LEO's Eats with Robin Garr
With all the justified uproar these days about mountaintop removal, miner safety and other issues surrounding Kentucky’s beleaguered coal industry, it may seem a bit odd to have something nice to say about coal. But damn! A coal-burning oven makes one fine pizza. What’s more, the good folks at Coals Artisan Pizza, recently arrived in the Vogue Center, are burning re-mined hard anthracite coal, which is about as environmentally friendly as coal can be.
But how are the pies? Easy: This is seriously good pizza, folks. We’ll talk about that in just a moment, but first, a little background on this coal-burning thing.
There are essentially three ways to cook pizza in a commercial setting: local utility power (gas or electric), wood or coal.
Pizza ovens heated by gas or electric are by far the most common, even in such havens of traditional pizza as New York City.
Wood-burning ovens, which hail from Naples, Italy, have become popular in the United States. The fierce heat of a wood fire does delicious things to pizza dough thanks to the twin effects of fast “oven spring” rising and the tasty caramelization that occurs when intense heat toasts the crust.
Coal-fired pizza ovens are much less common, but coal is making inroads into artisanal pizzerias around the country, spreading from its roots in New York City, where bakers immigrating through Ellis Island found coal much more readily available than wood, and where iconic pizzerias like John’s in Greenwich Village and Totonno in Brooklyn burn coal to this day.
Coal, its fanciers say, burns even hotter than wood. Coals Artisan Pizza’s chef Mike Hungerford says their oven reaches 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to finish a pie in just a few moments — and it burns clean.
The proof, of course, is in the tasting, and after repeated taste tests, I’m prepared to rank Coals among Louisville’s best, on par with the product of the gas ovens at Papalino’s (which run at 450 to 600, for what it’s worth, teaching us that heat is something, but it isn’t everything).
Read the full review on LouisvilleHotBytes,
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/coals ... urning-hot
And in LEO Weekly:
http://leoweekly.com/dining/coals-artis ... urning-hot
Coals Artisan Pizza
The Vogue Center
3724 Frankfort Ave.
742-8200
http://on.fb.me/coalspizza
Rating: 94
