Ed LaDou, master pizzaiolo
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Home Peter Reinhart Gary Bimonte Chris Bianco Brain Spangler Tony Gemignani |
Ed LaDou from
Legends of Pizza
Ed taught Wolfgang Puck all about pizza. Several years later, he put together the entire menu for California Pizza Kitchen..
Ed is very open about how he views pizza...and the pizza business.
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Albert: This is what you say about pizzaiolo: “A rag tag collection of misfit, outcast, burnt-out, adolescent, working-class, boozing, womanizing, food gods have populated the pizza making craft many years and probably since it’s inception.”
Ed: Oh, yeah.
Albert "I include myself proudly in one or more of these categories at various stages of my life and career."That’s kind of how you see pizza at business?
Ed: Yeah. Pizza has always been kind of the stepchild of the culinary field that people never really knew how to place it categorically. A lot of people considered it fast food and lumped it in with hamburgers and hotdogs.
Other people considered it ethnic cuisine and put it in with spaghetti and meatballs and lasagna. Really, the whole history of pizza from its inception was flagged a food form that was designed to be eaten while you’re working by hand that is easily transportable. So, it didn’t call for fine craftsmanship.
It called for a lot of improvisation and adaptation of local produce or local food, cheeses, or anchovies or whatever was available that it’s made of and so on. There was a lot of adaptation and a lot of free form of the pizzaiolos. I’m kind of getting to the point where I can actually lump myself into that category. You know, I worked with the guys who worked in their t-shirts with their arms rolled up and the cigarettes behind their ear. I worked shoulder to shoulder with those guys and there is a long history of that.
Hand selecting the peppers or the onions or the rapini or the radicchio or how sweet you want the roasted garlic to be and that kind of consideration is just a wonderful craft because it nourishes people and makes people healthy.
It keeps people alive. You can’t do it for any length of time and be good at it without loving it, without being able to appreciate that transmission that you’ve become a part of the process of.
Here is an excerpt of an Interview with Ed:
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Cooking pizza is unlike a lot of the other cooking crafts. We are like heavily on speed and getting the pizzas in and out fast. So, that whole speed production gives you another mentality that some of the more refined cooking styles don’t have.
It doesn’t take long to build a relationship with it because if you work with dough on a daily basis which I’ve done for pretty much thirty years, there is a certain transmission that comes from it.
You start to kind of respect this living organism that is on the table and you become sensitive to its touch and to its smell and to appearance and it becomes very plush-like and lifelike to you. In that respect, it does take on a certain spirituality. I’m talking pretty specifically here just with the dough process. That also overflows into today’s contemporary pizzas where you can have that same kind of respect for the produce that you put on it.
Sadly Ed LaDou passed away in December, 2007.
You can read my tribute to Ed LaDou
at the Pizza Therapy Pizza Blog
Hear more stories, here:
Legends of Pizza Volume 2 on CD
Legends of Pizza Download on MP3
Tony Gemignani Brian Spangler Ed LaDou
Legends of Pizza Volume 1 on CD
Legends of Pizza Download on MP3
Featuring interviews with: Chris Bianco Gary Bimonte Peter Reinhart
Read The Legends of Pizza e-Book.
(Contains transcripts of all interviews)
