California-style pizza (also known as California pizza) is a style of
pizza
Pizza is an Italian cuisine, Italian, specifically Neapolitan cuisine, Neapolitan, dish typically consisting of a flat base of Leavening agent, leavened wheat-based dough topped with tomato, cheese, and other ingredients, baked at a high t ...
that combines
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
New York may also refer to:
Places United Kingdom
* ...
and
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
thin
crust with toppings from the
California cuisine cooking style. Its invention is generally attributed to chef
Ed LaDou, and
Chez Panisse, in
Berkeley, California
Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...
.
Wolfgang Puck
Wolfgang Johannes Puck (born July 8, 1949) is an Austrian chef and restaurateur.
Early life
Puck was born in Sankt Veit an der Glan, Austria. He learned cooking from his mother, who was a pastry chef. He took the surname of his stepfather, Jos ...
, after meeting LaDou, popularized the style of pizza in the rest of the country. It is served in many California cuisine restaurants.
California Pizza Kitchen,
Round Table Pizza
Round Table Pizza is a Restaurant chain, chain and Franchising, franchise of pizza parlors in the Western United States. The first Round Table Pizza restaurant was opened in 1959, and the company has over 400 restaurants. The company is headquarte ...
, and
Extreme Pizza, are major pizza
franchises associated with California-style pizza.
History
The California-style pizza was invented more or less simultaneously in 1980 by
Ed LaDou (the "Prince of Pizza"), then working as a pizza chef for Spectrum Foods' Prego Restaurant in
San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
's
Cow Hollow neighborhood,
and by pizza chefs working for
Alice Waters
Alice Louise Waters (born April 28, 1944) is an American chef, restaurateur, food writer, and author. In 1971, she opened Chez Panisse, a restaurant in Berkeley, California, famous for its role in creating the farm-to-table movement and for ...
at the
Chez Panisse Cafe in
Berkeley, California
Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...
.
LaDou had learned pizza-making in the 1970s as a teenager at Frankie, Johnnie & Luigi Too, a traditional New York–style pizzeria in
Mountain View, California
Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census.
Mountain V ...
.
He made pizzas briefly at Ecco, an upscale restaurant at the
Hyatt Hotel in
Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
Th ...
,
before starting at Prego.
Although Prego specialized in classic, Italian-style thin-crust pizzas, its chefs encouraged LaDou to experiment with
prosciutto
Prosciutto ( ; ), also known as ''prosciutto crudo'', is an uncooked, unsmoked, and dry-cured ham. It is usually served thinly sliced.
Several regions in Italy have their own variations of ''prosciutto crudo'', each with degrees of protected ...
,
goat cheese, and
truffles
A truffle is the fruiting body of a subterranean ascomycete fungus, one of the species of the genus ''Tuber''. More than one hundred other genera of fungi are classified as truffles including '' Geopora'', '' Peziza'', '' Choiromyces'', and ' ...
in their
wood-burning oven, and send his results to guests.
At one table, the guest to whom he served an off-menu invention involving
mustard,
ricotta
Ricotta () is an Italian whey cheese made from sheep, cow, goat, or Italian water buffalo milk whey left over from the production of other cheeses. Like other whey cheeses, it is made by coagulating the proteins that remain after the casein h ...
,
pâté
Pâté ( , , ) is a forcemeat. Originally, the dish was cooked in a pastry case; in more recent times it is more usually cooked without pastry in a terrine. Various ingredients are used, which may include meat from pork, poultry, fish or bee ...
, and
red pepper turned out to be chef
Wolfgang Puck
Wolfgang Johannes Puck (born July 8, 1949) is an Austrian chef and restaurateur.
Early life
Puck was born in Sankt Veit an der Glan, Austria. He learned cooking from his mother, who was a pastry chef. He took the surname of his stepfather, Jos ...
.
By 1980, Alice Waters' Chez Panisse and its head chef,
Jeremiah Tower, had already invented
California cuisine, a combination of
French and
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
techniques and presentation with fresh local ingredient-focused flavors. Waters was a long-time fan of Tommaso's Italian restaurant in San Francisco's
North Beach, which had installed the
West Coast's first wood-fired pizza oven when it opened in 1935.
After traveling to Italy, Waters decided to make an open
kitchen
A kitchen is a room (architecture), room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation in a dwelling or in a commercial establishment. A modern middle-class residential kitchen is typically equipped with a Kitchen stove, stove, a sink ...
featuring a Tommaso's-style pizza oven the focus of the new cafe she was opening above her main dining room. Although prepared classically, her chefs added exotic fine ingredients to their single-serving pizzas and
calzone
Calzone is an Italian oven-baked folded pizza. A typical calzone is made from salted bread dough, baked in an oven and stuffed with prosciutto or salami, mozzarella or ricotta, and Parmesan or pecorino, as well as an egg. Different regio ...
s, such as
goat cheese and duck sausage.
Her cafe, and its pizzas, in particular, were an instant success, attracting wide attention among food critics.
Wolfgang Puck, in 1980 and 1981, was preparing to open the restaurant that would make him famous,
Spago, in
West Hollywood, California
West Hollywood is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Incorporated in 1984, it is home to the Sunset Strip. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. Census, its population was 35,757.
History
Most historical writing ...
. Initially conceived as a
pizzeria
A pizzeria is a restaurant focusing on pizza.
A pizzeria may offer take-away, where the customer orders their food either in advance or at the restaurant and then takes the prepared food with them in a pizza box. A pizzeria may deliver food to ...
, Spago's was modeled after the upstairs cafe at Chez Panisse.
He was so impressed with the pizza LaDou had made for him at Prego, he hired LaDou as head pizza chef. Under Puck's guidance, LaDou developed more than 250 pizza concepts using ingredients such as scallops,
roe
Roe, ( ) or hard roe, is the fully ripe internal egg masses in the ovaries, or the released external egg masses, of fish and certain marine animals such as shrimp, scallop, sea urchins and squid. As a seafood, roe is used both as a cooking, c ...
, and baby
zucchini flowers.
Among their most famous invention was "Jewish pizza", a pizza dough first cooked then topped with
smoked salmon,
crème fraîche
Crème fraîche (English pronunciation: , , lit. "fresh cream") is a dairy product similar to cream cheese, a soured cream containing 10–45% butterfat, with a pH of approximately 4.5. It is soured with a Microbiological culture, bacterial cult ...
,
capers, and
dill
Dill (''Anethum graveolens'') is an annual herb in the celery family Apiaceae. It is native to North Africa, Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula; it is grown widely in Eurasia, where its leaves and seeds are used as a herb or spice for flavouring ...
. Another innovation was using infused
olive oil
Olive oil is a vegetable oil obtained by pressing whole olives (the fruit of ''Olea europaea'', a traditional Tree fruit, tree crop of the Mediterranean Basin) and extracting the oil.
It is commonly used in cooking for frying foods, as a cond ...
, baby vegetables,
chili oil
Chili oil is a condiment made from vegetable oil that has been infused with chili peppers. Different types of oil and hot peppers are used, and other components may also be included. It is commonly used in Chinese cuisine, Mexico, Italy, and el ...
, and flavored dough.
In 1985, LaDou helped two inexperienced lawyer-restaurateurs, Richard L. Rosenfeld and Larry S. Flax, start a new restaurant concept,
California Pizza Kitchen (also known as "CPK"). He brought them many of Spago's recipes, which he had carefully saved.
The new restaurant borrowed the concept of open kitchens centered around wood-burning pizza ovens from Spago, but instead of exotic gourmet ingredients, it used innovative but simpler
comfort food
Comfort food is food that provides a nostalgic or sentimental value to someone and may be characterized by its high caloric nature associated with childhood or home cooking. The nostalgia may be specific to an individual or it may apply to a ...
toppings.
When the new restaurant's chef quit less than a month before opening, LaDou quickly designed and cooked an entire menu, inventing barbecue chicken pizza on the spot.
LaDou also helped develop pizza menus for Sammy's Woodfired Pizza and the
Hard Rock Cafe
Hard Rock Cafe, Inc. is a chain of theme restaurant, theme bar-restaurants, memorabilia shops, casinos, hotels and museums founded in 1971 by Isaac Tigrett and Peter Morton in London. In 1979, the cafe began covering its walls with rock and roll ...
.
Prominence
Both Wolfgang Puck and California Pizza Kitchen were instrumental in turning California-style pizza from a
gourmet
Gourmet (, ) is a cultural idea associated with the culinary arts of fine food and drink, or haute cuisine, which is characterized by their high level of refined and elaborate food preparation techniques and displays of balanced meals that have ...
food trend to a mass consumer food product. Based on the success of his pizzas and his status as a
celebrity chef
A celebrity chef is a kitchen chef who has become a celebrity. Today, chefs often become celebrities by presenting cookery advice and demonstrations, usually through the media of television and radio, or in Books, printed publications. While telev ...
, Puck opened a series of restaurants, ranging from high-end clones of Spago to convenience chains for airports and mall
food courts. California Pizza Kitchen grew to 200 outlets. Both introduced frozen pizzas, but after an early success Puck's supermarket lines were overtaken by CPK's, which are backed by
Kraft Foods
Kraft Foods Group, Inc. was an American food manufacturing and processing conglomerate (company), conglomerate, split from Kraft Foods Inc. on October 1, 2012, and was headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. It became part of Kraft Heinz on July ...
.
See also
*
Pizza in the United States
*
New Haven–style pizza
*
New York–style pizza
*
Chicago-style pizza
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:California-Style Pizza
Californian cuisine
Food and drink introduced in 1980
Pizza in the United States
Pizza varieties