Wylie Dufresne is not your typical pizza-maker. The award-winning, fine dining chef-turned-pizzaiolo pushes the possibilities of traditional pies at Stretch Pizza in NYC. At this slice shop, you'll find soy sauce in the dough, smoked eggplant in the sauce, and Ritz crackers in the meatballs.
Credits:
Producer: Connor Reid
Directors: Connor Reid, Murilo Ferreira
Camera: Murilo Ferreira, Shirley Chan
Editor: Michael Imhoff
Executive Producer: Stephen Pelletteri
Supervising Producer, Operations: Stefania Orrù
Supervising Producer, Development: Gabriella Lewis
Audience Engagement: Frances Dumlao
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- Pizza's about umami. Everything about a pizza is,
sort of, soaked in umami: tomatoes, cheese, yeasty flavors. You're building this umami bomb and that's why we all love pizza, 'cause we all love delicious. I'm not traditionally
trained as a pizzaiolo, as a pizza-maker. I've been a professional
chef here in New York City for the last 32 years. I was in fine dining
for a really long time and then casual dining and I
was in the doughnut business. And I'm looking at pizza through
a slightly differ
ent lens than some of the more
traditional pizza-makers here in the city. We don't have any of the
constraints that maybe some people that want be more traditional,
more classical, have. The sky's the limit here. Cooks come to me with an
idea, I say, "Let's try it. Let's have some fun here, guys." So this is our dough room. The
process starts with our biga. The biga is similar to
a sourdough starter. You ferment this group of
ingredients, you let them get to a certain point and
then you take mos
t of it, you leave some behind, you
add it to your pizza dough, you mix it, and then you
keep that little bit alive and it can live for centuries, in fact. But what happens with
our biga is, you mix it and you use it all and then
you start again the next day and mix more and use it all, and so there's nothing left. So you can see, like, this
is all that fermentation, all that activity, all
those bubbles in there, all that structure is happening. It really has some good wake-you-up funk. Our doug
h guru, Jimmy makes our
dough five days a week here. We put our biga in here
from the mixing bowl. It's water, olive oil,
flour, some more yeast, some more salt, some
sugar, some diastatic malt. It's all going in there and
it's gonna get mixed up. We have a chart right here. This has got every pizza dough recipe, every batch since the first day we opened. Keeping track of the
temperatures is really, for us, very important and fundamental
to monitoring the dough, being consistent with our dough.
To do something well, you have
to understand what's at play and that involves really trying to be analytical about the dough and what can we do to make better dough and never being satisfied with
the dough that we're making. We don't go to what they
call full windowpane, where you could really,
really, really stretch this thinly without it breaking because we want the gluten
to develop over time as we put it in the cooler
over the next four days. Then we drop a specific amount of dough into the
divider,
gonna turn the dough out, he's gonna press it
evenly into the corners, and the dough is cut into
30 equal size squares. From there, we confirm the
weight to make sure it's accurate and from there it goes into the rounder. This one saves us some time. Once he gets a couple of trays, he'll roll 'em into the cooler and then that's where they'll
spend the next 3, 4, 5 days. I mean, we're always trying to make better pizza tomorrow
than we did yesterday. I don't know that that's
the bumper s
ticker that we're gonna put on the website, but that is our ultimate goal and obviously that's
where it starts, right? Pizza starts with the
dough and from there we can do all sorts of fun stuff. We do a square pie. So we take our pizza dough,
we make a larger ball of it, then we stretch it into a Sicilian pan. We leave it out for 18 to 20
hours 'til it's proofed nicely and then we bake it in the deck oven. - So these are our square pies. They've been resting and proofing and now we're gonna bli
nd bake them. If you pull up too fast, the
dough will go with the lid and then you catch these
air bubbles under the dough, and then rather than getting contact and getting a nice crispy
bottom, you have these pockets that are no good. These are gonna go in actually at 475 for about 20 minutes. - What I love about our square is that to me it has this like, Stouffer's
French bread pizza vibe. It's like a brioche and a
focaccia went on a date. - [Tobias] These have been
in for about 18-20 minutes.
- You can see they're nice
and light, golden brown. This is what we're looking
for in our squares. It's got some nice height. These have now been baked
and then we lay down some sliced cheese, then
some of our house sauce, then some shredded cheese,
and some cupping pepperonis. We give them a second bake, and then after that they'll sit here and as soon as they get
an order we'll give 'em a quick flash and finish
'em with a little bit of 30-month aged Parm, and send them on their merry way. - W
e're gonna start meatball prep. This is for the pull-apart
meatball sliders and our meatball marinara as well. - So it's a 50:50 pork and beef meatball. They're both 80:20 blends of meat to fat, and we're gonna then mix
that with some grated onions, some eggs, some cheese, some
nutritional yeast, some MSG, some Ritz crackers. Breadcrumbs are a very common ingredient, but Ritz cracker is the
Parmesan of cracker, it's the king of crackers, right? It is the ultimate cracker. So we just felt like it
was a little bit of an improvement upon
the standard breadcrumb. - I'm basically looking at
the bottom of the bowl trying to make sure that any Ritz crackers, Parm, is fully incorporated in there. As soon as I see that,
I'm gonna turn it off 'cause you don't want
to overwork the meat. It gets all bouncy and tough. Then we're gonna weigh
'em out and ball 'em. We weigh 'em out to about 50 grams. We can fit 70 meatballs on one tray. I love the meatball Parm. I mean, we call it meatball marinara. I
think it's cool that
we have parts of the menu that are different, you
wouldn't see at a pizza place, kind of out there, crazy ideas. I mean that's kind of Chef's specialty, and then you're always gonna find classics that you'd find at pizza places and I think that's a cool combination. So these are all done. We're gonna bake 'em off
and then they're gonna be ready for service. - We were excited to
put sliders on the menu. Our meatball is, maybe,
not classic Italian and maybe more Swedish-leani
ng, but we're still trying to
be respectful of the art of making meatballs. And we put it on a delicious bun, and some delicious Wisconsin brick cheese. It melts really well
and makes for, we hope, a delicious, fun way to have it. It's pull-apart and it's
like a pizza shop staple. So we see stuff like that as not only an obligation
but an opportunity, a place where we can have fun, where we can make something
delicious, make something that's hopefully best in class, but also a little
whimsical,
a little bit fun. So this is Olga. She's officially the
world's greatest prep cook. She's the heart and soul of the basement. She'll cut off all these
mushrooms that we slice and we serve raw with some butter, lettuce and some radicchio, some sliced raw onion. And then we have our
Old Town pizza, which is a riff on a classic, the
Old Town Bar and Grill, which is nearby, and I have a lot of
personal connection to. The Old Town is based off of a sandwich at the Old Town bar. It's been a famous cla
ssic
New York institution. They have this sandwich, it's
a grilled cheese sandwich on pumpernickel bread
with sauteed mushrooms and Muenster cheese and
it's just super delicious and I thought it'd be fun
to make a pie out of it. We use New York as our inspiration a lot. I use my past, my culinary history, but I also like to use New
York City as an opportunity for a place to find inspiration. We're aspiring to make
a New York-style pizza, and classically, a New York
pie is 18 to 20 inches roughly
. It's baked once, taken
out, cut into slices and then when you order your
slices, they're re-fired. We've spent a decent amount
of time trying to figure out how we can get that twice-baked
pie on a single bake because we don't have the
luxury of pre-making pizzas and hoping people come in and order those. We got to the point where
we realized we couldn't bake the pie for its entire life
cycle at a single temperature, and so we began splitting time between a higher and a lower temperature. And w
e've been tweaking it quite a bit, but for the last couple
of months we've been at around 620 for half the time and 535 for the other half of the time, and what that ideally yields us is a pie that feels like that New York slice. It's baked twice. Our tomato sauce is
straight down the fairway. It's not too sweet. This is the base for all of
our red pies, square or round. This isn't a crazy, crazy, crazy recipe and we're just adding some
really nice dried oregano, some dried garlic, bunch of
oliv
e oil and some soy sauce, actually. We put soy in
there because we think that pizza's about umami. - So we're pulling the
eggplant out of the oven. It's ready to get peeled and then smoked, and then that becomes the
sauce for our Oddfather pizza. - So the Oddfather is
one of our earliest pies. It gets its name from like,
classic Italian flavors. It's zucchini and eggplants, garlic. It reminds me of the Goodfellas scene, you know, the guys in the
prison slicing the garlic. But we take eggplant an
d
we roast it in the deck and then we smoke it. So you can see we're filling it up nicely. You can see why we
wrapped it pretty tight. We don't want any smoke to come out because that's just flavor loss. - Yeah, that just sits there until you can't see the smoke anymore and then it's ready to blend. - We take a garlic confit that we blend in with the smoked eggplant and make a sauce. So we lay down some shredded
mozz, then we lay down some of that nice smoked eggplant cream. We put down the zucc
hini, drizzle it with some oil and we bake that, and when it comes out, give
it a little bit of crunch 'cause everything's kind of soft. We wanted to give it some texture, so we take tempura crumbs, finish it with some fresh parsley, some really beautifully 30-month
aged Parm, more olive oil, and that's our Oddfather. We are here with a national treasure, Scott Wiener from Scott's Pizza Tours, probably America's greatest
resource on all things pizza. Among his great, vast knowledge, the largest
single
collection of pizza boxes. - We take people around
pizzerias, tours of kitchens, explanations of dough
process, tomato selection, cheese preparation, history,
science, culture, everything. And I stumbled on this fact
that said something about how two-thirds of the three billion pizzas eaten every year in the United States are served out of a box, and I just started saving
interesting boxes that I saw and that turned into having
a few hundred of them, which turned into writing
a book about
them, which turned into a Guinness World Record, which turned into Chef
Dufresne calling me up and saying, "Can I put some on the wall?" and me saying, "Yeah, I don't
have room in my apartment. Take 'em all." These are all generic boxes
from all over the world. There's 19 boxes and I
think it represents 12 or 13 different countries. What pie are you into lately? - Maybe let's do the Reading.
- The Reading? - I love that pie. - The Reading is another one of our pies and it takes its inspiration
from another sandwich, a classic Philly sandwich. The Reading Terminal mix is
like a roast pork and a jus and you get it on a
proper Italian sandwich and it starts with a roast
pork that we rub with a bunch of dried spices, then we roast it in the oven, cool it, slice it on the slicer. We lay some grated provolone down, then we lay the pork down. Then we take some
broccolini that we blanch and saute real hard with
a bunch of chile flakes and chop that all up. Then we bake that off in the oven, f
inish that with a house-made chile oil and a little, again, some shaved Parm, send that out. It's pretty awesome. So, enjoy. - Smells freaking great. When I first look at a pizza, the visual impact is
always interesting to see, that balance of topping. This is an even browning, it's not like a super hot flash bake. It's very common right
now to see post-oven Parm. You also get this nice visual, it's like this freshly fallen snow. Pretty nice. Next thing you do is, I
look at the cross-section jus
t to see what's going on. Nice big open crumb
structure, like big bubblage, which is just a sign of full fermentation. I love a pizza like this 'cause it's, it's essentially a roast
pork sandwich pizza, but when you eat it, you don't think, "Oh well, this is one food
on top of another food." It really is owned by the pizza. - So this is our Stretch sauce. It goes with our chickpea fries as well as the dipping sauces for our crust. - And we offer five dipping sauces that you can order on
the side
in an effort to reduce the boneyard that
builds up on the plate. We would like people to eat the crust. - The base of the sauce is
actually just a little bit of our white sauce, which is based around the classic halal cart sauce that you'll get on the corner. Then we got roasted red
peppers, a little bit of Calabrian chile, some maple syrup, my favorite ingredient. And we got some garlic powder, some salt, and that's
just gonna get blended. First time here with us?
- Yeah. - You can get a veg a
nd a meat, you can get a square and a round. Hopefully a lot of choices. The name Stretch, it serves
a the number of functions. When I started making pizza, I realized that I could make this beautiful
dough, beautiful dough, and completely screw it up
by not stretching it right. I could go to all the trouble, I could waste four days worth of work because I couldn't stretch
the damn thing correctly. And it became really important
to me to get good at it. Making great pizza is not easy by any stre
tch of the imagination, and it takes incredible
dedication and hard work and I wanted to focus a
little of that on there. And then, of course, there's
the notion that we're trying to stretch a little bit
of the possibilities, stretch a little bit of the opportunities, stretch the way you could
think about a pizzeria, about a pizza, about what you could do. We wanna have a little bit of fun, we wanna be a little bit playful. We wanna stretch the possibilities. New York is full of great pizza and
what I want is, I want people to say, "We're gonna come back to New
York for another pizza tour and we cannot miss Stretch." "We gotta go to Stretch," and say like, "I gotta put this on my
list next time I'm in town." Like, "When I think about
pizza, New York City, Stretch is on the list."
Comments
Visited Stretch in October of 2023. Lived in NYC for half a decade, worked in restaurants over 10 years (including a residency with Chef Dufresne), and was fortunate enough to have visited Italy. The Shakshouka pizza at Stretch is hands down the best I've ever had. It wasn't even close.
Wylie Dufresne is a mad scientist in the best possible way
Love how passionate he is! The no-host format really allows the chefs a chance to share their passion
Wylie definitely does his own thing. I am always impressed with how he can just make a new restaurant and give up or put behind his old ones.
Wylie has always been so awesome. He cares about the process making dishes so much. Cool to seee him again!
the Rounder machine is absolutely wild
This video was an absolute treat to watch, with Wylie and Tobias creating a very welcome atmosphere for the viewer. Love these dudes
A lot of innovative thinking with the unconventional ingredients like soy sauce and Ritz crackers and the two temperature baking. Also pretty cool that he's not gate-keeping what he's learned.
I am shocked in a good way. That this pizza restaurant is a success. Given how strict some people are when it comes to pizzas in New York
Those meatball sliders are CLEARLY a stoner’s dream cure for the munchies.
I love how Pacojet containers have become the all purpose vessel UCkszU2WH9gy1mb0dV-11UJg/KsIfY6LzFoLM6AKanYDQAg
One of the most enjoyable meals I’ve ever had in my life was at WD-50 about 20 years ago! Excited to try this.
Love a place that weighs out their meat portions to ensure everyone gets a consistent product everytime.
Wylie doing Pizza? He doesn't let it out of the kitchen if it's not perfect, so that must be some incredibly good pizza.
wow! i idiolize this dude work when i was a teenager, i understand why he likes pizza making, once you make it you will understand how fun the process goes XD what a cool wylie dufresne! one of the master in molecular gastronomy indeed 👍
Learning how they prepare a pizzas you can see how,the team works together as a team,understanding the importance to do the job properly and with respect love and heart in the process of preparing a great meal for you.
Every single thing you served in this video I wanted to try!! If I’m ever in town this is a must-see for me!
The pizza at Stretch is absolutely amazing
We were there last Friday and it was spectacular!
still cant get over how Scott Wiener once asked for a "well-done" slice of pizza, checked it with a temp gun, then burned his mouth and said "too hot!"