Hidden in an abandoned-looking storefront with white windows, Wizard Hat Pizza in Brooklyn has a speakeasy vibe. The takeout-only shop is run by chef and owner Josiah Bartlett, who’s grown his pizza business totally through word of mouth. On the menu are New York style pizzas with traditional toppings like spicy pepperoni and mushroom, as well as more experimental pies like an al pastor taco-inspired pineapple pizza.
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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 So we have jalapeno and Fresno peppers.
00:05 We're gonna seed them,
00:06 and then they'll get sliced and pickled.
00:09 And those go mostly on our spicy pepperoni,
00:11 which is one of our more popular pizzas on the menu.
00:15 Now we're just gonna slice these,
00:17 and then they'll get pickled.
00:19 Wizard Hat Pizza is somewhere in between
00:23 a pop-up and a residency,
00:25 or a takeout pizza operation,
00:28 focusing on making consistently
00:31 New York-inspired awesome pizzas.
00:33 The spicy pepperoni,
00:39 that starts the same as the regular pie.
00:42 There's like a blend of three different cheeses on there.
00:46 We're using fresh, whole milk mozzarella,
00:48 low-moisture mozzarella.
00:49 What I think is really important
00:51 to our flavor profile there is a aged provolone,
00:55 which just brings like a really nice sharpness in there.
00:57 Pickled chilies on there.
00:59 Finish with basil, pecorino.
01:02 This Wizard Hat Pizza has a speakeasy feel about it.
01:06 It's a 100% word of mouth project.
01:09 At the end of the day, whatever's going in the box
01:10 is gonna be great quality and up to standard.
01:13 So first thing at Wizard Hat,
01:18 I come in, I start the dough.
01:20 That's our biggest, most important project.
01:25 These are einkorn berries here.
01:28 So this is just one of the several grains
01:31 that we'll play around with,
01:32 with the whole wheat percentage of our dough.
01:34 So this is stone mill, horizontal stone mill,
01:39 made by New American Stone Mills.
01:41 They're in Vermont.
01:43 This piece of equipment was in the space
01:44 when we started using the bakery here in Bratwizard Hat.
01:48 Our space is a commissary bakery space
01:52 where they were milling all of their grains
01:54 and had this big, beautiful stone mill
01:57 that a lot of pizzerias could never justify buying.
02:02 There's two stones, one with furrows in it,
02:06 which grind down the grains.
02:08 And then it's coming out,
02:10 shooting it out of here into this bag.
02:12 The next step is gonna be using this fresh-milled grain
02:17 and our pizza dough flour that we're gonna weigh out here.
02:21 So our dough is made up of five different flours.
02:25 We have some white flours and all the whole grains, einkorn.
02:29 We have wheat bread flour that we use a tiny bit of,
02:32 a little bit of an all-purpose flour,
02:34 and then an organic pizza flour.
02:37 Next thing, this is the starter.
02:43 I'll just weigh this out.
02:45 This is the backbone of our company right here.
02:48 That's like the gluten developing there.
02:51 If it looks too much like a smooth dough,
02:53 then probably it's gonna be in your best interest
02:56 to let it keep fermenting.
02:59 I check the temperatures of the rooms before I get going,
03:02 just 'cause the weather temperature
03:04 predominantly affects the fermentation
03:06 of our starter overnight.
03:09 Taking all of these temperatures and keeping them in mind
03:12 to get the dough at the end
03:14 to my desired fermenting temperature.
03:18 So this is gonna be my water for the first pizza dough.
03:23 So this water I'm using is just like a touch over 80 degrees.
03:27 I'll start adding some of the water,
03:29 bring over my flour.
03:32 So now I'm gonna start adding in the starter
03:36 and then the last bit of the water.
03:38 So at this point, it's all just flour and water.
03:41 Yeah, in the mornings, it's usually always just me
03:46 doing dough.
03:47 I talk to it telepathically more so,
03:50 just in case someone's walking by and they're like,
03:52 "I know he's in there alone."
03:53 Weird guy, makes great pizza.
03:56 So now I'm just gonna add in salt.
03:58 I found I like to put it right in the middle.
04:00 Seems to distribute into the dough really good.
04:04 If I put it on the outside,
04:05 sometimes it'll just be kind of like
04:07 skating around and spinning.
04:09 I want everything to come together as quick as possible.
04:11 That way, my actual mix time is really just
04:14 the time of mixing, not just ingredients in there,
04:17 kind of all separate.
04:18 So now this is all mixed.
04:22 I'm gonna take it out, put it into this bus tub
04:26 to start its bulk fermentation.
04:28 So I'm just gonna see what the end result was.
04:31 Okay, it's like 81 degrees, which is incredible.
04:34 All right, so we're making our sauce here.
04:44 We have two different types of tomatoes,
04:46 one that's gonna get milled,
04:47 the other one that's already crushed.
04:49 It's really simple, it's just tomato, a little bit of salt.
04:53 Our other tomato we use is a crushed tomato,
04:57 Jersey Fresh crushed tomatoes.
05:00 These ones I feel like have a very,
05:02 very strong tomato flavor,
05:04 and I feel like they balance each other out really nice.
05:07 All my friends that cook and stuff,
05:08 when we're talking about tomatoes,
05:10 or they're asking, "How do you do the sauce?
05:12 "How do you do that?"
05:13 And they mention, "We use the Jersey Fresh crushed tomatoes."
05:16 Like whether they're pizza guys or not.
05:18 Just one person after another is like,
05:20 "Oh my God, the Jersey Fresh, they're great, right?"
05:22 So yeah, they're winners in my book,
05:25 but that's it for the tomato.
05:27 Next I'm gonna cruise into dough.
05:30 This time is really time-sensitive
05:32 in terms of making sure we get this started on time.
05:36 So these are just little dough containers.
05:39 This is what's gonna hold our pizzas
05:42 after they're shaped and proofing.
05:46 We don't have a walk-in refrigerator or anything like that,
05:48 so we can't really fit in big dough trays like that.
05:52 This is a pretty, pretty wet dough,
05:58 so I like to just have a nice light layer
06:01 of flour down here, and then I find it really useful
06:03 to flour it while it's still in the bin
06:06 before dumping it out.
06:07 And then this is the sweet release.
06:12 (whooshing)
06:12 Comes out like that.
06:13 I've been working in restaurants since I was like 15.
06:18 I've always kind of wanted to have my own business
06:21 or start my own project or something like that.
06:23 So I started discovering that I wanted to go
06:25 into pizza full-time because I love the simplicity of it.
06:30 So I do like kind of a combination
06:36 of shaping them on the table and then picking them up
06:40 and finishing it off like that.
06:42 The other way I like to do it is picking it up
06:46 and then kind of shaping it just into a ball,
06:50 almost kind of like you'd shape mozzarella.
06:52 It's really important just to make sure you get the bottom,
06:55 the underside, nice and sealed up.
06:57 This is definitely my most intense part of the day.
07:01 Like once this is done, I can relax.
07:04 It's like if I mess this up,
07:06 then we might as well just skip tomorrow.
07:10 Dude, it smells so strong in here.
07:14 When we start baking, a large group of like
07:17 New York sanitation, like trash guys,
07:19 have become regulars.
07:20 Like they stop by and two different crews of guys were like,
07:23 "Yeah, we were two blocks away and we smelled you."
07:26 And then they just saw us out here
07:27 and now they factor that into their shifts, which is great.
07:31 Yeah, our space is not really customer facing
07:35 aside from picking up pizza for takeout.
07:37 It has a kind of a speakeasy feel about it.
07:40 Every day we put out our sign.
07:42 We have QR code for the menu and ordering
07:46 that has the name on it.
07:47 We have a sandwich board that I made at the beginning.
07:50 Come 10 o'clock, 10.30 when we're shutting up shop,
07:53 all that disappears.
07:54 So if you walked by, definitely people are still like,
07:57 "Oh, what's this place over here with the white windows?"
07:59 And some people don't know, some people,
08:02 you hear them like, "Oh yeah, that's a pizza place.
08:03 "They make pizza there."
08:04 And a lot of people are surprised.
08:06 Yeah, so this is our stamp.
08:09 I think it's been really important for us
08:10 to stamp all of our boxes,
08:13 especially starting out as a totally 100%
08:17 word of mouth project.
08:19 That was kind of one of our only chance
08:22 to get our name out there.
08:23 In my mind, it was just, whether it was in a trash
08:27 or on the sidewalk and someone's walking by
08:30 and they can see the pizza box with the name and the spiral.
08:34 (upbeat music)
08:36 So we don't have a traditional ticket printer
08:41 or anything like that.
08:42 Ramon is going through all of our orders,
08:48 transcribing them onto our boxes,
08:51 which then become our tickets.
08:53 And we'll just work off of this
08:55 all the way throughout the night.
08:56 We'll start making our first pizzas for five
09:00 just to give us enough time to prepare them
09:03 and get them in the oven so they're ready for pickup.
09:06 Now we're just getting the rest of our
09:10 mise en place into place.
09:12 We're gonna slice some mushrooms here.
09:15 These are cremini mushrooms.
09:16 They go on the fungi bianca.
09:18 It's a white pizza with roasted cremini mushrooms.
09:23 I would say, like, on average,
09:24 we're slicing about 50 pounds of mushrooms per week.
09:30 Our fungi bianca, which is our mushroom pizza,
09:33 that's mostly just mozzarella,
09:36 a lot of mushrooms, black pepper,
09:40 which is like one of the defining things of that one.
09:43 And then that gets finished with a little bit of lemon,
09:50 basil, and then that's our one pizza
09:53 that has Parmesan on it.
09:54 I think we got someone here.
09:59 Great dough today.
10:00 Ramon, what did you have set up here for the pizzas?
10:06 - The three, five-thirty, the man one is vegan.
10:08 Then you got pepperoni and cheese.
10:10 - So it's pepperoni, pina cheese?
10:12 All right.
10:13 So I was forever anti-pineapple on pizza
10:18 up until finally one day I was like,
10:21 you know what, I gotta put an end to this.
10:22 One of my favorite things to eat is Al Pastor tacos
10:26 or anything, really, and I was just thinking about
10:28 pork and pineapple and I'm like, what's the difference?
10:31 Ended up doing that pizza as a special.
10:33 It's our speck and pina.
10:35 I think it works really nice on the pizza.
10:37 The speck, the smokiness is really nice
10:41 and the pineapples are cut the right size
10:43 and that they're actually ripe.
10:44 That one has some chili on it as well.
10:49 That brings like a nice contrast with like the meat
10:51 and the sweetness of the pineapple.
10:55 - Ramon, when you have a second, can you open the ovens?
10:58 In our space we have three Rofco ovens
11:03 which are bread ovens made in Belgium.
11:06 They make incredible pizza.
11:08 They get hotter than your traditional convection oven
11:12 or home oven for sure.
11:14 That being said, they have a limit of about like 600 degrees
11:17 but it's hot enough to make pizza.
11:19 There's three stones in each of them.
11:21 So in total we have nine spaces for pizza
11:24 so we can just cycle through out the ovens.
11:28 Hey there.
11:32 Spicy pepperoni right?
11:41 Normal.
11:42 Pepperoni, oh normal.
11:45 Two pepperonis.
11:46 - One cheese, one pepperoni.
11:47 - One cheese, one pepperoni.
11:49 Another pizza we have is obviously our cheese pizza
11:54 which is our plain or regular.
11:57 There's a blend of three different cheeses on there.
12:00 We're using fresh whole milk mozzarella,
12:02 a low moisture mozzarella,
12:04 and then what I think is really important
12:07 to our flavor profile there is a aged provolone
12:10 which just brings like a really nice sharpness in there.
12:13 And then it's got tomato, some chili, garlic, oregano.
12:18 Those are all like layered in there in different ways.
12:21 Yeah we finish that one with basil
12:24 and a little bit of pecorino romano.
12:27 At Wizard Hut we're really passionate
12:30 about the pizzas that we're making.
12:32 We're paying attention to all the customers showing up
12:34 and every pizza that we're giving to them in a box
12:37 is gonna be as close to perfect as possible.
12:40 (upbeat music)
12:42 (upbeat music)