically pepperoni.

- Yeah.

- Sausage.

- Okay.

- Not much more than that, you know?

- Yeah.

- And then a lot of New York pizzerias, almost all of them serve Sicilian-style pizza as well.

- Yeah, yeah. Some squares.

- Which is really a takeoff on a real Sicilian pizza. Real Sicilian pizza, it's called sfincione.

- [Martin] Sfincione. Yeah.

- Yeah, and that to me is New York-style pizza as well.

- Yeah, the other thing that I think of is really important for New York-style is like, because you don't have a lot of stuff going on, you gotta have good flour, good basic ingredients, like really good tomatoes, good flour, really good cheese, great pepperoni, and sausage, like...

- King Arthur Flour. I mean, we did a lot of experimenting with different things and we love our King Arthur.

- Yeah.

- No imported tomatoes for us anymore.

- Yeah. You-

- You can use Italian tomatoes, Stanislaus.

- [Martin] Stanislaus, that's the stuff.

- All the way.

- Yeah.

- And the cheese, I use classic, you know, Grande.

- Grande, right? Yeah.

- Whole milk mozzarella. That's the New York slice, those ingredients.

- Yeah, man.

- And now we have our pizza. We have a vodka pie, we have a a cheese pie with mushrooms. We have a Grandma.

- Yeah.

- We've been working on our Grandma.

- Nice.

- Still working on it. I love our sliced sausage. There's a plain old cheese, pepperoni, and Hellboy, and there's a little different, you really didn't have this back in the day.

- Yeah.

- All of the squares, not the Grandma, but all the squares have sesame seeds on the bottom. This is Freddy Prinze, which is an upside-down. And that's it.

- So good.

- That's our pizza.

- [Martin] How long on the re-crisp?

- You tell me, Brandon.

- What's up?

- How long on the re-crisp?

- [Martin] Brandon, how long on the re-crisp?

- On the re-crisp?

- On the reheat? Yeah.

- Probably about two to three minutes.

- Two, three.

- Maybe a little longer for the Sicilians.

- [Martin] Yeah, yeah. A little thicker.

- Yeah.

- [Martin] And then your, like your bake temp at the same? Like 630, six, five, six, somewhere in there?

- I'm pushing about five on the re-crisp.

- Oh, five on the re-crisp. Gotcha.

- Five on the re-crisp. Some people might do a little lower, but they should be doing a five.

- Around there. Gotcha. So, Brandon, you got to prestretch.

- I prestretch.

- [Martin] And then you just let 'em hang?

- [Brandon] We let them hang for a bit. It kind of lets it like rest a little bit too. So when I go to stretch it, it's a little easier.

- Yeah, yeah.

- [Martin] And you've got like semolina or something in between?

- Sorry?

- Yes. Scott from Scott's Pizza Tours.

- Yeah.

- Bring that out to me.

- Yeah.

- [Paulie] He said if you are using your regular flour for deck flour, it's gonna burn.

- [Martin] It's gonna burn. Yeah.

- It's gonna burn.

- Yeah.

- [Paulie] But with this, he says it toasts.

- Yeah.

- I started out 2010.

- Yeah.

- I built a small wood-fired Pompeii oven.

- Sure, sure.

- In my garden.

- Yeah.

- Where we lived in New Jersey.

- Neapolitan-style or what was your style?

- Yeah, yeah.

- Neapolitan-style. Right?

- Neapolitan. Neapolitan-ish I would call it.

- Yeah, okay.

- Because I didn't want to, you know, I didn't wanna follow their rules.

- Right, right, right. They're annoying.

- Nobody's gonna tell me you gotta do something. If I could make things the way I like-

- Yeah, yeah.

- And that's the key to... Everything that I do, I make the pizza that I love.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- Hang on a second.

- Yeah, go for it.

- I can't be having this. The only one who cares about that. These benches are very important. I found a book called "The New York Pizza Project." In that book was a picture of a pizzeria here in another part of Brooklyn called Elegante Pizza. Some reason, on my phone, I took a picture of one of their seats that looked just like that. And I went to our local pizzeria in central New Jersey, and I got excited. I wanted to show him what I was thinking about doing. I said, "Yeah, I'm gonna make an old-school place, and I have benches like this." And I took that picture on my phone.

- Yeah.

- And I showed it to the owner, and he says, "I have those." I said, "What do you mean you have those?" I looked around.

- Yeah.

- I had forgotten they had remodeled a few years before.

- No kidding.

- I said, "What do you want for those?" Because they're not cheap. Says, "Want for them? My wife's gonna kill me if I don't get those outta the garage."

- No kidding.

- "See, I was about to chop 'em up," he said to me, "I was about to chop 'em up." So I got these, I put 'em in in my garage.

- Yeah.

- In Jersey until I actually found a place to put them.

- Incredible.

- So the beauty of these is that these are the actual benches that my children sat in growing up eating pizza.

- No kidding.

- The actual benches.

- No kidding. That's amazing.

- So this is what I did back here. And being a Yankee fan, I had to make this an homage to-

- Yeah.

- To my team. And I did that, and I just wanted to make it feel like an old-school shop.

- Yeah.

- Up front is a little different theme. So in every slice shop, gotta have one of these. This is a Cornelius jet spray JT20 double bowl beverage dispenser. And, of course, every pizzeria has to have a map of Sicily.

- [Martin] Of course.

- And over here, this is what the slice shop looked in 1940. And here's our pizza boxes. Now, most importantly, do you see our name on there?

- Yeah.

- You wanna tell people? You should know who we are. We don't need to say who we are.

- Exactly. Exactly. But it's got your glasses so we know.

- There you go.

- Damn. The crust is so tender.

- [Paulie] There's a lot of people making great pizza in this city.

- Of course.

- [Paulie] I'm not saying I'm any better than anybody else. I just wanted to create something that you could have gotten 50 years ago.

- [Martin] So, y'all, if you know, you know, head on down and give some love to Paulie Gee's in Brooklyn. This is Martin from New York City saying, I'll see you at the table.