How New York’s Best Pizzeria Makes 140,000 Pizzas In Its Coal-Fired Oven Every Year | Big Batches

This is just a fraction of the 140,000 pizzas Grimaldi's makes every year. For the past 30 years, the Brooklyn-based pizzeria has stuck to classic recipes and kept a veteran team of pizzaiolos. Today, you'll find kitchen manager Tony Flugo and his team of pizzaiolos hand-stretching 500 pies a day, slicing 200 pounds of fresh mozzarella, and working a 1,000-degree oven. It's a series of marathons for us because we have to make sure that we're prepared for the next shift, the next day, the next week, to keep up with the demand at the door. We visited Grimaldi's flagship pizzeria in Brooklyn, New York, to see how he makes these pies in such big batches. At 9 in the morning, Tony and his team get started making a 33-roll dough recipe. The mixer is loaded with olive oil, New York City tap water, activated yeast, and 50 pounds of high-gluten flour. Tony Flugo So we have it preset for five minutes. It's on a low-spin cycle, OK? And what we do is we sprinkle salt on top of our flour. Five minutes later, we have our famous dough recipe. Once mixed, the dough needs to be cut, weighed, and shaped into balls within 30 minutes so it doesn't rise. For this, Tony relies on the most experienced pizzaiolos at Grimaldi's. Tony Flugo They're cutting each and everything to the same size every day. It's almost like muscle memory at this point, where the skills are not even needed, you know? They know what they're doing, and it's almost like a healthy competition down here to race, like, let's go, come on, keep up with me. I'm rolling. You gotta cut faster. Let's go. Another skill that's hard to master is rolling the perfect dough ball. So we're rolling the dough, and we're making sure that it's a smooth outer layer, as well as making sure that there's no air inside. So, for example, you know, if you're rolling it, and you're just gonna meatball it, and you're just gonna put it like this down, it's gonna rise, and it's gonna thin out the middle. And then the pizza, when you pick it up, that's when it flops down. So Gramogli is known for a nice, hard-layer crust that is the texture. It's the base. It's the most important thing to the pizza. It's, you know, the foundation to the house. No foundation, no pizza. This batch of dough is enough to make 65 to 75 pizzas, which is just a fraction of what will be needed for the day. Once all of the trays are filled, they're taken across the hall to these fridges. So this is only the dough that was made last night, OK? So this is getting ready for our first few hours in Grimaldi's, and then we'll start fresh, probably go through the first batch that we made today, and then as well as another eight or nine for the night shift. In 2011, Grimaldi's moved into its current location. The double-story palazzo building on No. 1 Front Street was originally built to be Brooklyn's first safety-deposit company. Now Grimaldi's fridges sit in the same place as the old vaults. So I think that's really cool that we made them into our own vaults. So basically, it protects our gold, and this is our gold right here. Next, it's time to make the sauce. Large cans of San Marzano tomatoes are poured into buckets, topped with sugar, and blended. For us, we use a one-day shelf life, so we're just trying to keep it marinating for a few hours, if not a full day, and it's going right onto our pizza. So we like to keep it as fresh as possible. It's nice, thick, and imported tomatoes. Grimaldi's goes through about 700 quarts of tomatoes every week, or roughly 662.4 liters. Upstairs, 200 mozzarella balls are cut into thin strips, a process that's gone unchanged since opening. The Grimaldi's cheese is very special. It's made only for Grimaldi's, so nowhere else in the world can get our flavor profile that we're doing on our mozzarella. It is a low-moisture, low-sodium, UV-dried, fresh mozzarella, so it can withstand the high, intense heat of our oven and be cooked and melted to perfection in a short amount of time. By the end of the week, Grimaldi's will hand-slice around 2,000 pounds of mozzarella. An hour before opening, Grimaldi's restocks its goal so they can relight the oven. OK, so right now, he's throwing 40-pound bags of anthracite coal into the bottom of our oven chute right over here, so we keep about anywhere from 10 to 12 bags down there at a time. And what we're doing is, for at least a day or more, we try and dry out our coal to make sure that it's burning a little cleaner, easier, it's not popping from the inside, you know, on top of pizzas, et cetera, as it starts to heat up. It makes our stoking process and our oven heat up a little bit quicker, too. The pizzeria keeps embers in the brick oven overnight, so it stays warm. So, right now, we have a grate inside of our oven. It's holding our coal up, but he's right now flipping it and getting rid of all the old coal. The reason why we don't clean it out at nighttime is because we want to make sure that it stays warm overnight, because it's gonna take too many hours to heat up our floor. When the charcoal ignites, the team begins shoveling 200 pounds of coal into the side of the oven. Compared to wood, anthracite coal burns longer, hotter, and with less smoke. You can't get a gas oven or a wood oven up to 1,000 degrees the way we can, so we're able to get a different, not only flavor profile from the coal, but we're also getting a different profile from the heat and intensity that that pizza is going under. When the doors open at 11.30 a.m., it's all hands on deck to fill orders. To be an official Grimaldi's pie, it needs to be made a certain way. Unlike most pizzerias, Grimaldi's built its pizza cheese-first. Slices of mozzarella are evenly placed around the dough, and the gaps are then filled with sauce. So when it melts together, you're seeing a little bit of both, but you're also getting a bite of not too much sauce, not too much cheese. So that's what we're looking for with Grimaldi's. Specialty toppings range from hand-pinched Italian sausage to thinly sliced prosciutto and artichokes. And most pies are finished off with a sprinkling of the Grimaldi's Romano blend, extra-virgin olive oil, and a few pieces of fresh basil. To help streamline the cooking process, Grimaldi's uses a two-shelf system. So we have a pre-stretch and then a stretching and cheese section on this side. We're pre-stretching cheese in, throwing them on the first shelf right here. Everyone standing on this side is a topper, so that means they're putting on the toppings and the sauce on, they're finishing it off with the olive oil, the basil, and then finishing it off by putting it on the top shelf. The top shelf is so the oven guy knows that they're ready to go in the oven. Working a coal oven takes years of experience to master. From memorizing cook times to keeping a consistent heat, it's not easy to make a perfect pie. So what we're doing is we're loading them in, we're closing the door right away, we're giving it a pop of heat to the bottom of the pizza so we can actually move it around without ripping it or anything like that. What's rare about Brooklyn is that we use this copper stick right here. You know, it's very important with this high heat, if you're using a wooden stick, they're just breaking and wearing and tearing and drying out nonstop, especially when you're picking up a heavy pizza. So you can see it's only been about 60 seconds and they're already rising up. So basically I'm making sure that I can pick them up, give them a small spin, and then I'm actually just moving them into position right here. The high heat means that the pizzas only need a few minutes to cook. Water in the dough evaporates quickly, creating air bubbles and leaving behind a light, airy texture in the crust, while charcoal gives the pizza a charred, slightly smoky flavor and a crunchy texture. Outside, people begin queuing and waiting up to an hour to get a table. And 16 minutes after opening, the first and third stories of the restaurant are practically full. On the dining floor, you find servers with over 20 years of experience and a good sense of humor. Oh, mommy, I'm hungry! Boom. You got it, papa. While Grimaldi's has an established clientele, a vast majority of its business comes from tour groups. Since 2005, Tony Muglia, who runs Pizza Tours, has been coming to showcase Grimaldi's pizza. So, if I can describe Grimaldi's in three words, it would probably be legendary, authentic, and beloved, because people love Grimaldi's. The key to making a great pizza is passion. It's love. You take dough, cheese, or sauce by itself, it's just simple objects. But when you're building a pizza, it's a piece of art. So, for us, and for myself, it's a passion and love I put into every pizza that makes it special.