Bad Cholesterol will make you very happy
A former lawyer is making heavenly sourdough pies.
Friends,
The other night I was walking into Talea, my favorite neighborhood brewery, for a beer before attending a reading and discussion of Yewande Komolafe’s new cookbook My Every Day Lagos with Nikita Richardson at The Invisible Dog (a great event and a fantastic book!). I was in need of some dinner and as I was walking into Talea, there’s a guy outside making pizzas. He’s got two little pizza ovens set up behind him and a menu with two pies: one plain and one spicy. The pies are coming out and they look pretty darn good so I order one.
I’m inside at the bar, and I’ve got my New Yorker out, reading Simon Rich’s latest Shouts & Murmurs column which was making me laugh out loud, when the guy making the pizzas delivers the pie to me at the bar. It was about 10 inches, cut into four nice triangles, all hot and bubbly, the charred crust beautifully puffed up around the edges like it had just seen a fancy dermatologist on the Upper East Side for a series of injectables.
The pizza was delicious. The sauce was a showstopper, pulpy rich dark tomato sauce spiced up with Calabrian chilis from the inside out, so there’s lip licking heat in every bite. There were a couple of puddles of creamy melted mozzarella to tame the heat, a few slices of sopressata, and that crust! Light and airy, but also strong, powerful and determined, like Barbie after visiting the real world. I loved it. I was not intending to eat the entire pie but yes I did. I’d have eaten a second if it were in front of me. It was that good.
After my beer and pie, I had a chance to chat with the baker/pizza maker. His name is Chris Milazzo and, like me, he’s a recovering lawyer. Two years ago he left his fancy law job and got into baking croissants and pastry, and like many others, started his own mother for bread.
Instead of loaves though, he turned to sourdough pizza, self taught, just with the aid of YouTube. “I did a lot of screwing up,” he told me as we chatted outside on a warm November night.
Chris began his culinary career by selling croissants in local parks and at unsanctioned farmer’s markets. He soon started popping up at New York’s best breweries, serving his serious sourdough pizzas.
With a history of bad cholesterol, and all the croissants and pastry he was baking, he named his shop Bad Cholesterol Bakery, and now he’s doing all manner of danish and viennoiserie as well as a roster of four pies and small plates. He pops up at Talea in Cobble Hill every Wednesday for their Trivia night, and every Saturday at the Talea Williamsburg location. The good news is that he is opening a ghost kitchen in downtown Brooklyn and will start doing formal takeout and delivery in January 2024. You can help him open!
I hope you’ll check out Bad Cholesterol over at Talea and try one of his pies. Be sure to follow him on Instagram to get all the updates on his pop-ups and more. Let me know what you think!
Andrea