Stromboli's, how the heck do you eat these things without... (1 Viewer)

[David Williams]

I've never had a Calzone that had ricotta cheese in it (nothing but regular mozzarella), but Ranch dressing is the standard dipping sauce in my neck of the woods.

 

[Lynda-Marie]

Thanks, John and everyone else for giving me a clue.

Here in Washington State, they have always been calzones, as far as I know.

Ranch dressing inside? Eeew!

 

[Lew Crippen]

Sorry Shane and Thomas, but ranch dressing on anything is as Italian as pineapple on pizza.

 

[Ruz-El]

I'm with you! I never saw the point: Just have a pizza instead of a folded pizza, but now it all makes sense.

As far as eating one, I never have, but the "The Spiral" has always worked for me in the past. I'll give it a shot whenever I try one of these.

 

[Shane Martin]

They called it "Alpine Dressing" which basically tasted like Ranch.

That said I have not eaten a Calizone at our 2 best pizza places here in town(Marios and Umberto's which are both NY style and every bit authentic).

 

[Brook K]

Ricotta in Calzone here too, never heard of Ranch...eew.

The stomboli I've had around here doesn't have sauce inside so they aren't that messy other than the grease. They give you tomato sauce to dip it in which I sometimes use and sometimes don't. I've gotten into sauceless pizza lately. One of the places around here has a white cheese pepperoni with no sauce that I love.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Uhhh, no offense, but any "authentic" NY "style" pizza joint is nothing of the sort. Considering that in New York City itself there are 872 "Famous Ray's" pizza joints, each one claiming to be the "original", anything outside of NY City has a long way to go before they are truly "authentic".

It's like getting "authentic" New England Clam Chowder or a Clam Roll outside of NE, it just does not happen. You get milk soup with rubber chunks or deep fried clam "strips" (unaffectionately known around my hometown as "breaded elastics").

 

[MarkHastings]

- So true!

I love how these so called "Italian" places can just slap on the "Real Authentic" label over their Chef-Boyardee style food. :rolleyes

I still love that joke about taking the Italian uncle to Olive Garden..."Olive Garden????? What, was the A&P out of Spaghetti-O's"????

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

LOL, Shane, I think that the mere fact that I started a thread about how to eat something neatly is a testament to my anal-retentive nature.

Mark, I like Chef-Boyardee. :b Especially their spaghetti and meatballs, that stuff ain't half bad.

 

[Shane Martin]

Let me just say that when I had NY pizza in NYC just this past year, it tasted just like what I've been eating at those 2 local joints for a long time. Their cooks are all from there and trained up in NYC before working there.

The taste is very much there.

 

[Scott Simonian]

Since this just looks like a fuller version of the calzones I eat... Cut them in half with fork and knife. Add a napkin. Clean.

 

[MichaelBA]

Well, the quality of NY pizza has seriously DIPPED over the past two decades. Used to be a great joint on any corner. But some significant measure of homogeneous mediocrity has descended, and now you have to SEARCH actively for a GREAT pizzeria.

But... there ARE some still, for sure.

That said, I have many relatives who own pizzerias in Massachusetts featuring a New England style and their stuff is good -- for what it is, that is.

 

[MarkHastings]

NY Rays isn't that great when compared to a real Italian place, operated by an independant owner who sounds like he just came over on the boat.

Those places are GOLD!I've never even heard of NE Style? I only knew about Chicago and non-Chicago (which is the REAL way )*

Although, maybe NE Style is what I've always eaten and never realized it. The best places in my area are similar to the ones that boast NY style.


* If you've never been to CT, you have to visit New Haven's italian section. They're world famous for pizza...Seriously, I think they were voted #1 at some point.

 

[Shane Martin]

Mark,
They showed the world pizza championships on Food TV and one of the top 3 guys from the US was from CT so I don't doubt you. As far as I could tell they make their pizza like sicilians do. I sampled pizza from different places in NY(had 4 slices while I was up there) and the 2 local places here hold their own.

The only time it did was against Patsy's near NYU. That was more fru fru style pizza to me but the ingredients were fresh off the vine. I've never had ingredients that fresh in my life.

I do like Chicago style especially Malnatti's. I used to love Giordanos' the best until I tried Malnattis.

 

[Greg_S_H]

That's a little different, since clams just aren't going to be as fresh flown in to a place like Oklahoma. The ingredients for a pizza aren't going to taste much different across the country, so if you have a guy who just happens to end up in, say, the midwest--but knows what he's doing--you can still get an excellent pizza. I go to a local place run by brothers straight from Italy, and they not only know what they're doing, but they don't call it "NY Style" anyway. I usually end up getting a slice of pizza, but this thread is making me want their stromboli something fierce. They also have a calzone, and it definitely has ricotta. I'm sure they'd be just as offended by the thought of ranch in, on, or anywhere near one of their dishes.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Trust me, fresh clams are where chowder begins, not ends. We have seafood places that distinguish between clam types in their different chowders (quahog, littleneck, softshell, etc.) Not to mention chowders that no one outside of the northeast have ever heard of - Ever taste Corn Chowder? I've tasted chowders all up and down the east coast where fresh clams are available, it is all milk soup outside of NE (even RI has some bastardized clam minestrone "Manhattan Light" soup they attempt to call chowder, but they are a small and innocuous state, so we let the little upstarts get away with it).

I still say that the best of NY pizza cannot be found outside of the city. If you can compete for pizza sales in NY, you must be putting out a superior pie and that competition just does not exist elsewhere. Hell I'm a diehard Red Sox fan who would never admit NY had anything superior if it wasn't obviously true!

 

[Alex S]

Greg,

Sorry to disagree with you but you can't get the same ingredients in Oklahoma as you can in NY.

Nobody has dough like NY. That's why you can't get good Bagels or Italian bread outside of NY either. It's the water.

A lot of pizzarias in NY either make their on mozzerella or get from a local place that does.

 

[MarkHastings]

I know this is gross, but you guys also know that the pizza is dependant on who's making the pizza. They say it has to do with the oil in the chefs hands. Just like cologne and perfume smells differently on different people (i.e. the way it reacts with the chemicals in your body) is similar to the way pizzas taste when a specific person is kneading the dough. The oil in your hands is going to make the pizza taste differently from chef to chef. No matter how similar the processes and ingredients are, there's always going to be one pizza place that just seems to taste better than all the others.

I know it sounds gross, but I can totally understand it.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

It's true. Penn & Teller did a Bull$h*t episode on bottled drinking water. The cleanest and most healthy "mineral" water tested was NYC tap water. Not to mention that NYC gets it's choice of the finest flours and the best ingredients at prices that are much lower than other parts of the country due to bulk purchasing and shipping. Plus, they get to charge a higher price for their product due to it being NYC. Parts of the country that have a lower per capita income average are not going to be able to make a pie that will be competitive with Domino's et al while simultaneously paying non-NYC prices for the necessary high quality bulk ingredients.

 

[Lew Crippen]

Dough comes from flour, yeast and water. Flour (not from NYC) for pizza is easily obtainable from a variety of sources, including Italy. Individuals can buy authentic Tipo 00 pizza flour from upscale supermarkets, specialty (Italian) markets and mail order from both US and Italian sources. Commercial quantities would likely not be much more difficult to obtain in the Southwest than in NYC (though I concede that one might not find a distributor right down the block in Muskogee)—certainly not so much more difficult that it would preclude making pizza dough on a commercial basis.

Now water may be an issue, but somehow I don’t think that NYC tap water is better than that in Oklahoma City or Naples. And if it turns out that it is, there are a variety of treatment options that could be installed by a business.

I think that obtaining proper yeast would also not be much more difficult in the Southwest than in New York.

As for other ingredients, real (buffalo milk) mozzarella is very easy to get anywhere (see above for flour), good Roma tomatoes are probably even more easy to get in the Southwest (due to its proximity to Mexico) than in the Northeast, Parma ham can be purchased just like cheese—and on and on.

Good pizza can be made anywhere. The best I’ve ever had was in the Sydney suburb of Haberfield and even here in the interior of Mexico, a local restaurant run by natives of Livorno, turns out great pizza (the owners are also importers of Italian foods).