A Day Off With Chef Julie Andres

Julie Andres leads me into her cozy Columbia City backyard. “When we bought this house, there was a hot tub here,” she says, “and
I am so not a hot tub person.” But the cement slab that held the tub struck her as the perfect place for a pizza oven. When they aren’t working, she and husband Evan, owners of Sicilian-inspired La Medusa (where Julie is chef) and Columbia City Bakery (where Evan bakes), hold pizza parties all summer. So, I invited myself over for one of their get-togethers and asked for a pizza-making lesson.

The Plan: Spend the day cooking pizzas in the pizza oven.

The Dish: Pizza with salmoriglio sauce and heirloom tomatoes, a La Medusa specialty.

The Basics: “I think less is more with pizza,” says Julie. “You start with good things and you come out with good things.” And, she notes, “Unlike most of America, I like a crackery thin crust. I want to be able to eat a lot of pizza at one sitting."

The Lesson: Using Julie’s homemade dough, I assemble a minimalist pizza of tomato sauce, cippolini and Parmigiano. “You’ve done this before, right?” she asks. Not exactly, I admit, as my pizza gets stretched out of shape while I attempt to load it onto a long spatula known in pizza parlance as a peel. I thrust it confidently into the backyard applewood-fired oven, which Julie and Evan built themselves. I lean in close to watch my crust bubble up. “You have to sacrifice a few eyebrows,” jokes Julie.

Rotating the pizza while it cooks is vital, since much of the heat is coming from the pile of burning logs on one side of the oven. After watching me attempt to maneuver my pie with the peel, Julie demonstrates, pulling the pizza out of the oven and giving it a quick turn with her hand, then shoving it back in. OK, then.

The Meal: After slaving away for, oh, two minutes on my pizza (wood ovens are hot!), I present it to the 10 or so assembled guests, where it is given the thumbs-up and quickly disappears. I lose count of how many pizzas we make, because as each emerges from the oven, it is gobbled up in similar fashion. (One of the gobblers is La Medusa chef Sean Dominoski, who was recently promoted from sous-chef and who has absolutely no trouble with the pizza peel.)

As we’re eating, I ask Julie about her favorite pizza topping, and she looks at me like a mother asked to name her favorite child. “Salmoriglio sauce,” she finally decides. It’s a gutsy garlic-anchovy sauce, salty and rich, found on pizzas at La Medusa.