A Day Making NYC’s Most Hyped Pizza

Ceres is a pizzeria in the Lower East Side.

Julian and I met working at Eleven Madison Park,

it was a fine dining restaurant in midtown

with three Michelin Stars

that, in 2016, was rated the best restaurant in the world.

We don't have any investors,

we got, like, $2,000 left in our bank account

and about a quarter-million dollars in credit card debt.

When we opened this place, we did it with the intention

to make the best pizza that we can,

and the response has been crazy,

it's consistently out the door, it's really been a blessing.

[upbeat rock music]

Morning guys, my name is Jacob,

I'm an owner-operator here at Ceres Pizza.

It's 6:30 in the morning right now,

time to make some pizza dough.

[upbeat electronic music]

So first step is to get started on dough production,

just gonna weigh out some of the ingredients.

Consistency is the number one thing for us here.

Six kilos of sourdough starter,

and this will be used to make approximately 150 pizzas.

So we use this organic 00 flour from Utah,

Central Milling just does a really good job

of making a consistent product.

This is Julian, my business partner,

who's stealing the flour from me.

This is an organic whole wheat flour,

plays a pretty important role in the texture, flavor too.

This is an organic bolted flour,

it's like a whole wheat flour that's been sifted

to remove some of the larger pieces of bran,

so the bolted flour imparts, like, a nice savory,

like, malted flavor while also imparting a lot of strength.

When it comes to, like, planning out a day,

we just have, like, a very hard deadline.

Obviously, working at places like Love Madison Park,

they put a real emphasis on this so it certainly helps.

Julian is over here, he started the dough-mixing process.

This mixer is great because the bowl

spins itself in both directions

and has this very important breakup bar

in the center of the mixer right here,

which helps break the gluten structure

that's building when the dough is mixing.

Just helps us get a more even mix

than any other traditional mixer would.

Very small changes in temperature will affect the dough,

and because you have that breakup bar,

you minimize the amount of time

that the dough spends in the mixer,

therefore, you create less heat.

We're trying to control all the variables here.

We record the weights of every single flour,

we record the ambient temperature,

we record the weight of the starter,

the temperature of the water that we used.

If something goes wrong,

we can go back into the dough log,

look at the previous day, and see what was slightly off.

We gotta call the plumber.

The drain is [beep].

What do you mean?

It's draining when it's closed.

Oh no, I fixed this problem.

Okay, but also this, it's dripping a lot.

A lot of water coming out of there.

The water is draining when it's not supposed to.

Because we're on such a tight timeline,

we gotta call the plumber right now.

I fixed it.

But that doesn't change that

there's a lot of water ripping out of this,

so we did not fix it.

This is an old building in Chinatown,

it's been around for almost a hundred years at this point.

We have a lot of maintenance challenges,

we've been learning about HVAC and plumbing

and electricity ever since we opened this place

and it's been awesome.

Stare at the drain for a little bit.

[Julian] Yeah, stare at the drain,

we got about 25 minutes left of the...

It's not dripping.

[Julian] It stopped dripping?

So I fixed it.

[Julian] How? What happened?

'Cause I'm a smart guy. Plumber guy.

[Julian] What happened?

[Jacob] Plumbing smart guy. What did you do?

Magic.

[Julian] Tell me right now.

I just fixed the drain.

[Julian] All right, we'll keep an eye on that.

It's been 30 minutes, so it's time to have the salt

and get the dough mixing.

We like to use sea salt in the restaurant

because there is a mineral content in the sea salt

that I think adds more than just salinity.

So Julian and I met in 2019,

we were working at a restaurant called Eleven Madison Park,

Julian was my sous chef, which means he was in charge of me,

I was making cheesecakes and making souffles,

yeah, I've never spent so much time with anybody.

I hear this guy breathe sometimes.

Yeah, yeah.

But we both have, like, the same passion

for just, like, using the best ingredients,

I think something that we're really proud of,

like, this area of the restaurant,

even though it's not the prettiest,

we don't have any products

that we can't defend tooth and nail,

I don't have to justify why we need to spend...

$55 a liter for olive oil.

So we use two different types of olive oil here,

one is a little bit cheaper

which is still a great olive oil, it's from...

[indistinct]

It's an extra virgin olive oil,

and we have a finishing olive oil,

this particular one is the fourth finishing oil

that we've settled on, it's from Tuscany,

just, like, a very clean, distinct flavor

which is great for finishing our pizza.

Now, we're just gonna take the dough out of the mixer.

We're gonna do 27 kilograms per bin.

We make sure that each bin is consistent in weight

so that we can get a visual idea of, like,

how much gas is in the dough as it ferments.

So now, we have all the bins weighed out,

we're at 27 kilos each.

First step after they come out of the mixer

is to just give them a quick initial fold.

Folding bread dough is about building additional strength,

making sure that the dough is strong enough

to withstand the fermentation,

organizing the structure of the dough.

So we take the temperature.

[Julian] 78.4°, right?

.4, yeah.

The next step here is gonna be to take the pH of the dough.

Just rinse it in a little bit of distilled water,

and we're looking for somewhere around 5.6.

So we're at 5.65 right now,

the higher the number, the less acidic,

so we're looking for that number to drop

to somewhere around 5.4, 5.39 before we actually cut.

The acid is an indicator

of how much food the yeast has consumed,

so the more gas that's in it,

the sort of more difficult it will be to roll into balls,

and then, that sort of extends into the next day,

if it's difficult to roll into balls,

it will be difficult to shape into a pizza,

we'll get these, like, thick spots and thin spots,

which is sort of the enemy of consistency,

even across a single pizza.

What's next honestly would be some, like, small task

like cutting chives.

It's 8:30, we have 30 minutes

before we have to check on the dough again,

so just doing some miscellaneous mise en place,

cutting some chives for the white pie.

We have five different pizzas that we make here at Ceres,

cheese pie, our 'nduja pie, tomato pie, mushroom pie,

and then, we have our white pie.

It's in the style of a tart flambe, or a flam.

[indistinct]

I have...

My mouth doesn't really make that sound.

We use crème fraîche product that we get from Kendall Farms,

and then, we use pancetta, onions,

and we finish it with chives,

sort of, like, our take on this, like, classic Alsatian

or German tart.

So while Jacob slices chives,

I'm gonna start making the tomato sauce.

We tested a lot of tomatoes

and we decided to use San Marzano tomatoes.

Pissata is an already-milled tomato,

a lot of the water is removed from the tomato

so it's too thick,

so therefore, it's a way more intense, rich flavor,

that's why we decided to use...

[indistinct]

Plum tomatoes, and we'll mill those,

and we'll use the tomato juice that's in the can.

The food mill allows us to have an even consistency

of the plum tomatoes.

If you use a blender, you basically lose control of that,

and this just adds another layer

of control over the texture,

and this way, we can ensure that the sauce is the same

every single day.

It makes a product that is, like,

easy to distribute on the pizza.

Anthony Mangieri Una is another guy who makes awesome pizza,

I remember him saying San Marzanos

have this, like, green strawberry, like, level of acidity,

which in combination with mozzarella and scamorza

create a pizza that is, like, salty

but that you can also eat a decent amount of

because the acid sort of helps you not be bogged down

with the amount of salt that we put in it.

We're gonna let it sit in this container

just to make sure that the salt

gets absorbed evenly into the sauce.

It's 8:55, I have five minutes

before I have to go check on the dough again,

but we have...

Our pizza boxes all have stuff

that needs to be filled out on them,

the type of pie, so this one is gonna be a cheese pie,

and then, By, so this is, like, both Julian and I,

we're the only two making the pizza right now.

The goal of this was to basically motivate

whoever in the future is going to make that pizza

to put the best product out there that they can.

Also, what we're super proud of

are these little, like, NYC vents here,

which ensures that the steam is not trapped in the box

and kind of maintain the crispiness of the pie.

So now we're at the point

where Julian is gonna be upstairs preparing for service,

getting the station ready,

I have to spend a little bit more time down here

finishing up the dough process,

making sure that we're all good here.

We came downstairs and noticed

that our HVAC down here wasn't working,

so we're gonna have a technician come by

and see what's going on.

We got about 30 minutes left until the...

We gotta cut the dough,

it's just talking to our HVAC guy,

trying to get it a little bit colder down here,

but in the meantime, I'm gonna grade some of this scamorza,

it's, like, a low-moisture mozzarella

that we use for the majority of our pizza

that we have made for us by a small farm

in Branchville, New Jersey called Jersey Girl.

These are aged for about two weeks in a cave,

just, like, makes a product that has all sorts of nuance

that you don't get from a commercial manufacturing plant,

I think it's, like, a huge part of the reason

that our pizza is what it is.

Julian is upstairs making sure

that we're all ready for the rush to come,

I'm just down here grating through the rest of this cheese.

[Person] That one is broke.

[upbeat percussive music]

[faucet running]

Our sink's broken. You got a wrench?

We try to build in time for things like this,

which is difficult because you never know

how long something like this is gonna take.

You know, behind me right now, our HVAC, being repaired,

once 11:45 hits, it's sort of a non-negotiable

that both of us be upstairs.

It's just bad, just feels bad.

[Person] You need to change the whole unit.

[Person] How much does one of these cost?

[Jacob] Many thousands of dollars.

[faucet running]

No, no, no.

This is broken.

I'm gonna go see if I can do something about it.

[upbeat percussive music]

I'm gonna go to the plumbing supply store.

You're going there now? Okay.

It's 10 o'clock, Julian is baking off the first few pies,

just realized the part that was broken in our sink,

I'm gonna go see if I can get a new one

at the plumbing supply store.

[traffic humming]

So what we're gonna start with,

we have the sieve here with rice flour,

and so the rice flour doesn't stick to the pie

and doesn't give that cake-y, burnt flour on the bottom.

We have our dough tempering here.

If the dough's too cold,

it will prevent us getting good oven spring.

Oven spring is how much

the crust of the pizza rises while it's baking.

And then, we form the crust, trap that air in the dough,

and then, the rest of the pie kind of gets flattened out,

we'll flip it up, we wanna make sure it's nice and even,

we'll kind of let the weight of the dough

kind of stretch itself, we go once around,

and after that, we do a little check,

we feel the crust to see if there's any thin or thick spots.

I'm gonna add it to the peel.

We're gonna make a mushroom pie,

so here, we have crème fraîche, seasoned with 1% salt.

Crème fraîche is basically slightly-fermented cream,

which gives it this acidic flavor

which mimics that acidic tomato.

The reason tomato sauce works so great on pizza

is because that acid kind of cuts through the salt,

and the fat, and all of that.

Next, we're distributing

chopped portobello mushrooms, white onions.

I don't think many pizza spots use crème fraîche,

it's a quite expensive product to use,

but it just happens to work really well for our flavoring.

[light clattering]

But the pizza gets cut immediately

when it comes out of the oven,

there's steam trying to escape,

and by cutting it immediately,

it doesn't make the pie soggy from the inside.

Next step is to put the pie on a screen,

this prevents the pie,

if it gets soggy from the bottom,

the steam has a place to go.

This one, we finish with porcini stock powder,

which gives it a super, super rich mushroom flavor.

Next, we're gonna make the tomato pie, one scoop.

We're launching the pizza

on a stone that's roughly 570 degrees.

The pizza that we just cooked here

means that the deck cools down to 520°.

Once you launch a cold pizza on a hot stone,

basically, the stone cools down,

so then, before you launch another pizza on that spot,

you need to make sure that the stone has recovered

back to its original temperature.

Our oven, as it stands here right now,

is the reason that we're limited

to only being able to make 150 pies per day.

The new oven we're trying to get,

it's going to be seven inches wider and four inches deeper,

it will allow us to double our capacity

to roughly 300 pizzas a day.

For our tomato pie, there's no cheese on it,

it's just some Rosanna tomatoes,

we do usually finish it with Parmigiano Reggiano

and a garlic-infused olive oil that we make.

Now, we are making the 'nduja pie.

'Nduja is a spicy Calabrian pork sausage.

Traditionally, it's just 75% ground pork

and 25% Calabrian chilies.

Okay, so for this one,

we'll do a scoop-and-a-half of the tomato sauce,

small cubes of fresh mozzarella,

it has quite high moisture content

and if we were to shred it,

it would just become impossible to use

and then, next, we add scamorza cheese and aged mozzarella.

This is the 'nduja that we were talking about,

beautiful, rich, spicy, deep flavor.

For us, it's super important

to use authentic 'nduja from Calabria,

there's a lot of Calabrian chili in there,

deep red colors.

It's 10:29,

I just got back from the plumbing supply store,

they didn't have the replacement knob that we needed,

so we have a new entire sink assembly here,

talked to a plumber who was at the supply store

who's working down the street,

he's gonna be by in the next hour or two,

and hopefully, sometime in the next two hours,

we'll be able to do some dishes.

It's 10:35, we got, like, 150 dough balls to roll

before we can go back upstairs, so it's go time, I guess.

[upbeat funk music]

Sort of now a race against the clock

just in terms of, you know, us needing to be taking orders

relatively soon, and also, it being hot down here

and the dough becoming more and more gassy,

we have Julian slowly rolling the dough balls.

[Julian] Slowly?

[Jacob] The guy at the plumbing store got really mad

when I asked him if he could come right now.

[Julian] Really?

[Jacob] Yeah, he got really upset.

Gotta do what you gotta do.

So I just kinda, like, use the bench scraper

to make sure that there's not any rogue dough sticking,

and then, use my pinkies to tuck it in.

Use the bench scraper to pick it up,

so this is an example of a hole that was created,

so the chance that there's an air bubble building

that will kind of eat its way

through that dough ball is extremely high,

so this is where it's, like, really important

to kind of close it off, and then, put it in.

And yeah, we'll be standing here

for the next 40 minutes or so,

just making sure that all of our dough balls

are consistent size and shape.

So it's 11:28, looks like the sink

is gonna get fixed later today, dough balls are all rolled,

now, it's time to take some orders.

[upbeat electronic music]

What can we do for you?

[Person] I'm gonna get two pies.

Yeah. One cheese pie?

[Person] Yeah.

[Jacob] So right now, we're selling pies

on a pre-order basis only, going all the way until 8:00 PM,

hopefully sell a lot of pizza.

I think we just have,

like, a very good working relationship.

When you look for a business partner,

you've gotta find someone who is better at certain things

and you compliment each other really well,

it's very much, like, an equal partnership here.

[upbeat electronic music]

Thanks so much for spending the day with us, guys,

but it's 11:56 and we got pies to make,

so you gotta go somewhere else. [laughs]