Three longer reads from the kitchen.

Forty-eight hours is not a marketing number

Every few months a food writer asks me why our dough is fermented for 48 hours. Usually they want a quote about "tradition" or "old-world slowness." I say the real answer and they look disappointed, so here it is in long form.

Yeast does two things when you mix dough: it eats sugar and releases carbon dioxide (the puff) and it releases a constellation of volatile compounds that give bread its flavour — esters, alcohols, organic acids. Rushing fermentation gets you a lot of the first and almost none of the second. You end up with bread that is airy but empty.

If you want a crust that tastes of something — of caramelised malt, of lacto-fermentation, of that faintly sweet-acid thing the best Neapolitan pies have — you need the yeast to go slow. Long enough that the bacterial side of the culture also has time to work. Forty-eight hours in a 3 °C walk-in is what gets us there reliably. We've tried 24 (too flat), 36 (nearly good), 72 (gummy in the cornicione). Forty-eight is not a tradition. It's the number we settled on after six months of testing.

The hydration is 65%. The yeast load is 0.12% of flour weight, which is a joke of a dose. The flour is Caputo Nuvola Super — a high-protein 00 specifically spec'd for long-ferment pizza. We mix in the morning, bulk-ferment for four hours at room temperature, ball up, into the walk-in until Thursday evening (or Friday, or Saturday, depending on when the dough was made).

All of this is pointless if your oven can't back it up. Which brings us to the second story on this page. But first — if you've read this far, please consider that this dough cost us, in testing alone, about $9,000 worth of flour over 2020. It is still the thing I care about most here.

Go see the pies →

What College Street used to look like

When we took over 892 College in early 2020 the space had been a hardware store since 1978. Before that, from 1952 to 1977, it was a barber shop owned by a man named Enzo Delvecchio, who emigrated from Calabria in 1951 and cut hair until his son inherited the shop and couldn't make it work. Before that, from 1931 to 1951, it was a laundry run by a Jewish-Ukrainian family who moved out when the neighbourhood shifted Italian.

This is the standard Little Italy story. Between 1948 and 1965 roughly 35,000 Italians settled in Toronto, and most of the first-wave arrivals ended up between Bathurst and Dufferin south of Bloor. Grocers, butchers, shoe shops, cafés. By the 1970s College Street was the longest Italian commercial strip in North America. That version is gone — rents rose, children moved to Vaughan, a lot of the old shops closed in the 1990s. But the pattern of the street — narrow storefronts, apartments above, a mix of old and new — is still visible if you look.

We're not trying to recreate the Little Italy of 1965. That would be a museum. What we're trying to do is be a small independent shop on a street that used to be full of small independent shops. It's a modest ambition. We hope it doesn't sound pretentious.

The barber chair Luca sits in at the back of the kitchen is from Enzo's shop. We bought it from his granddaughter in 2021. It doesn't really do anything except hold Luca while he reads about pizza.

Come by the shop →

Why our pizza is not on the delivery apps

We get this question two or three times a week. The answer has two parts.

One: third-party delivery apps take 25–30% commission from restaurants. That would force us to raise our menu by roughly 22% to net out, which makes us expensive for no reason.

Two, more important: the apps treat pizza terribly. A Neapolitan pie packed in a cardboard box, stuffed in a soft bag, strapped to a bike for 28 minutes in humid weather arrives a sad, limp, soggy version of what left the oven. If you've ever ordered a serious pizza through an app and been disappointed — that's why. The pizza was fine. The logistics weren't.

So we run our own. Two riders, both paid fairly, both trained on how to handle a pizza box (keep it flat, drive carefully, don't swing the bag). Insulated carriers with a heated base. Vented boxes to prevent condensation. SMS when the pizza goes in, SMS when it leaves. A 3.1 km radius.

It's less scalable than the app way. It's also the only way the pizza shows up properly. We'd rather have a smaller delivery zone and do it right.

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