A Time to Reflect on Amazing Pizza
Pizza peppers the holiday calendar. Let's think back about how an amazing food shaped our year.
What a nice slow holiday week this is. I love the time between Christmas and New Years. It’s purgatory, a space that time forgot. Nothing is scheduled here and there’s no expectations. It’s the only time of year where you can simply exist. Like a cold slice of pizza sitting in the back of the fridge, forgotten to linger there contemplating your worth until you’re remembered. Why weren’t you eaten in the first assault on the pizza? How will you be reheated?
Lots of people use this time to reflect on their life. Did you make the right decisions? Is there such a thing? What does the future hold? In the spirit of the season I reached out to some folks in the pizza world to get their take on their favorite pizza memory of the year. I’ll be featuring those in the next month. This month Ryan Spak shares a sentimental anecdote about making a cast iron pizza for his family.
I also had incredible Christmas Day pizza courtesy of the fabulous Kevin Konn. Check out his website here for details on how to get his pizza. There’s very few people in the pizza world that love and care about pizza more than him. What a delight!
Ryan Spak’s 2022 Pizza Memory
There have been many but the one that sticks in my mind is making a simple cast iron pizza at home for my family. I was lucky enough to inherit some of my grandma's cast iron and using the cookware that was used to feed my father, grandfather and now my son and I was a really beautiful moment. Cooking is such a visceral connection to our memories and the people that we love, as well as our place in time, that is often forgotten during the grind of daily life and I cherish the times that I'm able to realize that. Needless to say, that pizza tasted absolutely amazing.
Check out Spak Brothers for some insanely good pizza. Located in Garfield, it’s one of my staples. Enough variety on the menu to please anyone you’re sharing pizza with.
Christmas Day Pizza
I typically make a few sheets of pizza on Christmas Day to serve to anyone that wanders into our open house. We get an eclectic bunch that day - people that had nowhere else to go, some that didn't have the time to venture home, and family that, well, you see six days in a row over the holidays.
Homemade pizza pairs nicely with ham, plus if you’re hosting during the day it’s the perfect snack. It’s universally loved so you can never go wrong with pizza.
This year in an effort to streamline the cooking I outsourced the pizza to Kevin Konn. Honestly, not sure I’ll ever make pizza on Christmas again. Kevin’s pizza were delivered to my door, expertly boxed. I set them in the fridge and all they took to cook was five minutes in the oven.
In an instant our table was lined with some of the best, professionally made pizza in the city. It was soft, chewy, flavorful, crunchy. All the elements you want on a pizza. The toppings, sauce and cheese were fresh and flawlessly executed. The perfect vehicle to accompany bottles of holiday cheer.
Thanks for reading! Hope you have a number of amazing pizza experiences this holiday season!
Thanks and pizza ya later!
-Dan Tallarico, Pizza Journalist