EMILY: The Cookbook

INTRODUCTION

Our first shared meal was a pizza. It was pepperoni and olive, eaten while sitting on the floor of Matt’s dorm room at school at Roger Williams in Rhode Island. Two days later, on a casual drive to a beach in Newport so Matt could snap shots for his photography class, we stopped for lunch and had more pizza together. A few nights later, Matt took me on a proper date to Al Forno in Providence, a place that was to become a beloved restaurant to us, where we shared their famous grilled pizza. We do eat other food (sometimes), but pizza has been the special fare we have enjoyed sharing since the moment our relationship began.

As soon as we graduated from college, we moved to New York City so Matt could enroll at the Institute of Culinary Education and begin his career as a chef. He has now worked for more than a decade in various restaurants across the city, where he has done everything from making pastry at Public, to smoking meats at the Smoke Joint, to spending his summer slinging pies for Pizza Moto at Brooklyn Flea. When we moved to Brooklyn a few years back, Matt stumbled on our neighborhood pizzeria, Sottocasa, in its opening days. The owner, Luca Arrigoni, invited him to join the founding team to practice the art of making pizza.

Immediately, Matt knew this craft was his path. Luca became Matt’s pizza mentor. Within a year, we decided it was time to take a chance and open a restaurant, which was the vision we had shared over a decade before as we ate our very first slices of pizza together. We worked to open our first, short-lived spot, Brooklyn Central, in Park Slope, which turned out to be a stepping-stone for us to emerge onto the pizza scene in New York. After learning some lessons and hitting some speed bumps, we took the opportunity to transition: We searched for a new spot to create a restaurant we could call home in our shared passion for artisanal, high-quality food while still specializing in pizza. It would simply be called EMILY.

While Matt would remain in the kitchen, I would oversee operations in the front and back of the house. If the restaurant was going to bear my name, it was important for me to be as visible as the culinary staff in our small, open kitchen at the back of the dining room. I would set the welcoming tone of EMILY, greeting guests at the door, stopping at the tables to check on the meals, and generally ensuring that the time spent with us would be fun and enjoyable for everyone.

In 2013, our search landed us in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that was home to many families and young professionals but had no local eatery. Everything about the location felt right to us. We spent a long autumn rehabbing a previous restaurant space to create a place that spoke of home, comfort, and warmth. This chance we took changed our lives forever. After enjoying the success and crowds at our Brooklyn location, we went on to serve EMILY pizza in the West Village in Manhattan, where we inherited one of the oldest working wood-burning ovens in the city, likely dating back to the late 1800s. After hard work that led to success for our first restaurant, we were blessed with the opportunity to expand, and we opened our sister concept, Emmy Squared, which serves Detroit-style pizza and some killer sandwiches and cocktails in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. After that launch, we opened our first location outside of NYC in early 2018—an Emmy Squared in Nashville.

No matter which location, Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill, or Manhattan’s West Village, or Nashville, our EMILY philosophy has always been based on the simple joy of eating great food together as well as having friends over for delicious meals in our home. Preparing meals is always about more than the food. It’s about the experience of yoking craft and flavor with generosity of spirit. Hospitality, whether in a restaurant or in your home kitchen, is about embracing genuine character.

One of our favorite pastimes is to dine out and spend an evening talking through the nuances of each dish, how the food tastes with the wine we ordered, and how well the meal matches the ambience of the dining room. Matt loves to try new ingredients, see how combinations of flavors work together in unique ways, and find inspiration for playing and experimenting in his own kitchen. Accordingly, much of what he learns finds its way into the meals he makes for others. And we love to cook for others! EMILY is a large-scale version of what we love to do at home: Matt cooks, I host, we serve nice wine and entertain in the coziness of our apartment.

At EMILY, we believe in simple ingredients and simple recipes. Matt’s technique is an amplification of flavor. He follows a flavor profile he likes—the richness of dry-aged beef, for instance—adds salt, and suddenly, the funkiness of the meat is alive; he sautés Brussels sprouts with a splash of fish sauce, and suddenly the subtle sprouts are brightened and enriched by the addition. The recipes in this book employ many of the same techniques we use at the restaurant to help simple ingredients sparkle.

Our philosophy is that while food should taste really good, it should also be fun. There are many who preach strict ways of preparing food as either right or wrong. We find this singular way of thinking to be most pronounced in the pizza world: Dough must be D.O.C. (that is, denominazione di origine controllata, or designated from controlled origin). That means it’s made according to very strict rules, using only Italian flour, water, yeast, and salt, and the tomatoes must be San Marzano. If you are cooking in a Neapolitan oven you must make traditional Neapolitan pizza. We take these rules with the proverbial grain of salt. We say, what is right is simply what you enjoy. There is no right or wrong when it comes to pizza. It’s all about personal preference. So, cultivate a practice in your kitchen that feels right to you; after all, intuition and heart are what the process of cooking is all about.

And while we have become known for pizza and burgers, there are other items on the menu that we hope will really get your appetite going. Our small plates are packed with flavor and have been designed to pass around the table for sharing with others. Our salads are the perfect way to start a meal because they are light; they leave room for the main course. Dessert features decadent and nostalgic options not just from the restaurant but from our moms’ recipe collections. And it doesn’t matter whether you begin or end your meal with one, just be sure not to skip our house-made cocktails.

Our goal for EMILY: The Cookbook is to take you on an in-depth journey on how to make our best dishes and pizzas at home. Although we cook in a professional Pavesi oven in Clinton Hill and a gigantic, wood-burning oven in the West Village, we know you need more practical methods.

Everything we offer in this book is meant to be accessible and approachable, with lots of details to help you along the way. In Pizza Tools and Ingredients, you’ll find everything you need to know to get started. We offer in-depth information on the dough itself, as well as the toppings and various cheeses. Round and Detroit pies are grouped separately in their own chapters, sequenced by the main color of their toppings: red, white, pink, or green. That’s how we do it at the restaurant, too.

We reach beyond pizza with our well-known EMMY Burger, providing all of the secrets (it’s in the sauce!) to replicate it at home. But our favorite section is perhaps the last chapter with our sauces, condiments, and other extras that you can use in your everyday cooking with recipes outside of this book.

And when it comes to ingredients, a glance through the recipes in this book shows Korean seasoning pastes, Italian bottarga, Indian papadums, Japanese okonomiyaki sauce, Sichuan peppercorns, and many other global influences that inspired Matt. While we give substitutes where possible, there are not always easy swaps. For example, there is no simple substitute for Korean seasoning pastes such as gochujang and ssamjang, which we are crazy about, and we know you will be, too. (The former is one of the main ingredients in the sauce for the renowned EMMY Burger.) We cannot encourage you enough to search out these ingredients. It’s more than worth the effort. In almost all cases, they are not perishable and store well for months on end in the fridge so you will have them handy for other recipes. Google them for the best sources, letting your pizza serve as the host for a culinary adventure.

As you cook your way through EMILY: The Cookbook, please use it as a guide, not as a rule book. Leave pressure at the door, and take from the book ideas and insights that will make cooking a more enjoyable experience. We encourage you to mix and match—make a dressing into a dip, make a condiment into a drizzle on a pizza—and use our ideas as inspiration for your own pizza inventiveness. Be creative in your approach, trust your instincts, and remember, never is there enough ranch dressing to dip your crusts in.

Please keep in touch by taking a photo and tagging us @pizzalovesemily on Instagram so we can see how your homemade pizzas turn out!

With kindness and warmth,

Emily & Matthew Hyland

CHAPTER 1

SMALL PLATES

To start your meal at EMILY, we offer a rotating selection of dishes that will set the stage for the food to come. Knowing that the main courses will no doubt be indulgent, we keep these small plates on the lighter side, and mostly vegetable-driven. We like to offer highly seasonal vegetables when we can to highlight offerings from local purveyors such as Myers Produce or small, emerging greenhouses like Farm One. From our experience eating at lots of pizza restaurants over the years, salads and small plates often feel overlooked or play second-fiddle to the pizza; we prefer to make our best versions of these items to shine just as brightly as everything else on our menu. To help accomplish this, we use unexpected ingredients with a bent toward Matt’s affinity for global flavors. And even though some pizza restaurants also have chicken wings on their menu, we wager that they are nothing like our customer favorite, Nguyen’s Hot Wings, cloaked in a sticky spicy sauce.

MARINATED OLIVES WITH LEMON AND FENNEL

MAKES 8 SERVINGS

Olives, lemons, and garlic have grown side-by-side for centuries in the Mediterranean region, so it is no surprise that they go so well together. It’s worth making a large batch, as they keep for a couple weeks in the fridge. While this method works with other varieties, the Castelvetrano variety, with their mild flavor and plump flesh, is our absolute favorite out of a wide range of olive options.

⅔ cup (165 ml) extra-virgin olive oil, or more as needed

⅔ cup (165 ml) canola oil

3 garlic cloves, crushed under a knife and peeled

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

1 bay leaf

3 strips lemon zest, removed with a vegetable peeler, about 3 inches (7.5 cm) long

3 strips lime zest, removed with a vegetable peeler, about 3 inches (7.5 cm) long

1 pound (455 g) Castelvetrano olives

1. Warm the olive oil, canola oil, garlic, fennel seeds, peppercorns, bay leaf, lemon zest, and lime zest in a small saucepan over very low heat until tiny bubbles appear around the garlic and zest strips, 5 to 7 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cool for about 10 minutes. Pour the olives into a large bowl, add the contents of the saucepan, and mix well.

2. Transfer the mixture to a container with a lid. If the oil does not cover the olives, add more olive oil as needed. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

3. To serve, use a slotted spoon to transfer the olives and any clinging ingredients to a serving bowl. Let stand for about 30 minutes, and serve at room temperature. (The olives can be refrigerated for up to 2 weeks.)

SHISHITO PEPPERS WITH SICHUAN OIL AND PECORINO

MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGS

Part of the fun of eating shishito peppers is that only one out of ten is really spicy. This phenomenon occurs because the peppers facing the sun while growing turn out to be the spiciest. We play up the heat with a drizzle of our brick-red Sichuan oil and then balance it with the salty sharpness of pecorino Romano cheese and a splash of fish sauce. Cook these outside on the grill for a bit of smoky flavor, or just roast them in a hot oven for similar results.

8 ounces (225 g) shishito peppers

2 teaspoons canola oil

2 teaspoons Sichuan Oil

2 teaspoons Vietnamese fish sauce, preferably Three Crabs (see below)

Pecorino Romano in a chunk, for grating

Special equipment: Large handful of oak or maple wood chips

1. Prepare an outdoor grill for indirect grilling over high heat (500ºF/260ºC). Sprinkle the dry wood chips over the coals of a charcoal grill or into the smoker box of a gas grill. (Or position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 500ºF/260ºC.)

2. Toss the peppers with the canola oil and spread in a large, heavy skillet, preferably cast iron. When the wood starts smoking, add the skillet to the cooler area of the grill and close the lid. (Or place the skillet in the oven.) Cook, without turning, until the peppers are lightly browned, 7 to 10 minutes.

3. Remove the skillet from the grill (or oven). Drizzle the Sichuan oil and fish sauce over the peppers. Grate a shower of Romano over the peppers to lightly cover them (about 2 tablespoons), and serve immediately, directly from the skillet.

Fish sauce It would be almost impossible to make Southeast Asian food without fish sauce. Called nuoc mam in Vietnam and nam pla in Thailand, there are also Japanese, Korean, and Indonesian versions. Interestingly, while fish sauce tends to be associated with Asian cuisine, it has been traditionally used in Roman cooking as well; Matt finds it indispensable in most of our pasta dishes, where it works in tandem with tomatoes and cheese to deliver its umami punch. Our favorite is the Viet Huong brand; we also like the Three Crabs variety. Look for the three crustaceans on the label.

SMOKY CARROTS WITH BELUGA LENTILS AND TAHINI DRESSING

MAKES 6 SERVINGS

With bold contrasting colors of orange carrots and black lentils, this dish works well as an appetizer, on a buffet table, or even at a picnic, where it is delicious at ambient temperature. It’s best with organic carrots, preferably from the farmer’s market, perhaps with a mixture of orange, yellow, and purple rainbow carrots. We love beluga lentils because they offer an al dente texture compared to other lentils and a subtle bed of flavor to the smokiness of the carrots. Like all of our oven-roasted dishes, this one can be cooked on the grill or in the oven.

TAHINI DRESSING

2 tablespoons tahini

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

1 or 2 cloves Garlic Confit, mashed with a fork into a purée

1½ tablespoons water, as needed

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

½ cup (110 g) beluga (also called black or caviar) lentils, sorted for debris, rinsed, and drained

Kosher salt

12 thin carrots (about 1 lb/455 g)

Extra-virgin olive oil

Ground sumac, for serving

Fresh mint sprigs for garnish

Special equipment: Large handful of oak or maple wood chips

1. To make the dressing: Whisk the tahini, lemon juice, and garlic confit in a small bowl. Whisk in enough water to make a thick but pourable dressing. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Set the dressing aside.

2. Put the lentils in a medium saucepan and add enough water to cover by 2 inches (5 cm). Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium-low. Cook the lentils at a steady simmer, uncovered, until tender, about 30 minutes. During the last few minutes, add 1 teaspoon salt. Drain well and set the lentils aside.

3. Prepare an outdoor grill for indirect grilling over high heat (500ºF/260ºC). (Or position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 500ºF/260ºC.)

4. Cut carrots in half lengthwise, and then on a diagonal into chunks about 3 inches (7.5 cm) long. Toss the carrots with 1 tablespoon olive oil on a rimmed baking sheet (or, for grilling, in a shallow disposable aluminum foil pan).

5. Sprinkle the dry wood chips over the coals of a charcoal grill or into the smoker box of a gas grill. Roast the carrots over indirect heat on the grill, with the lid closed, or in the oven, until they are barely tender