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Jules is a place where I can make pizza in a way that I like and in a way that I felt didn't exist a ton here in the Bay Area. I describe our pizza as if New York-style pizza was slightly higher hydration and charred a little bit more like they would in New Haven. It just doesn't have to be overly precious. I just want it to be approachable to people still and not make them scratch their heads about what we're doing. At the end of the day, it's pizza. It should be fun. Hey, I'm Max. I'm the chef-owner of Jules in the Lower Haight. Come on in. This is our dining room. We seat about 40 inside. So, we're going to make all six pies that are on the menu right now.
I'm going to stretch and top them and I'll explain them as we go and then Tony's going to cook them for us. And so, we're going to do the marone first, which is our classic cheese pizza. I go very little flour on top. The flour kind of keeps it from getting as much color in the oven. And then, I start by kind of pushing all of the gas to the crust as much as I can. I am trying to keep a pretty open crumb with our crust. And so, I start on my fingertips and then stretch by giving it like a little bit of a turn and a pull. Flour the bottom again to help keep it from sticking. And then, we'll get the rest of the size.
We've been really lucky to be successful pretty much from the beginning of opening here. We did 2 years of pop-ups before we opened, so it was sort of like had built-in a little bit of a following. We had our 1-year anniversary last week and there was a line around the block starting at 4:30 for people to come into the party. It's nice to know people like want to be here. I'm starting with a scoop of sauce. So, it's sort of a cross between an East Coast cheese and a margarita. To me, a true margarita, like Neapolitan style, is going to be sauce, basil, and fresh mozzarella. In this case, I want
to get some garlic in there and oregano and some of those other flavors that we'd get from more of the like New York style. So, I'm going to give it a pretty good pinch of agika, which is the chili flake mixture that we make. We use Japanese chilies, dry coriander, dried garlic, fenugreek, and dehydrated marigold flowers. And it all gets blended up in there. Some basil. I also love fresh basil on the finish, but in this case, I'm getting it on to cook beforehand. Just kind of helps make that a little more aromatic. And then, we're going to go with our cheese mix. I want to be careful not to go too heavy. When it's too cheesy, I think you cover up a lot of the tomato flavor. Also, it
starts to get kind of soggy and we're going for pretty crispy pizzas over here. The caciocavallo is essentially a really funky sharp provolone in a sense. The Sicilian pecorino is like salty, little acidity, it's got it's a creamy good melter. And then, lastly with this one, we are going to give it some fresh mozzarella to give a little bit of that creamy melty mozzarella texture. Mozzarella is a great cheese, it melts really well. It's kind of bland overall as a cheese. Give this a little bit of a stretch and then, we're going to go into the oven with that guy.
You want to think about firing sort of like throwing a dart. There's like a sort of quick forward and back movement. I mean, the most important thing is that it doesn't stick. To check, I usually like to hit it against my hip. I like to see that it turns. If you see a spot where it's stuck, I know I need to either move it or re-flour it a little bit. So, we're moving on here to a spicy Ronnie, which is our pepperoni pizza. It's our best seller cuz pepperoni is number one pizza ingredient in America. In New York, especially at the time I was there, everybody was doing some version of like a spicy pepperoni. I worked at Roberta's, which is home of
the Beast Sting, and there's is with sopressata, honey, and chili flake, but we're doing a spicy pepperoni. We have the option of adding our fermented garlic honey, but it doesn't come automatically on the pizza. So, starting with tomato sauce and garlic again, adjika as well, pretty good pinch since this one is the spicy pizza, cheese mix. And I tend to go a little heavier than I do on the marone because here we need a little bit more of the fat to balance out the pretty hefty amount of salty Ezzo pepperoni. And that's it before we go into the oven with this guy. I'm going to do a drunken sailor. It's basically going to be our cooked tomato sauce, some oregano on there, capers, and then it gets anchovy. It's literally
like two fillets that go on this pizza, broken up. It's really more there to give you a little bit of that umami, like bites of it. And that's it on this pizza before it goes into the oven. So, we launch up in the front spots here, and then we're kind of looking for once it's set and gets some oven spring. So, you can see this what was the backside has a little color on it, and then looking at the bottom, we've already got some color, so I'm going to spin it and move it to the screen on the back. Oven spring is the initial powerful rise that you get when bread goes in the oven, gets a burst of heat, and the yeast reacts to that heat by really quickly producing a ton of carbon dioxide, so that's what makes
it sort of explode in the oven, and you need enough strength and structure in the dough to be able to get that oven spring. When it's too strong, the gas tries to expand, and the gluten is so strong that it can't really open up. And so, that's why it getting that protein content around like 11, 11 and 1/2% is kind of a sweet spot for building a strong enough dough that also is extensible enough that when it gets that oven spring, it can like open up really nicely, hold on to the gas, but stretch enough that you get an open lighter crumb. So, we're going to move into white pizzas. This is called the fun guy.
Going to get mushroom cream on there, little garlic as well. Black pepper, some cheese mix. We're going to get our mushrooms on there, maitake, hon-shimeji, and then we've got some morels. We use this cheese called Horn Kuckucksuhr, a Swiss Alpine cheese. The name literally translates to horn cheese because they use only dairy cows with horns. The finish on this is we put these little dots of a black garlic tamarind sauce that we make. It's kind of fun just cuz a lot of people think it looks like chocolate chips. And then this last one we're going to do is Fiona's Destiny. And because we never like to take things too seriously here, it gets finished with Funyuns. I think Funyuns are an incredible and underrated
chip. We're looking for like a pretty good amount of Maillard reaction. I like darker brown. I mean, if anything, this is like a really nice bake. I like to be able to hear the crack when you do that. And then when you pick it up, I want to have like enough structure that it doesn't fold and collapse. The bottom, I like seeing a good amount of contrast, nice like dark brown color, and not flopping everywhere. I want that like open crumb, lighter texture with sort of a thin, shattery crust. We got to get pizza dough going and get those ingredients going. So, we're going to start on that now. All right, we're in the prep kitchen in our basement.
160 doughs for today. I typically want the dough that we make today to get used tomorrow. The fermentation's really different between same day, one day, two days, three days in the fridge. The purpose of a sourdough starter is to leaven the dough. So, it creates carbon dioxide, which helps to make the dough rise. On top of that, there's a lot of lactic bacteria that live in a sourdough starter. The name of one in particular is called Lactobacillus Sanfranciscensis. It's named for San Francisco, which is partly because San Francisco's very well known for its sourdough. That bacteria is what gives it a lot of flavor. This guy, this is the poolish also pre-ferment. The
poolish as a tool helps me manage the acidity and give the dough a sweeter flavor that I like. For me, one of the things you taste in the dough of a New York-style pizza is often that sweeter yeasty flavor. Like, traditional New York-style pizza is not naturally leavened. And then, last thing we're adding before the flours is a little bit of commercial yeast. I know this seems complicated to have all three different leaveners, but I find that a little bit of that fresh yeast is just what helps give it that little bit of extra pop in the oven. And that is part of what to me gives it that thinner shattery crust. We have three different flours in our pizza dough. This one's called Max's Marvel.
Partly chose, I'll admit, because of the name, but I also really like this mill. It's Capay Valley Mills. This is actually a blend of three different grains. Love this flour. They mill it fresh for us. Anyway, Glacier Peak here, this is from Cairn Spring Mills. This one's a much whiter flour. I love this flour. It's great. It's too strong for pizza, in my opinion, if it were 100% Glacier Peak. Higher protein's great, makes a strong dough, you can stretch it. Because it's so strong, it's like toothier and harder to chew. I don't really want to see someone having to like rip it, and I think with a lot of New York-style pizza, which is typically using really strong flours, that's why
your jaw is like tired by the time you're done eating. Um so, we're kind of trying to avoid that. Last flour, Edison. This one is single varietal. This one is about 10 and 1/2% protein, much softer overall. I like blending these three because effectively I'm kind of trying to get a protein content overall of about 11 to 11 and 1/2%. This one would be a little too weak on its own. This one would be too strong. This one has nice strength but is all whole wheat. But, we blend them together and we get something really good out of the three.
All right. These are all in here now. Um I'm going to get this started. Gluten is two amino acids and when you add water and mix them together, they bond and create gluten. In theory, if you mix it together and let it sit for like 12 hours, you'd end up with a pretty strong dough even without doing anything. I like getting it started, letting it rest, letting the gluten start to form on its own without having to over mix. So, this one's just a couple minutes and it has no strength. It's not like tugging back at me at all. It's really shaggy meaning like that doesn't look smooth at all either, but it is hydrated and in the next half an hour, it will become a much smoother, stronger dough
even with no effort. All right. So, we're going back in. This has rested about 30 minutes. It's still pretty shaggy, but in terms of strength, we've actually got development here. So, we're going to do the final mix. And now that I see it kind of coming together, I'm going to add in the salt and then olive oil. I like adding a little bit of fat. It helps keep the crumb a little bit more tender. All of our olive oil is from Trulli, which is based here in California. You know, we could use Italian stuff, but I feel like we're in California. We should use California stuff. Uh and I love the flavor. At the end of the mix, this is looking really nice to me. So, this is what's going to come out. Hold that.
All right. Dough for 160 pizzas is set. Now, I got to get some sauces started. I wanted to do vodka sauce, but I also um make things a little easier since we already make four different sauces for six pizzas, which is a little crazy. So, we make our wine sauce for the drunken sailor, which has white wine in it. So, we're going to use some of the wine sauce as the base basically, but we're starting it with Calabrian chili oil. We use Calabrian chilies on top of the spicy Ronnie, and we strain off some of the oil, and then we have all this oil. Tons of Calabrian chili oil. So, we're always looking for things to use Calabrian chili oil for. While it's still relatively cool, I'm going to add
in gochujang, a fermented pepper paste common in Korean food. It's going to get really aromatic and definitely imparts a little bit of heat. So, we have like a nice fry here on our gochujang, so I'm going to deglaze this with the wine sauce. Our red pizza sauce for the marone and the spicy Ronnie is a pretty classic raw tomato sauce. It's tomatoes, salt, a little olive oil, and a little water, and we blend that together. Tomato is such an amazing flavor on its own. It's got umami and acidity and sweetness. Kind of got everything right there, but the wine sauce, we sweat some onion and garlic, add in oregano and chili flake, deglaze with white wine, cook off the alcohol a little bit, and then add our
tomatoes and bring that up. So, a little bit more of that rich more caramelized tomato flavor in that. I kind of want everything to come together, and as I stir and the heat comes up, it'll kind of all get emulsified in there. While this is happening, I also going to get mushrooms for our mushroom cream going. Basically, we take all the scraps from when we break down the mushrooms, and we're going to season that with some oil, some salt and pepper, roast it right now. We're going to get a little rosemary in there before it's done roasting. And then that's all going to get blended with some red onion and cream, and that's going to make the base of that mushroom cream.
Just throwing this in. Pretty simple. Nice thing about having a pizza oven is you can roast things really hot. We got them a ready forni because I'd worked with them more in the past, which is an electric deck oven. This is a really old building from 1892, so we did not have enough electricity for that. So, out of necessity, we went with gas, and I'm very, very happy that we did actually. This oven's awesome. A lot of the old school, like the Baker's Pride's, it's one really thick stone, so it takes a really long time to heat that up. And then the first few pizzas usually just basically burn the out of the bottom because it's so
hot. And then once you're in service and you're firing a lot of pizzas in it, you've pulled a lot of the heat out of the stone, and it takes so long to reheat that entire stone cuz it's so thick that it's really hard to catch up if you're really busy. But the way Moretti designs their oven is that there's the three stones on each deck that are what you're landing your pizzas on to, then there's like an air gap beneath that, and then another set of three stones. It's able to trap a bunch of really like superheated air in between the two layers of stone, and so it's sort of constantly replenishing. We put pizza screens like in the back of the oven, so we'll fire onto the first row.
And then once it sets, we move it to the back on two screens. And that allows the top to get enough color before the bottom is too burnt. Even with a really busy service, this oven keeps up really, really nicely. So, this was just at like a pretty gentle boil, and I'm going to just get the cream in. The Satchwell special went on the menu. It was supposed to be one of our seasonals just when the green garlic came in and it's quickly become one of our most popular pizzas. It beats spicy Ronnie in sales a lot of nights, which
it's hard to beat a pepperoni pizza in sales, so it's not going to leave the menu anytime soon. Our sauces are all set for the moment, so I'm going to run downstairs and we're going to start dividing and shaping dough. This is from today, so this is the same one that I mixed. So, it's had about an hour and a half bulk fermentation right now. You want to build a lot of structure cuz pizza dough is going to be sitting and proofing for a pretty long time. So, I'm going to kind of like bring these rougher edges in and I'm kind of like tucking and springing back to where I can work with it and then giving it like a little bit of a quarter turn each time I push it and then trying to seal that bottom.
And then it goes in the dough box. If we were to bake this dough right now, it's still pretty under fermented. There is some activity, so it get a little oven spring, but it doesn't have a ton of structure yet. It would definitely just bake like a blob and honestly the biggest thing is just from a flavor perspective. You get so much flavor from the fermentation time. I'm the fastest at this. Yeah, I mean I've shaped at this point tens of thousands is not an exaggeration, potentially a hundred thousand of these in my lifetime, so it's just about practice and it takes a little while, especially this is a stickier dough, so this isn't like a
beginner level pizza dough to work with. We're going to be shaping here for the next 20 so minutes, so we'll be finishing this up and then we can go get some pizza ready. It's 4:30, it's just about time for pre-shift. We're mostly set up on the line, so we're going to go meet with our front of house staff. Hey everybody, welcome in. Hope you had a good day. Welcome back Eileen. We're going to go over our notes for the day. Food wise, we don't have any major changes. Um, we talked about very minor change that the Fresno chilies are Serrano chilies now on the crudo. So, we're going to
start with chicken this coming Tuesday as like a one day. Just going to do it on Tuesdays, I think for now. Want to also just say thank you. Um, and that's all we got. All right, guys. We're set up here on the line. I'll be expediting here at the pass. I like to expedite, but we'll also work the oven. Some days I'll stretch and open doughs, kind of wherever is needed. It's 4:55. We open in 5 minutes. Thank you for spending the day with us, but you got to leave.
