Neapolitan-style pizza, potato pizza, and 5th Street Pub

I guess this could also be posted in the Thin Neapolitan style Pizza Lovers thread.

Apparently, https://www.facebook.com/5thStreetPub in Perrysburg opened on Mon, Mar 4, 2013.

http://instagram.com/5thstreetpub/

Photos on their Facebook page of their menu.

Maybe I'm overlooking it, but I don't see a potato pizza on their menu. I thought potato pizza was popular in Italy. I was hoping the 5th Street Pub offered this option.

At home, I enjoy making pizza dough from scratch and baking it credit-card thin on a stone. I make the Margherita pizza often. I try to keep a basil plant alive for fresh basil. My wife makes and cans pizza/pasta sauce in the summer and fall, so we use that on the pizza. We have a mozzarella cheese-making kit, and it's suppose to be easy to make this cheese, but we have not tried it yet for some reason. I think the Calder Dairy Natural Milk sold at the Phoenix Earth Food Co-op is a good choice to use when making mozzarella. For now, I buy the small barrels of mozzarella cheese at the store. And the other toppings are olive oil and coarse, grey sea salt. Our natural gas oven only goes to 550 degrees. I bake at 525. Apply the fresh basil after the pizza comes out of the oven. Simple and delicious.

But this winter, I started making a potato pizza (patate), and I like it equally as well as the Margherita. The potato pizza consists of yellow potatoes sliced thin with a mandoline and then soaked in water for a while. On the dough, it's just the potato slices, diced yellow onion, black pepper and olive oil. I still make a very thin crust, but I bake it much longer than the Margherita. The potatoes provided an excellent combination of crispy and soft.

I love pizza, and my favorite is what we make at home, but I need to visit a few places in the Toledo area to see what I'm missing. Plus, it's quicker to dash out somewhere for a Neapolitan style pizza. I like to let my pizza dough "age" in the frig for two or three days to develop flavor, so making pizza at home is not a spur of the moment thing.

The 5th Street Pub menu offers a funghi pizza option, but it says it also contains tomato sauce, which seems strange to me. I made a funghi pizza at home once, using cremini mushrooms sliced thin with the mandoline, but I used no sauce. It was just the shrooms, a lot of shrooms, diced yellow onion, salt, and olive oil. Excellent. The leftovers the next day were even better.

Foodie posted at 12:14:33 PM on Mar 05, 2013:
Any sauce on that potato pizza jr? If yes, what type?

No sauce on the potato pizza, and none is needed. Same with the mushroom pizza. Adding a tomato sauce or some other sauce would interfere with the taste of the spuds and shrooms, in my opinion. Those pizzas taste great when those ingredients are the stars.

The potato pizza consists of yellow or gold spuds, yellow onion, olive oil, fresh ground black pepper, and good crust. It doesn't sound like much, and I was skeptical the first time, but it tastes great.

I got the potato and mushroom pizza recipes or ideas from Jim Lahey's book My Bread, but I use a different recipe to make the dough, and I bake on the stone instead of the baking sheets. Jim's recipe calls for fresh rosemary leaves, but I don't like rosemary.

I have not tried the Pizza Cipolla recipe (onion pizza). That pizza uses thinly-sliced yellow onions, heavy cream, salt, and fresh thyme. Sounds interesting.

Last summer, we visited the Black Star Farms winery in northern Michigan, and we ate at their cafe, which offered wood-fired, Neapolitan-style pizzas. They offered five styles of pizza. We got the Margherita pizza, but they also offered a potato pizza. From their menu (pdf file):

Potato [pizza]
yukon potato, Leelanau Cheese raclette and fromage blanc, roasted garlic oil, arugula, black pepper

Knowing what I know now, I would have ordered their potato pizza. Our Black Star Farms pizza was good, but the crust could have been better or airier. The one downside was that the person who made the pizza used a rolling pin to shape the dough. Even I can shape pizza dough by working it on the back of my knuckles. No need for a rolling pin. Use gravity. I know from experience that shaping pizza dough with a rolling pin can make the crust harder or tougher and prohibit the dough from bubbling up along the edges. When I learned to shape pizza dough in the air with my knuckles and fingers, then I stopped using a rolling pin.

Hopefully, these local pizza places are not using rolling pins to shape the dough. Maybe it's faster to use a rolling pin, but that kind of shortcut negatively impacts the overall enjoyment of the pizza. It's the little things that add up to something delicious.

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The above text was copied from my comments at ToledoTalk.com:

• Mar 5, 2013 comment at ToledoTalk.com thread Wood Fired Pizzeria comes to Toledo!
• another Mar 5, 2013 comment in the same thread

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June 16, 2013 Toledo Talk comment

There was a recent review in the Blade about 5th Street Pub that read: "Let's face it, until recently the Toledo area had been sorely lacking in the pizza department."

Maybe for sale, but "good" pizza has been made secretly in home kitchens. It's not hard to make a scrump pizza.

I prefer the thin crust Margherita-style pizza. Homemade crust topped with simple but quality ingredients: homemade sauce, fresh mozzarella, olive oil, coarse grey sea salt, and fresh basil.

I could eat this once everyday. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, doesn't matter. It's a lightweight pizza, not loaded down with five pounds of meats and cheeses.

A couple slices of this and a small glass of red wine, that's my idea for a fast-food, drive-thru lunch business.

tags: #home - #food - #pizza - #restaurant