What we learned from our visit to a Michelin-star pizzeria
On our way home from Montana last month, we had one night in Los Angeles and finally made it to Pizzeria Mozza, a spot we’d been looking forward to for years.
We first learned about Nancy Silverton’s quest for the perfect pizza dough back in 2017 when watching her episode of Chef’s Table on Netflix. At the time, our weekly pizza dough came out of our 17-year-old breadmaker. But when all the Teflon came off onto the dough ball one night, and the dough had to be thrown out, we began thinking about how we could try Nancy’s method before buying another machine.
There was no going back to a breadmaker after that first attempt. The difference was night and day. For the next eight years of Friday pizza nights, we used her recipe or some variant of it. In the last couple of years, we’ve experimented with another recipe (you can see it here on our website), but we’ve kept one of Nancy’s signature touches: brushing olive oil and sprinkling salt around the crust. So many people comment on how much they love it. We also make a pizza inspired by her fennel sausage one, and this trip gave us a few improvements to ours too.
Pizzeria Mozza is a Michelin-star restaurant, and it was the first time any of us had eaten in one. We ordered six different pizzas and each one was incredible. Regan spent time sitting near the pizza oven, talking with the team making the pizzas. He brought home a tip that has already improved our pizza crusts even more: use rice flour instead of cornmeal to keep dough balls from sticking to each other and to stop pizzas from sticking to the peel. Both rice flour and cornmeal have higher burn points than regular flour, but rice flour is unbelievably soft and has none of cornmeal’s grit, so the finished pizzas feel even better. From now on, that’s what we’ll be using.
It was such a great experience to be inspired by a Michelin-starred restaurant, but it was even better being back home and sharing stories with friends over pizza at our own table.
