February 12, 2025

AmericanHummus

Food & Travel Enthusiast

This clam pizza recipe normally takes 10 minutes and is a style of Connecticut

This clam pizza recipe normally takes 10 minutes and is a style of Connecticut

There’s a pizza out there with no tomato sauce and no mozzarella. It has clams — at times even now in their shell — moreover, some would say sacrilegiously, pecorino Romano cheese, alongside with garlic, dried chile, and most likely oregano or parsley. It bucks so several pizza conventions that it could not have been engineered and target-grouped in a lab. Rather, the white clam pie from New Haven, Conn., is an alchemy of a particular time, place and labor pressure, and it’s so deliriously superior — piquant, briny, vivid — that it is really worth ripping off at household.

Frank Pepe is broadly identified as the originator of New Haven-model pizza and particularly the white clam pizza. He started out by marketing two kinds of pizza out of a pushcart to manufacturing facility personnel ahead of opening his restaurant in 1925. It continues to be open and the longest-running pizza joint in the spot, albeit in a diverse spot down the highway.

The pizza he designed was very similar to the pizza in his hometown of Naples, with a slim crust and a a little bit soaked center. His pizzas had been a small crisper, even though, with significant char due to the fact they were cooked in coal ovens, which burn hotter and drier than the wooden hearth of Neapolitan pizzas.

At Pepe’s, they also served uncooked, freshly shucked littlenecks from nearby Rhode Island as an appetizer, and by some means, at some level in the 1960s, in a tale that’s misplaced to historical past, these clams designed it atop a white pizza. Justification me, apizza, to use the Connecticut-Neapolitan vernacular, or “abeets” for small.

Pork chops meet a dirty martini: A saucy dish finest shaken, not stirred

This toast has equivalent appeal and flavors as all those New Haven pies, but it is created with staples you could possibly even have in your home right now (no clam-shucking for you). Stir with each other canned clams with a heady mix of pecorino cheese, garlic, dried oregano, lemon zest and purple pepper flakes. Lightly toast some bread under the broiler this could be a slice of sourdough, a break up French roll or whichever you have on hand. An English muffin would be pleasant. Spoon the clam mixture on to the bread, then broil right up until effervescent, just a several minutes. A tiny singe all over the edges of the bread will remind you of the coal-fire char of the original.

You might’ve caught on currently, but this toast arrives together incredibly rapidly it’s an excellent food for crazed lunchtimes or late-evening dinners. I’ve started earning a double or triple batch of the clam combination and retaining it on hand in the fridge to dole it out even faster. With out neighborhood clams and a coal oven that eclipses 1000°F, can you make a white clam pie at dwelling? No, and indeed … form of. These toasts are a mere slice of the authentic offer, enough to tide you about until finally you can make a pilgrimage to New Haven.

Get the recipe: French Bread Clam Pizza