‘Burgh pies start at farm, end at plate

Most Americans’ definition of pizza requires a few necessities: red and tangy tomato sauce, a… Most Americans’ definition of pizza requires a few necessities: red and tangy tomato sauce, a crisp and golden brown crust and gobs of white cheese pulling into strings at the edges of each slice.

Pizza-shop devotees quibble over which place has the best pizza and which style tops the rest like they’re talking politics. And while the pizzerias in question might be local, the tomatoes, flour and cheese don’t sprout up in the middle of the city.

How does flour get from field to dough? And what about the tomatoes that go from vine to sauce? And finally, what process does cheese go through to travel from cow to shredded topping? Each pizza shop gets ingredients from somewhere, and whether it’s from mostly local suppliers or somewhere a little farther — like California — getting the right mixture is important.

One can trace the development of a pizza from start to finish, and it’s possible to find purveyors of all the necessary parts in Pittsburgh.

Life of Pie

One local shop — Spak Brothers Pizza located in Garfield — has staked its reputation not just on its pizza, but on where its pizza comes from. In exploring its “local, sustainable and healthy whenever possible” ingredients, as explained by its mission statement, Spak Brothers ensures its pies become more than the sum of their parts.

Past the graffiti-style mural on its outside wall and through a door that you need to “Pull Hard,” according to the sign, Spak Brothers Pizza looks like a neighborhood pizza place dipped in a bath of punk-rock lacquer. Pinball machines and a few seats lead the way to a worn wooden counter and a pizza oven that barely seems able to fit inside the small space.

General Manager Cody Darling of Polish Hill explained that brothers Ryan and Nate Spak opened the restaurant in 2008 to be a haven for pizza lovers looking for a healthy and sustainable choice of pie.

“They wanted to serve a neighborhood that doesn’t have that option already,” Darling said.

After working in pizza shops for years, the brothers knew they wanted to do something differently.

“It was a reaction to places they had both worked that didn’t offer the things they were looking for,” Darling said. “It came out of a reaction to the lack of their product model being available in Pittsburgh.”

While Spak Brothers’ cheesesteaks with soy products and seitan — a wheat-based meat substitute — rank high on customers’ favorites lists, the pies are really just good old-fashioned pizza-shop fare.

“We’ve made a conscious effort to be a standard hoagie shop that has these vegetarian items,” Darling said. “We’re not only for the hip vegetarian kid, but it encompasses what everyone wants. Everybody likes pizza.”

Spak Brothers’ basic pizza starts with fresh dough made from unbromated flour — wheat flour lacking the “flour booster” potassium bromate that strengthens and helps dough rise — and a sugar-free sauce comprised of ground tomato and tomato puree. A few secret ingredients later and it’s topped with a pre-shredded provolone-mozzarella blend.

“We cook it in a pizza oven,” Darling noted as the important final step. “Not a conveyor oven that’s essentially a toaster.”

Instead of moving through, the pizza must be turned to cook in the uneven heat. The edges might come out a little less than golden-brown perfection, but it’s all part of the charm of a bona fide hand-made pizza.

Not yet a symphony of sauce and cheese, the ingredients are sourced from a variety of companies that operate in the Pittsburgh area. Darling said Spak Brothers gets its ingredients from five to six suppliers, including the Oakland Supply Company.

“It’s about finding the best way to access those ingredients for the best price with the best quality. It took a while to get under control,” he said. An essential member of that food-supplying team is a distributor that deals in a variety of bulk items.

Sacramento to the Strip

The Pennsylvania Macaroni Company, founded in 1902, operates today as one of the most prominent sources of ethnic food in the Strip District and greater Pittsburgh area. It’s not one of the Spak Brothers’ distributors, but the owners certainly know their Italian food, even the Americanized stuff.

“By the mid 1980s, the grocery side of our business started to go away,” said co-vice president and third-generation owner Bill Sunseri. “So we started to focus on restaurants and pizzerias and continue with the Italian specialty items.”

The retail shop is known for its variety of captivatingly pungent cheeses, but the basic pre-shredded mix back at Spak Brothers offers its own intrigue into a local pizza practice.

“Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania probably have the highest provolone pizza in the country,” Sunseri said. “All over the country, everybody uses mozzarella, but the 50-50 blend gives it a little bite. Mozzarella doesn’t really have any other heavy flavor besides the creamy texture.”

Though the ultimate source for cheese was once dominated by the land of the “Cheeseheads,” now there’s a likely chance the cheese is local. Sunseri said that although cheeses traditionally came from Wisconsin, they’re now being shipped in from California and New Mexico, or even made here in Pennsylvania.

Flour is also sourced from the U.S., with the “Wheat Belt” of the Midwest producing most of America’s starchy white staple. And from further west comes that juicy, bright red element argued to be both a fruit and vegetable.

“Most of your tomato products come from California,” Sunseri said. While the Golden State might supply part of Spak Brothers’ tomato needs, a new startup in Shadyside is fulfilling the rest with a hydroponic system — one that uses a nutrition solution instead of soil — and tomatoes grown only a short walk away.

Tomatoes Imported from Maryland Avenue

Shadyside Nursery started as a Christmas tree operation a few years ago, but quickly evolved into a source for produce grown hydroponically within the city limits.

“Once we figured out a location, we talked the landlord into giving us the property, and we partnered up with a friend of ours to dream up the hydroponic system,” said owner Bill Brittain. Hydroponics trade soil for a carefully controlled water home and allow vegetation to be grown outside its normal climate.

“We tried to do basically just spices in the beginning, but it was hard to move 100 pounds of basil a week or whatever,” Brittain said. “So we went over to tomatoes, peppers and eggplant.”

Besides being grown near one of Shadyside’s cultural centers, the tomatoes grown for Spak Brothers offer consistency that’s not available from commercial tomatoes.

“The tomatoes have a better taste than those that are grown in soil because they’re not grown in soil,” Brittain said. “Especially during the winter, the tomatoes you’ll find in stores are usually ripened with ethylene gas. They do it with most fruit. They don’t ship it ripe, and I think that gives it kind of a mealy taste.”

The hydroponics also increase the plant’s yield five to ten times and open the possibilities for a variety of sustainable practices. Brittain says the greenhouse composts and collects rainwater. Though the Pitt graduate is happy to be involved in the local supply chain, he doesn’t think that Shadyside Nursery’s model is going to take over production of the world’s tomato crop any time soon.

“I’m not terribly optimistic,” Brittain said. “I think the mega-farms are the way it’s going to stay. I think there’s a niche market, especially with whatever you want to call food enthusiasts — foodies?”

But the nursery still has other areas of business, such as its landscape work and Christmas tree sales.

“Our angle is to do 50 things at once,” Brittain said. “That’s the only way we’ll make it.”

“When The Moon Hits Your Eye…”

While opinions abound as to who makes the best Margherita pizza, Pittsburgh offers numerous square-boxed varieties that appeal to college students and native Pittsburghers alike.

“You can go to Mt. Lebanon to one of the better shops in Pittsburgh and you’ll pay $16,” Sunseri said. “You can go to Oakland and buy a $4.99 pie. There’s business out there for everybody.”

Somewhere in between (a large cheese pizza costs $7.49), Spak Brothers tries to make its pizza and its shop a reflection of the customer base. The walls are lined with art by a local painter and fliers local punk rock shows — a decor that Darling said is connected to the customers who go in-and-out of the hard-to-open door.

“It lies a lot in the commitment to neighborhood and community, be that physical space, a punk rock subculture or local food communities,” Darling said.

“It all comes out of a desire to be associated with and involved with the food from the beginning to the final product. It’s where you’re getting it from and who you’re feeding it to and being aware of that connection.”