Cooking
Start with Roberta’s pizza dough, then try your hand at a clam-chowder pie.
Good morning. What is the best thing you’ve eaten this summer? I’ve had some stellar corn, about 1,000 excellent tomatoes, two great lobster rolls and a beautiful wood-roasted leg of lamb. A buddy dropped off some bluefin tuna caught not a dozen miles south of Montauk, N.Y., at the eastern end of Long Island, and we inhaled it in chunks, with dabs of soy sauce against the fat. Wood-roasted strawberries at Peasant on Elizabeth Street in Manhattan? I’ll be thinking of those when there’s sleet scuttering against my window in February.
But here’s what I’m inscribing into the permanent record for Summer 2024: a modified Coke float I put together in a Wawa in New Jersey and the clam-chowder pizza (above) that followed when I got home.
You could make both this weekend, and ought to.
For the pie, you’ll need a round of Roberta’s pizza dough, a recipe Anthony Falco taught me to make a decade ago. To top it, you’ll make what amounts to a clam-chowder glaze, and add torn mozzarella and a spray of red-pepper flakes to it. I call for a finish of lemon zest in my recipe, but lately I’ve gone a step further and squeezed lemon juice onto the finished pizza as well. Please follow that lead.
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Clam-Chowder Pizza
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As for the Coke float, it’s a no-recipe affair: a suggestion to follow when you’ve found an exceptional convenience store, the sort where there are slushie machines alongside the urns of coffee, next to the hot-dog rollers, near the chips aisle. What you want is a cup of Coke slushie filled almost to the brim. Take that and head over to the coffee bar. Add a floater of light cream or half-and-half, and watch as the white liquid falls through the ice to turn the whole affair into a caramel cloud. Get a top on that and a straw into it.
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