After recently posting a collection of pizza-making tips, I bought some Pizza Tonight dough and made some of my own dough as well. Then, I made six pizzas for 20 people at my wife’s birthday party and the outcome revealed a real disparity. My competently made pizza dough couldn’t hold a candle to Pizza Tonight’s. People raved about every pizza I made with it. I put white sauce on that light and airy dough and nestled brussels sprouts and caramelized onions into it. Draped some thinly sliced ham (donated by an attendee) and added smoked mozzarella. Scattered potato slices with garlic and rosemary. Each of those pizzas, in turn, totally stole the show. I’m telling you a monkey could make amazing pizza with Pizza Tonight’s dough as the foundation. Not a bite of crust was left behind.

We won’t get into how the pizzas with my dough fared. The point is, I was just about to call it quits.  Stop the exploration of every kind of pizza. And just tithe part of my paycheck to Victoria Deroche’s Pizza Tonight business. And then Doug emailed me about New Jersey tavern-style pizza. What’s this? Bar pizza? A style of pizza I’ve never heard of? His name is Doug Mulvihill, and we first corresponded in response to my La Michoacana ice cream post. Months later, he saw my pizza post and let me know that he’s got some pizza secrets of his own from several years working on his technique. Now, let me get outta the way, so Doug can tell you how he, um… rolls.

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it’s all Doug from here down
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I love pizza, and I think I make fairly decent pies, so hopefully I can provide some information that might help someone. Before I explain everything, I need to provide some context on my pizza history and what prompted me to make my own pies.

Thinner = Winner (depending on who you ask)

We all have our favorite pizza. Based on what I have seen, most people become attached to the pizza of their youth. The pizza we eat as children shapes our appreciation. Generally people idealize their first pizza, and it becomes their favorite for life. None of us is wrong, we just like what we like. (more…)

(rewriting and updating this post all week as more noteworthy details come to mind – time permitting – new stuff at the bottom)

Today, we’re unveiling a redesign of the EatingRichmond.com food blog aggregator.  Ever since Matt Sadler helped me launch it over almost two years ago (big thanks to Matt), we’ve been trying to figure out ways to make it better.  It’s helped a lot of people find fun local food content, but the single feed of 40-50 different Richmond food blogs became unwieldy and too simplistic over time.

The only way I could think of to address the issue was the imposition of categories.  I mean, restaurant review junkies probably don’t wanna read about health food every day. Also, as more people buy into the idea of beer/wine/coffee as one of the basic food groups, a need to include those blogs became apparent.  For the really infrequent posters, the Slow Foodies section is where you’ll find their once in a blue moon blog entries.  And then there’s the unruly Smorgasbloggers who really can’t be contained to a subject-matter.

I couldn’t have done any of this without my neighbor, David vanBlaricom, handling the technical Wordpress details (more…)