A Pizza Lesson with the Guys from Roberta's

I took a pizza-making class recently with Anthony Falco and Angelo Womack of Roberta's. These two pizzaiolos were leading a workshop in Brooklyn (at the Brooklyn Kitchen Labs) on making pizza at home.

Did I say that the focus was on making pizza at home? Yes, I did. The class was less about tweaking the hell out of your oven and more about how to get the best pizza you can out of it with some basic tools. To that end, we used only pizza stones and inexpensive quarry tiles as the cooking surface — none of them positioned with mathematical precision. (Full disclosure: The ovens were convection ovens with a range of up to 550°F.)

Anyway, here's some video from the day. It takes you from dough-stretching through pizza build-up and into the oven.

We were given a range of prepped toppings—including sliced red onion, grated Parm, basil, the Meat Hook's "Fat Kid" sausage blend (ground beef, bacon, and cheddar), and its "Pizza Blend" (basil, parm, fennel sausage)—and allowed to go nuts.

Pizzas cooked up pretty well, given the relative absence of oven tweaking, and I would be happy to have had such good pies come out of my own oven.

Here's the hole structure of one of the pizzas.

And here's the undercarriage.

Oh, oh, hey, look who was in the class ... Cary Steiner from Passion-4-Pizza.com:

If you missed out on the most recent class, don't worry. Falco and Womack hold these workshops every so often — and the next one is on November 7, 2010. Watch the Brooklyn Kitchen Labs class schedule it and any other upcoming sessions.