When considering pizza, there are there standards – you have your basic cheese and pepperoni slice. Those basics are the baselines in pies, if you don’t have it, as a shop, you’ll alienate yourself from majority of the market. I think for a lot of chefs who also have a hand in owning their business, there is some consideration for creating from a place where majority of people can wrap their heads around the product.
That said, we don’t like to play it safe. It’s in our name! What we do instead, is find the common ground amongst the people we are catering our pizza towards and build from there. My business partner Eddie forces the two of us to push the limits. He’s a very particular person, always playing devil’s advocate. So the approach is a continual process of questioning our intent behind the recipes we utilize, but always keeping in mind that there isn’t going to be a perfect end goal – instead we find a place where him and I are able to check off as many boxes as we can in terms of the criteria we set out.
We’ve always understood that the dough is the foundation of pizza and we love our pizza dough. In order to achieve the level of dough that we have today, we considered our goal from various angles: the eatability factor, airiness, lightness, how can it hold up to the types of ingredients and toppings we wanted to put onto our slices, how well will it reheat, how will it chew when it’s eaten cold? We took these considerations with a sense of earnestness because it would be the groundwork in supporting our vision.
I always thought of the dough as a blank canvas to bring to life the concepts dreamt up by myself and my peers. Take for example the Kung-Funghi, its a favourite not only for the flavours, textures, and layering, but the overall look of it. The colours and depth that is incorporated into the pie. From the earthy blend of mushrooms, to the specks of green from the chives, and the pop in red from the chili jelly which gives it that extra Kung-Fu kick. When I took on the task of creating this mushroom pizza, I said to myself: there better be mushrooms in every-damn-bite. The weight of the toppings could have disturbed the balance in the under-crust to topping ratio leading to a sub-optimal eating experience.
Pizza is an international language, everybody is familiar with the concept of what it is, and because of that, it can become quite a subjective food group – people will argue about what pizza is. Big Trouble Pizza is not a New York slice, nor a Neapolitan, and that’s okay. We recognize that we’re trying to make something unique. Perhaps there isn’t the right language to explain the experience, as the experience of pizza is very much mixed in with traditional beliefs. But that doesn’t stop us from creating pizzas that allow us to pay homage to our childhood experiences and flavours that we think represent what Toronto is all about.
