Anthony Falco - Pizza Czar: Recipes and Know-How from a World-Traveling Pizza Chef

PHIL KRAJECK

It was April 2018, and Anthony and I had just finished working a long-ass day at my soon-to-open pizza restaurant, Folk, in Nashville. Anyone who has ever opened a restaurant knows that its like giving birth, getting married, and getting divorced all at the same time. We came home, showered, and lit a fire in my backyard. We were exhausted. We needed a drink.

Anthony had traveled to Nashville to crash in my guest bedroom and help us figure out what the fuck we were doing. Sauce, dough, cheesethat was covered. Its the How do we set ourselves up to execute consistently and quickly? How do we maintain the perfect oven floor temperature all service long? How do we get the ideal balance of extensibility and elasticity in our dough?thats the other part of Falcos genius that most people dont see. Hes a consultant. Youre in Sao Paolo and want to do grandma pie? Youre in Mongolia and want to do Neapolitan? Call Falco. Hell arrive; dig into the supply chain; help you source the best dairy, flour, and tomatoes; and teach you how to properly use the oven you just spent thousands of dollars on. Falco knows the restaurant world and systems so well. Having him get on a planeas a broand help me was invaluable.

Back to my backyard: After the aforementioned long-ass day, I opened a bottle of wine. And another. And another. At one point, Anthony looked deep into the fire and said, We cook pizza with the stored energy of the sun.

Pizza Czar? How about Pizza Mystic?

See, the State of Pizza in Popular Culture over the past ten years is divided into two periods. B.F. and A.F.: Before Falco and After Falco. Anthony made pizza cool, mashing up art and culture and music and drugs and fucking delicious pizza and wine. Thats why hes a legend. Because not only has he studied and tested his recipes a million times over, but he understands that pizza is a great unifier. Its joy and togetherness.

I dont know how to do anything else, hes said to me, and likely countless people. Anthony Falco is a dude who just wants you to enjoy it as much as he does. Which is a lot. So much love, energy, and effort has gone into these recipes. Use them as a reference. And make so much pizza for your family and friends.

I never meant to make my life about pizza. I also never asked to be called Pizza Czar. But here I am, forty-one years old, and my life revolves around pizza. And now Im writing a book all about pizza.

Mind. Officially. Blown.

Growing up I had a fierce love for pizza. But I imagined myself becoming a filmmaker, illustrator, or revolutionary (and Ive done all three... in pizza). I was drawn to life in restaurants after realizing my artistic and revolutionary leanings would not be suited to office life.

I was raised in a household where my dad, a vegetarian (in Texas), denounced the factory farming he grew up around in Falls County. He was an outlaw, someone who thought cannabis and hemp should be legalized, took every psychedelic you could find in the 70s, and spent years in federal prison for smuggling hash. There was a lot of radical shit banging around the Falco house growing up, and food was foundational to it.

It had an effect. I found the real disruptors behind the bar, in the kitchen, and on the floor. Artists, writers, filmmakers, creativespeople who couldnt stomach the sacrifice of plugging into the nine-to-five. The cushy bubble of corporate stability felt like it could smother that flame. These were the people I wanted to surround myself with. But we needed gigs, so we found ourselves in the service industry.

Working in a restaurant, you develop comradery because youre on the battlefield together. You meet and work with new people from the world over. The work is physical. Everyone sweats and cleans together. And while there are rules, there is so much room for creativity.

I wouldnt even start making pizza until a decade into restaurant life, when I found myself at my first job in New York, where Id been trying to move my entire life. And I wouldnt so much as come within three feet of the wood-fired oven for weeks after starting at Robertas in Bushwick, Brooklyn. After I somehow got through my first shift topping pizzas without making a fool of myself, my boss said, Falco, your pizza ninja training has begun.

Then he shoved a deck brush in my hand and said, Now scrub the floors.

I was stoked. One of my favorite comics growing up was Usagi Yojimbo (which translates to rabbit bodyguard) by Stan Sakai, the story of a samurai rabbit who, rather than join the prestigious martial arts school in town, trains with an angry old hermit living in the mountains. He carries water, splits wood, and cleans before becoming a ronin (a masterless samurai). At this new gig, Id become very good at splitting wood.

In 2010, I purchased a wood-fired mobile pizza oven with money I borrowed from my wife Rebeccas parents. I may have owned the pizza oven, but from that moment, it was pizza that owned me. That oven was more challenging and required more creativity than any restaurant Id worked in. Cooking out in the elements in unfamiliar places and climates using different ingredients elevated my understanding of pizza. And by pizza, I mean dough. Dough is the hard part, the living part, what you obsess over if you commit to pizza as I did.

I came to oversee not just that oven but nine others and a team of pizza makersprobably 150 people between takeout, delivery, and frozen and mobile operations. My pizza masters called me the Pizza Czar. Back then, I felt this title mayve been an attempt to keep me out of their traditional culinary hierarchy and make me sound silly. If my suspicion was correct, that backfired. Instead, the title sparks imaginations. (That, or it makes people think I sound like a pompous asshole.)

I made thousands of pizzas (some perfect, some failures), honed my skills, and was a part of a pizza program lauded as one of Americas best. Then I sold my oven and said goodbye to my old life, and in the years since, Ive traveled the globe making pizza, each challenge another chance to learn.

This book represents everything Ive learned about making pizza over thirteen years: my mistakes (thereve been plenty), my successes (luckily, Ive had a few), and the recipes along the way.

As difficult as restaurant life is, in some ways its a safe place. I mean, not really. Its a crazy place filled with dangers physical and emotional. But intellectually, after six months or so, you become familiar with the conditions and could probably work every station. Seasonal ingredients or menu refreshes add some variability, but the routine wont drastically differ. As a consultant, though, Ive been thrown into situations making pizza in jungles and deserts, climates Ive never encountered, hopping between hemispheres and among unfamiliar cultures. Ive learned a lot about myself, about pizza making, and about doughsometimes life-changing things. When I learned about natural fermentation it completely changed the way I approached dough and reshaped my understanding of the craft of pizza forever. The idea of employing the same technique thats been used to make bread rise for millennia harvesting wild bacteria and yeast from the air, from us, from flourtheres something amazing, even revolutionary about it.