Is It The Water?

Mario Batali tells Wired that the reason you can't replicate New York pizza is the water:

"Water," Batali says. "Water is huge. It's probably one of California's biggest problems with pizza." Water binds the dough's few ingredients. Nearly every chemical reaction that produces flavor occurs in water, says Chris Loss, a food scientist with the Culinary Institute of America. "So, naturally, the minerals and chemicals in it will affect every aspect of the way something tastes."

I've heard this water theory, as applied to both pizza and bagels, from a variety of sources for years. To me, it doesn't add up. Here's why -- if you leave the city and head to a suburban community in Long Island or Connecticut or New Jersey featuring many ex-NYC Jews, you'll find bagels that are similar to the ones in the city. Similarly, where ex-NYC Italian-American communities exist in the suburbs, they make similar pizza. But even though these suburbs are close to the city, their water actually comes from radically different sources.

I think the economics just don't translate out of the social context of the traditional northeast areas of Italian-American settlement. When you go someplace that doesn't have that pizza tradition and go build a restaurant where people are going to sit at tables and order brick oven pizza by the pie from a server, you wind up going for a more upscale ambience than you see at, say, John's on Bleeker Street. That flows naturally into a more upscale conception of the ingredients and next thing you know you have something like DC's Matchbox, which I like a lot, but is really quite different from the old-school New York experience.

Photo by Flickr user Tangysd used under a Creative Commons license