At Eaglewood Golf Course and Event Center in North Salt Lake, Utah, pizza was among the first items Justin Field added to the catering menu when he joined as Executive Chef/Kitchen Manager. Today, the club offers not one or two but three styles: Sicilian, Detroit, and New York.
“My dough process has been ongoing,” Field says. “My first job was in a pizza place at 15 years old. Throughout the years, I’ve held on to the [NY-style] recipe and made it my own. The Detroit pizza, I did a little bit of R&D for. I just wanted to make sure I was getting the ratio on that dough correct. And then the Sicilian pizza, I actually reached out to a place I used to go when I was a child in Queens, called Rizzo’s, and they helped me out with that”
Their advice? Keep it simple.
“Keep it simple, and make it like grandma made it,” Field recalls.
Sicilian pizzas in particular are easy to make for a crowd, Field notes.
”It’s a little different dough than a focaccia, but it’s a very easy-to-put-together dough. You make sheet pans of them, load them up with sauce and toppings, and throw them in the oven. Golfers love them after a tournament.”
The most important thing with any dough product, Field says, is giving it the time and care it needs.
“Especially on a thicker-crust pizza,” he says, “you don’t want to overwork the dough. You don’t want to crush a lot of the CO2 out of it; you want to stretch it gently. And if it’s fighting you, let it rest a couple minutes and then continue with the stretching process.”
Pizza-makers can sometimes be overzealous, he notes. They want to get it done quickly.
“People aren’t necessarily breadmakers, so they don’t understand that it’s still a form of bread.”
Eaglewood’s kitchen is home to a relatively small, double-decker pizza oven. At some point, Field hopes to add a wood-fired oven to the lineup.
“I would love a wood-fired oven that I can put on our patio to do pizza nights out there, where we can cook a more Neapolitan, traditional-style pizza and have events focused around it,” Field says. “Currently, though, I think our pizza oven is quite sufficient for our needs.”
The biggest consumers of pizza at Eaglewood are families with children.
“Pizza made from scratch with good ingredients is actually pretty healthy for you,” Field adds, “compared to other popular kids’ foods. … A lot of people want to take something home with them that reheats well, too. That’s a great way to spread the word because they tend to share with friends.”
