A recent challenger within the Big Apple’s neverending pizza wars is just not only making its own pies, breads and pastas — but additionally grinding up artisanal, “ancient” grains to make the flour that goes into them, Side Dish has learned.
Heritage Restaurant & Pizza Bar near Bryant Park plans to make use of ancient grains milled at its adjoining Heritage Grand Bakery to create wood-fired pizzas, pastas and breads served with other menu items.
“Their taste is totally different,” Heritage Grand Bakery’s CEO Lou Ramirez told Side Dish. “You don’t feel filled up.”
Ramirez partnered with Luc Boulet, a fourth-generation bread artisan from France, and Alex Garese, founding father of the Wolkonsky Bakery chain in Russia and Ukraine to open Heritage Grand Bakery last December.
The brand new 3,000 square-foot restaurant at 8 West fortieth St. – set to open Wednesday – shares the identical address because the bakery, which has a modest eight seats. The restaurant and pizza bar may have room for 120 people, plus 60 additional seats in a non-public dining room.
The traditional and heritage grains come from the south of France, Belgium — and upstate Recent York’s Wild Hive Farm in Clinton Corners.
“Ancient grains make every little thing a lot more energizing, unadulterated, with no additives. “They should not genetically modified and have only two or three chromosones — in comparison with others which have 23 to 25 chromosones,” Ramirez said.
With biblical sounding names like emmer, teff and amanith, the grains have “15,000- to twenty,000-year-old lineages” said Ramirez, who was previously a partner in Maison Kayser, Fig & Olive and president of Le Pain Quotidien.
Heritage Restaurant & Pizza Bar near Bryant Park plans to make use of ancient grains to create wood-fired pizzas, pastas and breads served with other menu items.
Alex Staniloff
“Their taste is totally different,” Heritage Grand Bakery’s CEO Lou Ramirez told Side Dish. “You don’t feel filled up.”Alex Staniloff
Grand Heritage Bakery’s executive head baker Mark Fiorentino, previously the Chef Boulenger at Daniel, trained outside Brussels to learn the way to work with the traditional grains.
“Ancient grains are very different from multi-purpose flour. It’s very difficult to work with. Unlike flour you get from big mills that has been fortified and has different additives, these grains are different each time, depending on the soil and climate and weather, so we’re consistently tweaking the recipes to create great breads,” Ramirez said.
Boulet added that ancestral bread-making techniques “allow the dough and bread to grow like all living organisms.”
That provides the pizza crusts a “deeper, richer flavor and color than white flour,” Boulet said.
“Ancient grains make every little thing a lot more energizing, unadulterated, with no additives,” says Heritage CEO Lou Ramirez.Lou Ramirez
Heritage Grand Bakery is adjoining to the brand new restaurant.Alex Staniloff
And as a bonus, it doesn’t leave a bloated feeling like pizzas created from white bread.
“The traditional grain flour enables the pizza to be produced with a thinner crust because the dough is more elastic, so it’s in a position to keep its original shape higher,” Ramirez explained. “This thin crust pizza doesn’t make you full like other pizzas. You might be in a position to taste the flavour of the dough together with all of the ingredients because the crust is just not overpowering.”
The bakery is starting with an ancient grain called European Population in addition to a rye from upstate. The traditional grains einkorn and spelt will probably be next, Boulet added.
The milling is completed in a closed off room — because it is noisy and messy — that’s partly visible from the bakery. The metal, wood and stone machine is over 5 feet tall and the stones are about 18 inches in diameter. The machine shakes the grains, which fall right into a funnel tube and the stones separates the grains, leading to flour that’s then sifted.
The machine shakes the grains, which fall right into a funnel tube and the stones separates the grains, leading to flour that’s then sifted. Lou Ramirez
‘The milling process may be very slow, so that you get essentially the most nutrition out of the grain,” Boulet said, adding that a 50-pound bag of grains will create around 40 to 45 kilos of flour.
The dearth of additives makes the breads easier to digest, and popular with those that seek a gluten-free weight loss plan.
“We get the stocks, the seeds, and we mill on site. It’s very specific and sustainable, with no pesticides. Other crops are grown across the fields to maintain the insects away,” Ramirez said.
The brand new 3,000 square-foot restaurant at 8 West fortieth St. is ready to open Wednesday.
Alex Staniloff
The restaurant and pizza bar may have room for 120 people, plus 60 additional seats in a non-public dining room.
Alex Staniloff
While milling on site is just not yet a trend, Heritage Grand Bakery is in good company. Micheline-starred chef Ignacio Mattos can be using the age-old technique at Rockefeller Center’s Lodi.
Restaurant & Pizza Bar’s Patricia Joseph worked with interior designer Silvia Zofio of SZprojects and lighting designer Hervé Descottes of L’Observatoire International “to create a Mediterranean oasis” in one in all town’s busiest areas.
The design includes reclaimed 200 year-old wood beams, stone arches and grey stone from a mountain in Ontario, Canada, together with Venetian plaster and Balinese furniture.
The bakery group is now trying to buy farms to make their very own grains in places like Vermont and Connecticut, Ramirez said.
