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Once you become a convert to wood-fired pizza, other ‘zas lose a bit of their magic.
The fire has a way of balancing the yeastiness and the chew of the crust, just so. You don’t want to throw away the crusts. You don’t want to dunk them in marinara, "Buttery Garlic," or (pizza gods, forgive us), "Cheezy Jalapeño" sauce. You just want to eat them exactly the way they are. The crust isn’t an afterthought – it’s more like a dessert.
Once upon a time, St. Louis had a pizza truck with a mobile wood-fired oven that worked the streets. Wanderlust Pizza, a funky-cool, shiny 1973 Airstream trailer retrofitted to serve great pizza, drove away into the sunset almost two years ago. Owner Erik Jacobs followed his wife to the Bay Area where a new job awaited her. We’ve had other pizza trucks in the meantime, but none of them have been outfitted with a wood-burning oven – until now.
Bravado’s Pizzaria has been plying the corporate office-park hinterlands of the Lou for about a year. What the employees of various chemical companies and auto dealerships in the area have been eating is a superior, wood-fired product that Downtown food-truck patrons would surely love to get their mitts on.
Bravado’s owner/chef Randy Hoffman (above) makes and tosses the dough himself, and makes the red sauce for the pizza, too. He uses whole-milk mozzarella. (Provel might not survive the 1,200-degree heat of the wood oven, if you were wondering.) Toppings are standard – pepperoni, sausage, bacon, ham, hamburger, Canadian bacon, peppers, mushrooms, black olives, onions, and jalapenos are available. Customers can order slices or whole pies (which measure 10” to 16”).
“It took me two years to figure out this dough,” said Hoffman, who made pizza at the former Agostino’s Little Place. “And I don’t use a mixer on my dough, I use my guns,” he said, slapping his forearms. “I’m the only one that tosses the dough. It’s a lot of work.”
The dough not only had to taste right, it had to jibe with the portable oven, and all wood-burning pizza ovens, any pizzaiolo would surely tell you, are tetchy like thoroughbreds. Each has its own personality and must be coddled and cajoled. But when the right wood oven and the right dough find each other, it's like this.
“The design of the oven is paramount,” said Hoffman. “It has to withstand the rigors of a food truck. You can’t just put a brick oven in the back of a truck. There are issues with weight, structure, durability and safety.”
Bravado’s also sells salads with house-made dressings and cannoli with house-made filling, but those are the Dom and Vince DiMaggio to the Joltin’ Joe that is the pizza.
Hoffman may or may not park the Bravado’s Pizza vehicle in a popular spot like Citygarden or Wells Fargo for Joe Officeworker to patronize the truck anytime soon. He doesn’t have to, he says – he has reached the enviable plateau where he gets all the business he can handle from corporate gigs, five days a week. He arranges to come to a big office building or factory or Mercedes dealership, and the employees pour forth to order the wood-fired pies.
This is to say that if you want to try Bravado’s pizza, you pretty much have to call Hoffman or post something on the Bravado’s Facebook page, ask him which business he’s hitting today, shlep there, and get in line with that business’ employees. If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain.
But at the end of your pilgrimage you'll find pizza salvation.
