Chef's Table: Pizza

When I was a kid growing up in New York,

my job after school was folding mountains of pizza boxes.

They said, "You've tried the rest, now try the best,"

which everyone's boxes said.

Looking at that box, I just thought, "This might not be true."

"This might be somewhat biased."

Oh really? You use that same bromated, bleached flour?

That same block of cheese?

What magic could these hands do to these same ingredients?

I would hear people say, "It's the water."

I love wood ovens.

Is that the secret?

It's not.

Here's the secret.

Shit in, shit out. You know?

You put crap in there, crap's comin' out.

Put good things in an oven,

then we have an opportunity to make something good happen.

I did this book where I went around the country,

and went to Italy.

I ate a thousand slices of pizza in one year.

And I said in my book,

"The best pizza in the world

is made in Phoenix, Arizona."

People thought it was the most blasphemous thing you could say.

"Oh, it's not made in New York?" Or, "It's not made in Italy?"

The food critic at Vogue said, "You know, you're insane."

I was like, "Okay, go to Phoenix, eat the pizza."

"Talk to me."

He calls me from the airport.

He says, "You were right."

When I went to meet Chris Bianco for the first time,

he was this sort of Yoda of the pizza oven.

He was talking about pizza, the desert, and how he fit in it all.

The last one to go outside. Here.

It was dizzying,

but you're gonna look at pizza differently after hanging out with Chris Bianco.

Drop it, baby, drop the ball.

Chris has this really abrasive exterior,

and he says "fuck" a lot and all of those things,

but he's so, so sweet.

He wants to make people feel good, and that'll keep him up at night.

There's something of an old-school New York cab driver about him.

But Chris is the Coltrane of pizza.

This guy remade the game.

Before Chris, people were using canned pizza sauce,

generic flour.

Chris elevated every ingredient.

He said, "It's worth doing right."

And now, if you look across the country, in all 50 states,

you can find pizza

that has been inspired by something that Chris did.

He basically started the pizza revolution in this country.

Marg, Wiseguy.

There's something else for 'em. Wanna take that to the table outside?

Now, we've got a Wiseguy coming…

All right, friends, we got pizza rolling up.

Wiseguy, smoked mozzarella, fennel sausage, roasted onion.

Being a kid from New York, we think we know everything.

The Yankees are the best. Your mom's meatballs are the best.

But what makes it the best anyway?

I'll never forget my first trip to Italy.

We went to a little trattoria. A really simple meal.

I remember thinking about what dessert was gonna be.

It'd be a big rum cake?

Cannoli?

And then dessert came.

There was a guy pushin' on

a shaky little cart with this pewter bowl,

beaded with sweat from the ice in it.

And in that bowl was just peaches, bobbing like apples in this ice bath.

And I thought, "What am I gonna do with this peach?"

Took a spoon and fished it out.

Cut this peach with a knife.

I remember taking it, biting it…

And it was like I'd never had food before.

It was like a lightning bolt of perfection through simplicity.

Probably the greatest revelation that I've ever had.

We grew out a couple varieties of Italian grain.

We grew out some, um, barley from Magdalena in Mexico.

- Oh, sweet. - It just loves it out here.

So this is a little petri dish about what the future's gonna look like.

- Yeah. -Snippets of all the possibilities.

So these are mostly… These are all like a flint corn.

We planted this in sort of the same sort of traditional spacing…

Mm-hmm?

…that you would have seen in Native American times.

-But isn't this a beautiful plant? -It's beautiful, man.

You know?

Beautiful.

Let's give some of this grain a run.

Let's do it.

Everything starts with a tactile approach.

You have to be local

to get close to that, to get your hands in it.

To get something at source, or as close to it, is pretty magical.

People not from the desert,

they do not think of it as being bountiful.

But, in fact, Chris is in a part of the world

that has deep traditions of wheat growing.

Oh yeah, that feels amazing.

This is warm, and all that good moisture in there.

Something that Chris discovered

is that Arizona grew wheat that was going to Italy.

People were using this ideal wheat for pastas and for pizza making,

and it wasn't staying in Arizona.

That was kind of a happy accident.

Wheat is one of the reasons he became a great pizza maker.

He has figured out the exact combination of flour,

of dough work,

and time in the oven

that gets to an idyllic place.

There's a sturdiness to the crust that goes all the way to the tip of the slice,

and it somehow is able to do that while still being thin.

And before Chris Bianco,

you kinda thought it might've been impossible to achieve.

-Watch out for rattlesnakes. -Yeah, man. Always a buzzkill. You know?

They always ruin the party.

I know. I know.

Chris, this is my favorite picture of Daddy and I.

-We were just married. It was our first-- -Just married. Ain't that cute?

Look at that. That's Daddy and I. This was New Year's Day, 1960.

Look at your father. He looks just like you. Just like you.

-Poor guy, poor guy. -Yeah.

-That's in New York. Yeah. -That's a great one.

-There's you as a little boy. - Before I did anything bad.

-I have a little-- -I remember this pin.

It's about… about 120 years old.

And my father gave it to me. I had just been married. He said--

-"In case he's any trouble…" Boom. -In case he's any trouble…

Anyway… And I cannot tell you

how many pies and breads and tortes that I've made with this.

That's awesome. What else you got?

Oh, I got other things. Let me get them real quick.

I was born in the Bronx.

When I was, like, five years old,

I started getting these episodes where I wasn't able to breathe.

It was the worst thing ever.

I thought, "Maybe I won't make it."

"Maybe I'll just stop breathing one day."

Ended up that I had asthma.

There was no inhalers then.

You had these pills.

If you couldn't breathe, you'd just chew on one.

If you got bad enough, you'd just go get a shot of adrenaline at the hospital,

which… not fun, to say the least.

Kept me home.

I loved to play sports, but I missed a lot of games.

But it allowed me to do something else.

Helped my mom and my grandmother cook dinner.

My mom was the greatest cook.

Just natural, has a great palate.

She just gets it.

There was lots of love, lots of meatballs.

Chicken cacciatore, which was my favorite.

I got to be around these women that impacted my life so greatly.

So, from that, you know,

asthma became not something that was detrimental.

It ended up being an incredible blessing.

My first job in a pizzeria was a place called Aldo's Pizza

on Croton Avenue in Ossining, New York.

My job was carrying flour up from the basement

and dump it off to the pizza guy.

And then I graduated to shredding mozzarella.

You know, I'd get to tug on a few pizzas.

What was amazing about it,

you got to wear an apron, you got to wear a cool white T-shirt.

You'd get one soda per shift, which was awesome.

If your friends came in to get a slice,

you felt important

because you had something that people wanted.

It just really kick-started to being a part of something.

Pizza made me feel I had a place. That sense of purpose.

It made me feel like a superhero.

And that was pretty awesome.

So when I was a kid, I was a very easy child.

- Oh yeah, right. -

Oh my God. Chris had decided that…

- What did I decide? -That he didn't love school.

I made you drive me to Little League.

We were sitting in the car, and you said, "I saw your report card."

"What are you gonna do with yourself?" And I said,

"I'm gonna be a baseball player."

You said, "Nah, I've seen you, you're not that good."

-That was a good brush with reality. - Chris is still…

So many chapters in our lives.

-It was like that. Boom. - Didn't see that one.

So many years, huh? I guess we're in for the long haul.

-I think you guys are gonna make it. -In for the long haul.

You never had one argument, all these years.

Well, divorce never-- Murder maybe, but not divorce, no.

Asthma was mostly a nocturnal condition.

I couldn't sleep.

In school, I just felt if I could stay awake,

I could stay ahead of it.

But I was fucking exhausted.

I didn't do well in high school.

I didn't see college as my place.

I didn't know what to do,

where I fit in, how I felt… about anything.