OKC pizza shops go above and beyond to prove they’re the best

There’s plenty of good pizza in Oklahoma City.Hideaway Pizza, Empire Slice and The Hall’s Pizza Kitchen are native staples. But there’s plenty of competitors on the market, and some locations at the moment are going above and beyond to recreate very particular flavors from different elements of the world. More than 75,000 pizza locations dot the U.S. map, and these eating places bake up to $45.5 billion price of pies yearly. Half of that cash goes to the chains, leaving 39,000 unbiased, native pizza shops to combat for what’s left and preventing to stand out from the crowd.KOCO 5 is taking you on a tour to Detroit, New York and even Naples, Italy, and we’re going to do it with out leaving the OKC metro. Woodward PizzaKeith Cochran and Kyle Schultz had been two best buddies from Detroit, and that they had a dream whereas working at a well-liked Detroit-style pizza chain once they had been youngsters.”Make the best pizzas in the U.S., and we’re going to do it outside of Michigan,” Cochran stated. “We’re going to do this someday. We don’t know when, but we’re going to do it.”With Woodward Pizza at Edmond’s new Icehouse Project, Cochran and Schultz did it – bringing Detroit’s fluffy, crunchy, tacky, sauce-covered pizza deliciousness to the hungry households in the north metro.”We pride ourselves on having that perfectly cooked pizza every time,” Schultz stated. But it isn’t simply the house owners who’re authentically Detroit. So are the pans they use to cook dinner every rectangular pie. They are from an auto provider in Detroit.”One of the hallmarks of the pizza is getting the cheese around the edge of the pan – all the way around. So, we pack that cheese around the outside, and it melts toward the middle as we cook the pizza,” Schultz stated. “Sauce on top, and we like to go heavy in Detroit because we think our sauce is so good.” Dado’s PizzaDetroit-style pizza is gaining in reputation, however New York City pizza wants no introduction. While anybody could make a large 20-inch pizza with the conventional big, thin-crust slices, Dado’s Pizza in Oklahoma City does “a 20-inch pie, hand-stretched.”The difficult half is recreating the New York City taste.”Everything is basically the same,” J. Mays, the proprietor of Dado’s Pizza, stated. “the oven’s the same. The peels are the same. Even the front counter is mimicked after the one in New York. The case, everything.”Mays and enterprise companion Chris Kana have opened different eating places in the OKC metro. But with Dado’s, they’re going the further mile in authenticity.And they’re doing it with water. The New York Watermaker, they are saying, is the key to good New York City pizza. “It electrifies it, ionizes it and then sends it through a series of filters,” Mays stated. “And out this side comes a molecular copy of New York City water.”>> Download the KOCO 5 AppMays stated he was a skeptic, however not anymore. And he isn’t alone.Kana stated individuals are strolling in curious and strolling out believers.”We wanted people to walk in here who’ve been to New York, who grew up in New York, to walk in and say, ‘Wow. This is just like the Bronx, just like Brooklyn, just like Harlem,'” Kana stated.Pizzeria GustoBringing Neapolitan-style pizza to Oklahoma City was fairly the journey.A large wood-fired pizza oven hand-built in Naples, Italy, was shipped by boat, then by practice and then by truck earlier than ending its journey in a distinguished place inside Pizzeria Gusto in Oklahoma City’s Uptown.”We wanted to do something completely different,” Pizzeria Gusto proprietor and chef Kathryn Mathis stated. “Nobody else was doing it, and we also wanted to do it the best we possibly could.”By any and all measures, Mathis stated the oven is the star of the present.”The Mercedes of pizza ovens,” Mathis stated. “I mean, it was made in Naples – the birthplace of pizza.”While New York City and Detroit-style ovens do not get over 500 levels, the Neapolitan oven’s stone ground sizzles at 900 and produces 11-inch pizzas that bake in underneath two minutes. And the hearth inside, Mathis stated, has by no means stopped burning since the first match.”It’s never gone out. Someone will come up here on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to throw some logs in,” Mathis stated.Neapolitan pizzas usually use much less sauce, cheese and toppings than you are used to, however the taste is simply as massive.The genuine expertise is making a small military of converts who cannot go again to different pizza shops.”We have people who sit here and say, ‘Ever since you opened, I can’t eat anywhere else. Like, this is the only pizza I eat now,'” Mathis stated. 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