Pepperoni: On Top
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Pizza at Mario Batali’s Otto, which cures its own pepperoni.
By JULIA MOSKIN
Published: February 1, 2011
ACROSS the United States, artisanal pizza joints are opening faster than Natalie Portman movies. But inside those imported ovens, pepperoni — by far America’s most popular pizza topping — is as rare as a black swan.
Related Recipes
Potato Salad With Pepperoni and Vinegar (February 2, 2011)
Caleb Ferguson for The New York Times
Torrisi Italian Specialties buys several types of pepperoni for different dishes.
In these rarefied, wood-fired precincts, pizzas are draped with hot soppressata and salami piccante, and spicy pizza alla diavola is popular. At Boot and Shoe Service in Oakland, Calif., there is local-leek-and-potato pizza. At Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn, dried cherry and orange blossom honey pizza. At Motorino in the East Village, brussels sprouts and pancetta. But pepperoni pizza? Geddoutahere!
What, exactly, is pepperoni? It is an air-dried spicy sausage with a few distinctive characteristics: it is fine-grained, lightly smoky, bright red and relatively soft. But one thing it is not: Italian.
“Purely an Italian-American creation, like chicken Parmesan,” said John Mariani, a food writer and historian who has just published a book with the modest title: “How Italian Food Conquered the World.” “Peperoni” is the Italian word for large peppers, as in bell peppers, and there is no Italian salami called by that name, though some salamis from Calabria and Abruzzo in the south are similarly spicy and flushed red with dried chilies. The first reference to pepperoni in print is from 1919, Mr. Mariani said, the period when pizzerias and Italian butcher shops began to flourish here.
Pepperoni certainly has conquered the United States. Hormel is the biggest-selling brand, and in the run-up to the Super Bowl this Sunday, the company has sold enough pepperoni (40 million feet) to tunnel all the way through the planet Earth, said Holly Drennan, a product manager.
Michael Ruhlman, an expert in meat curing who is writing a book on Italian salumi, doesn’t flinch from calling pepperoni pizza a “bastard” dish, a distorted reflection of wholesome tradition. “Bread, cheese and salami is a good idea,” he said. “But America has a way of taking a good idea, mass-producing it to the point of profound mediocrity, then losing our sense of where the idea comes from.” He prefers lardo or a fine-grained salami, very thinly sliced, then laid over pizza as it comes out of the oven rather than cooked in the oven.
But some of the most respected meatheads in the country are beginning to take pepperoni seriously.
“I can’t make salami fast enough as it is, and now the pizza chefs are begging me for pepperoni,” said Paul Bertolli, founder and self-proclaimed “curemaster” of Fra’ Mani, the salumi specialist in Oakland. Mr. Bertolli is in a research-and-development phase on a pepperoni, because of demand from expert pizzaiolos like Chris Bianco of Bianco in Phoenix and Craig Stoll of Delfina in San Francisco. “There’s nothing quite like that spicy, smoky taste with pizza,” he said.
Mr. Bertolli believes that pepperoni’s smokiness, beef content and fine grind are more characteristic of German sausages like Thüringer, suggesting a possible Midwestern connection. “I’ve never seen a smoked sausage anywhere in Italy,” he said.
Normally, Mr. Bertolli confines himself to products and processes that are almost painfully traditional, and a nose-to-tail ethos that he applies to the pasture-raised, antibiotic-free pigs he buys. (Except the ears; Mr. Bertolli says they have too much crunch even to be used in headcheese.) For Mr. Bertolli’s pepperoni, he will avoid the nitrites used by commercial producers in favor of celery juice, an effective and natural preservative, though it does not produce the same appetizing color in the finished product as the chemical versions.
No one is claiming that pepperoni is difficult to find. Large producers like Volpi, Patrick Cudahy (makers of the No-Char line used by many pizzerias in the Northeast), Columbus and Ezzo are considered top-of-the-line among pizzeria owners. Opinion is divided on whether a slice of the stuff should curl when cooked, or lie flat. Some say that the little cups of cooked pepperoni perform an important job: confining the spicy, molten fat from pouring out over the surface of the pizza.
But a pepperoni that lives up to the handmade, high-quality standards of the artisanal-food movement and also replicates the soft, chewy, smoky-hot-sweetness of the commercial product? That’s the grail.
Caleb Ferguson for The New York Times
Mario Carbone, at Torrisi Italian Specialties, grates a frozen pepperoni to make “snow” atop Peconic Bay scallops with lime and cilantro.
Related Recipes
Potato Salad With Pepperoni and Vinegar (February 2, 2011)
Otto, the Greenwich Village pizzeria opened by Mario Batali in 2003, cures its own pepperoni, in a small subterranean chamber now overseen by Dan Drohan, the restaurant’s chef. In 2007, following a crackdown on illicit cured meats by the New York City Health Department, Otto became the first restaurant in the city to receive formal permission to air-cure its own meats, a process that must take place within a specific range of humidity and temperature in order to be safe and effective.
Pepperoni is the most popular topping at Otto, said Mr. Drohan, and the restaurant goes through more than 100 pounds a week of red-wine-colored pepperoni, made from Berkshire pork shoulder and flavored with fennel pollen (rather than the usual fennel seed), paprika and cayenne.
Outside the pizza universe, it’s rare to see pepperoni in a restaurant kitchen. Chorizo is everywhere; soppressata, with its pearly grains of fat, all the rage. But only at Torrisi Italian Specialties, the small Mulberry Street restaurant dedicated to upgrading Italian-American flavors, is there evidence of true pepperoni creativity. It serves pepperoni vinaigrette, pepperoni snow, and minced pepperoni mixed into warm crushed potatoes with oregano and vinegar to make the potato salad of dreams.
“We buy three different kinds for different culinary purposes,” said Mario Carbone, a co-owner and chef. Alps brand is good for cooking, he said, “Pepperoni just wants to give out that wonderful orange grease.” Salumeria Biellese is best for slices, he added, and a super-salty-smoky version from Vermont Smoke and Cure makes an intensely flavorful garnish for raw seafood. For the snow, Mr. Carbone briefly freezes the whole sausage, then grates it on a Microplane into feathery shreds that melt when they come to rest atop a hot soup, like potato or bean.
A block farther along Mulberry Street, on a stretch that is suddenly reclaiming its Italian-American culinary heritage, is a pizzeria called Rubirosa that opened in November. There’s no more noble lineage in American pizza than Rubirosa’s: the chef and co-owner Angelo Pappalardo (always called A. J.) grew up on Staten Island working in his father Giuseppe’s pizzeria, Joe and Pat’s, where the crusts are thin, ethereal and legendary.
The pizzas at Rubirosa are almost identical, with sauce spread almost all the way to the edge and a sauce lightly balanced between tangy and sweet. The pepperoni pieces, no bigger than a nickel, are sliced each day (many pizzerias now buy pre-cut pepperoni, which toughens quickly).
When Albert Di Meglio, a born-and-raised Staten Islander, came on board at Rubirosa as co-chef, he said he had big plans for the pepperoni pie. “I thought we’d do some kind of local salumi, something from Little Italy down the street.” He was wrong. Although Mr. Pappalardo has cooked at high-end Italian restaurants like Esca and Osteria da Circo, and all the pasta at Rubirosa is made by hand, the pepperoni is Hormel. Its familiar texture and taste, Mr. Di Meglio said, won out.
“A. J. said ‘Give the people what they want,’ ” Mr. Di Meglio said. “And he was right.”
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