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On the Hunt for the Perfect Pizza

It was an overcast day, but nothing could put a damper on our first adventure in the city - a quintessential New York Pizza experience with Scott's Pizza Tours!

Now, to be honest, I never thought of myself as a guided tour person. Being herded through the streets in a group with matching shirts while a guide waves a flag through the air yelling touristy facts is typically not my style. However, I underestimated Scott and his Cheesiest Guided Tour.

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He even has his own sweatshirts promoting his cheesiness.

 

You see, Scott appeared as just a normal, everyday Joe. Except his name was Scott, his knowledge for pizza was extensive, and his passion was even greater. To help you understand, Scott consumes such a high quantity of pizza that he utilizes an app called Daytum to track his daily / weekly pizza consumption to ensure that his pizza intake levels do not reach critical mass.

 

 

Scott, walk away from the pizza.

 

Aside from the pizza tracking, Scott also writes for Pizza Today, an industry publication dedicated to pizza AND is a recurring judge at a Pizza Conference in Las Vegas. Needless to say, we were convinced of his guru status. Now there was just the issue of the tacky tourist guide which he also immediately debunked. Instead of being the lame-o Hawaiian shirt tour guide that I imagined in my head, I felt like he was just a guy we happened to meet in the restaurant who decided to give us a behind the scenes tour of his favorite pizza places. It was like a food adventure with your cool friend who just knows a bunch about pizza.

It was awesome.

The journey began with a behind the scenes look at Kesté Pizza & Vino on Bleeker Street.

 

 

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Spoiler Alert: This was my favorite.

Kesté is a Neapolitan style pizza restaurant, which we learned has as much to do about the history of pizza as it does the flavor of the pie. 

To kick off our pizza immersion in style, we took a true behind the scenes tour of Kesté, getting so close to the wood burning oven that we could actually measure how hot it was inside with Scott's handy temperature gun. He even had a holster. I swear.

 

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Traditional Wood Burning Oven with Dome Shape to Help the Heat Swirl, Creating Pizza Goodness.

Scott put in an order for pizza, and true to Neopolitan style it was done within 90 seconds. Now THAT is service!

The first pizza we tasted, the mast'nicola, consisted of dough, olive oil, basil and pecarino. Now, you may ask, why no sauce? Well, as we learned from Scott (with some help from the A+ exchange student from France), the original pizzas did not have sauce due to the fact that tomatoes were not always in existence in Italy. Brought to the region via explorers from South America, tomotoes became popular later on. I am glad, because in my opinion, cheese and baked dough are all you really need. For the non-vegetarians of the group, the olive oil was replaced by another ingredient. After watching the faces of those trying to place the savory taste, Scott finally let them know the secret - lard. Yup, Paula Deen's ancestor was apparently from Italy and put lard on everything too. 

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Because of the "puffy crust", Keste provides a special angled knife.

You know something is good when it demands special cutlery.

The second pizza was a more familiar margherita pizza. Since this wasn't my favorite, I'll show you a photo, but that's all you get.

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All in all Keste was an amazing experience, one that I look forward to visiting again very soon with a group of good friends and great conversation.

Tomorrow we will conquer the last 2 pizza places, but for now, have dreams of Keste and it's connection with Italy's spectacular history.