Congratulations to Nathan for taking the next step in his pizza journey.
Many of you saw the video provided by Nathan Ingram on his quest to develop the perfect sourdough crust recipe using his Pizza-Porta. Nathan took the plunge and bought his own food truck. He was featured last week in his hometown newspaper. Congratulations Nathan - We wish you the best! If you are near Hampton Roads VA -check him out.
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By MATTHEW KORFHAGE
THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT |
MAY 07, 2021 AT 7:40 AM
Sour Street Pizza
A pepperoni pizza baking in the Mugnaini wood-fired oven in the Sour Street Pizza trailer. (Courtesy Nathan Ingram)
Norfolk and Virginia Beach. Schedule and menu at sourstreetpizza.com. 757-403-6705
Nathan Ingram did what a lot of people did while stuck at home during the pandemic: He got obsessed with dough.
While working from home, he made batch after batch of pizza — with a copy of baker Ken Forkish’s “Flour Water Salt Yeast” and no ingredients in his dough except the ones in the book title.
“I was at my house 24-7,” he said. “I had an IT job, I was in sales. And in between calls and working, I was able to start working on the dough.”
He graduated quickly to sourdough the same way they do it in Naples, maintaining a yeast starter he loaned out to Glass Light Hotel chef Zack Close for that chef’s pandemic experiments in baking. Ingram started making his pizza on a Big Green Egg ceramic grill (with a Pizza-Porta), inviting friends to taste his experiments while socially distanced.
He eventually upgraded to a Mugnaini wood-fired oven weighing down the back of a custom-built trailer from Florida, decked out with a pizzified palm tree in Vaporwave pink, blue and yellow.
As of April, Ingram has been selling wood-fired pizza loosely inspired by the pies of Naples, from simple marinara pies to more offbeat concoctions topped with gorgonzola and fig, or arugula and prosciutto and hot honey.
The dough is already accomplished: thin and crisp at its middle, with a high rise and complex crumb structure around its perimeter, with sourdough character that never slips over into tart or salty, and beautiful leopard spotting beneath its skirt.
Immediately since the truck’s first outings, it is pizza worth traveling for — in particular the more composed creations such as the fig or the prosciutto. You can quibble with the flavor balance on the margherita, perhaps: The sauce was a little too lightly basted and maybe under sweet, the fresh fior di latte mozzarella less moist than some after baking.
But those last tasting notes come, perhaps unfairly, from one of their first days in business. I had been watching Sour Street’s Instagram with such eagerness I simply couldn’t wait.
You probably won’t want to, either.