Pizza - Sarah Minnick

Episode transcripts for the TV series, "Chef's Table". Aired: April 26, 2015 – present.*
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American documentary series takes viewers inside both the lives and kitchens of a variety of acclaimed and successful international chefs, with each episode placing the spotlight on a single chef and exploring the unique lives, talents and passions which influence their style of cooking.
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Pizza - Sarah Minnick

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[soft ambient music playing]

[faint birdsong]

[woman ] Pizza is known for toppings
like pepperoni, sauce, and cheese.

I don't find that to be where my heart is.

It's very magical
when you can just go into your yard

and see stuff
that's popping up everywhere,

and you're just like,

"Guess what,
we're gonna eat that for dinner."

I've really come to love the pepperiness,

the spiciness,

the bitterness of weird weeds.

I know that that's gonna
be the secret good stuff.

I've heard many people say
it should just be cheese and sauce.

That's the measure of a good pizza.

I just don't find that to be true.

[alternative rock music playing]

[woman ] People feel like
there are actual limits on pizza.

Pizza is an expression of a pizza maker.

Everyone should explore that
for themselves.

[Vivaldi's "Winter" concerto playing]

[woman ] In Portland,

we have D-I-Y and punk ethos

running through our city.

People have this spunky spirit
of being their own entrepreneurs.

They launch their own coffee shops,

food carts, and pizza shops.

We've liked seeing people

come up with their own ideas

on their own terms.

[Karen] What matters here
is having something to say.

[upbeat electronic music playing]

[Karen] And Sarah Minnick
has a lot to say.

[Karen] Lovely's Fifty Fifty
is a neighborhood pizza shop

that happens to serve,

by the sheer will
of Sarah Minnick and her family,

some of the best pizza
and ice cream in Portland.

This isn't the place to come
to eat pepperoni pizza.

[Lane] This is the place
to try something new.

Sarah's veggie-centric creations…

That is her art,
and that's where she really shines.

[Karen] Everyone serves
seasonal food in Portland.

But Sarah Minnick goes beyond
the farmers' market.

She hunts for wild edibles.

She taps into farmers
who are doing experimental things.

At Lovely's, I've encountered vegetables

that I've never seen
anywhere on the planet.

Wasabi-like mustard greens,

fenugreek, and echinacea flowers.

These ingredients would be a w*r crime
in a Jersey slice shop.

These pies are not beholden
to any doctrines.

At the end of the day,

this is just damn good
pizza and ice cream.

Emily, were each
of those white flours a thousand grams?

[Emily] I think they were
a thousand grams. Yeah.

-Perfect.
-Yeah.

[Sarah] How's, uh, table five?

-Good.
-Okay.

-Any more pizza there? They want any pie?
-They got two.

Okay. Cool.

[Sarah] In Portland,

most restaurants are run
in this very do-it-yourself way.

There's restaurants where,
their opening night they were just like,

"Can everybody just
bring a chair to donate?"

There are many restaurants
furnished completely from Goodwill.

We did the same thing.

That's what we thought you did.

[gentle piano music playing]

[Sarah] At Lovely's,
my sister is the host.

She remembers everybody's kids' names.

How old they are. What school they go to.

That's a very key ingredient.

My mom has always been our accountant.

When we first opened,

she showed up every day
and made a hundred waffle cones.

She wanted to prove that she could do it.

My daughter, Sophie,

she started working here pretty young.

Now, she's a master pizza box folder.

In Portland, you start something
with very little money,

no investors,

because you're like,
"I think I can make this work."

There's a level of confidence
because the support is here for that.

-Not too spicy. Wait.
-Yeah.

-Not too spicy. Kinda smoky…
-No, they are. [laughs] They're spicy.

-Smoky and spicy at the same time.
-Yeah, they're good. Yeah.

[male vendor] Oh, the corn.

It's so sweet right now.

How many do you want today?

[Sarah] Maybe, like, two dozen.

[Sarah] At Lovely's,

there's no rule saying
we have to have the same thing day to day.

I start with the ingredient and find out
where it's gonna fit into the menu.

[alternative rock music playing]

[Sarah] When I go to the market,

anything I find
is gonna set the pace of the night.

That's what keeps it interesting.

If I see something perfectly ripe
and in season,

I will try to put it on the menu.

If there's a wild card ingredient
that I haven't used before,

I have to go through an entire night
of making that pizza, to adjust.

Tomato sauce can affect how a pizza cooks.

So, if it's up to me,

it's going to be
just cheese, vegetables, and dough.

Laying out a pizza, it can be beautiful.

As beautiful as any piece of art.

Many restaurants will set the menu
for the whole year.

I would be extremely bored
making the same pizzas every day.

Seeing pizza from start to finish…

that cycle is really satisfying
and important to me.

It's endlessly gratifying.

[Sarah] When I was younger,
I was impulsive.

I didn't do well
with the rigid system of school.

I remember seeing my dad
go to work every day.

Wearing a suit, wearing a tie.

[Sarah] I didn't see myself doing that.

I wanted something different.

Something unexpected.

[soft ambient music playing]

[Sarah] When I went to college,
my major was fine arts.

And when it came time
to sign up for a work-study job,

they were like, "Here's the options…"

"Work in the school office."

"You can do this, you can do this,
then we have one

that's working in the student café."
And I was like, "Oh, that's cool."

[Sarah] When I got in there,

there was a lot of freedom.

I was there early in the morning.
I stayed till late at night.

I worked really hard doing it.

I enjoyed the culture.

There were like-minded, creative people.

At one point, a friend was like,
"I know you want to be a painter,

but it seems you like running
the little restaurant café better."

And I was like, "Uh-oh, busted." [laughs]

[Sarah] I felt guilty.

I knew I really enjoyed it.

But there was stigma
around working in kitchens.

It was frowned on as a career.

[wires clatter on table]

[Sarah] After I graduated from art school,
I was torn.

I knew that I loved
working in restaurants.

But after I'd gone to art school

and spent the money on it,
and family had helped with that,

I felt responsible to make that my career.

[soft guitar music playing]

[Sarah] Around that time,

I saw a job in the paper
for a pattern maker at Adidas.

I thought, "This could be
a good career path for me."

"I can work creatively and get a job."

I applied and got the job.

In the beginning, it was like,
"Okay, cool, this is great."

"I get on with my team.
I'm gonna find the camaraderie there."

The job had benefits,
it had  (k), it had all these things.

At my first review,

the team leader was like,
"You're doing great."

"I think the path here for you

is in ten years
you could be a team leader." [laughs]

I was just like, "What?!"

[Sarah] Hearing that triggered
something in me that made it impossible

to keep enjoying the job.

It stopped being creative.
It stopped being fun.

I just didn't see a way to keep it going.

[Sarah] I had to figure out a way
to get out of my job at Adidas.

At the time in Portland, there were
a lot of do-it-yourself restaurants.

They made very simple food.

They put it on vintage dishes.

They opened in a house, with no money.

They made it look easy.

I thought, if you open a restaurant,
that's a career.

That seems like something to be proud of.

That's when I started to plot
opening a restaurant.

[soft piano music playing]

[Sarah] At the time,
there was a house for sale.

It had that Portland spirit to it.

And so I took out a loan
and turned it into a restaurant.

The restaurant was called
Lovely Hula Hands.

It took a lot of elbow grease
getting it painted,

getting it decorated.

It was a family-run business.

My boyfriend at the time was the cook.

My sister and I
ran the front of the house.

I kept my real job and worked at night.

Seeing people actually show up,
seeing people enjoy it…

I was totally exhilarated.

It felt like I was doing something that
was way too fun to be counted as a job.

I loved it.

[Sarah] I don't need a trowel
if I just turn it over.

The trowel is over at my house,
so I'll go get it.

[Sarah] Mom, you wanna help with this?

-Here you go.
-Okay.

All right.

[Sarah] My favorite ice creams
have flavors you don't see everywhere.

In my sister's yard,
we have this fig tree.

It makes really terrible figs.

But I thought,
maybe I could use the fig leaves.

[upbeat electronic music playing]

[Sarah] First, I will take
a ton of leaves.

I'll snip 'em all off,

and then layer them up in my oven
at a really low temperature.

Then they crisp up.

I usually crunch 'em up into little pieces

and put them in the cream, and cook them.

It thickens almost into a yogurt.

When infusing an ice cream
for the first time,

there is this element of surprise.

I remember lifting off the lid,
it was, like, figs.

The flavor of figs
without the mess of figs.

Fig ice cream without the bullshit.

[Karen] Do not sleep
on Lovely's ice cream.

One half of this is pizza.

The other half is ice cream.

Despite what might sound
like highfalutin ingredients,

I'm here to tell you,

nobody makes better ice cream
in Portland than Sarah Minnick.

[birdsong]

[Sarah] About two years after we opened
Lovely Hula Hands,

we'd often end up in the dining guides
in the local papers.

I quit my job at Adidas.

All the hard work was paying off.

And then my boyfriend
at the time was like,

"You know, I don't want to do it anymore."

"I don't want to be the chef."

I was scared.

[soft ambient music playing]

[Sarah] I didn't see a way
for it to work out.

Then I found Troy MacLarty.

He had worked at Chez Panisse,

a landmark farm-to-table restaurant
in Berkeley, California.

When I met Troy, we went down to visit.

At Chez Panisse,
they work with foragers and farmers.

The ingredients were seasonal.

The food was really good.

I was totally blown away.

When Troy took over the restaurant,

he put a seasonal focus on the menu.

We got into the groove
of working together.

I was tasting the menu every day.

I was really inspired.

Before Troy, I really hadn't learned
that much about cooking, in general.

I really started to see it as being
instrumental to a good restaurant.

-[woman] Getting ready for the weekend?
-[Sarah] Yes.

Did you get my message about what we have?

-[woman] I think Ian has a list.
-More or less.

-Yeah.
-[Sarah] Okay. Great.

-We ever sent you this one too?
-I don't think so.

It's a brandnetelkaas.

It's a Belgian nettle cheese.
It's kinda almost like a Havarti.

Melts really cool.

[Sarah] Mm.

That's so good. It's really bright.

[Ian] It's one of my favorite things.
Perfect.

That'd be good with peaches.
Like a good melter. That's just like…

-Yeah. That…
-…highlights that.

[Ian] That, I think, is, uh,
pretty much a flawless cheese.

[Sarah] That's so good.
I guess I never got that one before.

[Sarah] We were running the restaurant,

and we'd had really good success.

It had been really busy for a few years.

But at some point,
it got so much good press,

people did perceive it
as a special-occasion place.

It became a little stuffy.

People were like, "We love this place.
We come on our anniversary every year."

I remember thinking, like,

"Yeah, we don't really
want to build that."

[gentle ambient music playing]

[Sarah] We wanted a more casual place
where people came once a week.

At that time, Portland really didn't have
an ice cream shop.

And I thought that
we had a lot of room for one.

But I thought in the winter,
that'll be a little rough.

No one wants ice cream on snowy days.

I was like,
"Pizza seems like a good counterpart."

Pizza and ice cream.

Lovely's Fifty Fifty.

I thought this is an obvious winner.

A restaurant like that has a place
in almost every neighborhood.

Alice, will you run around
and grab me a dough card, that way?

-[Alice] An orange one?
-Just white.

Hot things here for you.

[Sarah] Oh.

-[Sarah] Stir it back in for a second?
-[Alice] Sure.

[Sarah] We started construction
on the pizza place.

We were feeling good about it.

And that's when Troy left.

[gentle ambient music playing]

[Sarah] I hired
a series of chefs after that.

And none of them worked out.

The food would be weird,
or just not what I expected.

I just couldn't find someone
that I liked their way of cooking.

During that time,
there was an economic recession.

At Hula Hands,
we started to have very slow nights.

I remember that first day

it became a real possibility
that we were gonna have to close it.

I went to my mom's house.
She asked me for the numbers.

And she's just like,

"If it keeps going like this,
you can't keep it."

I decided that we should just close it.

Two weeks later,
we opened the pizza place.

[seagulls squawking]

[girl] Whoa, look at this giant mussel.

[Sarah] I don't know how they do
when they're, under there, under there.

-[girl] There's literally ten.
-[Sarah chuckles]

Last time we were here

there was a baby seagull
on top of that rock.

I thought it was just a baby.
I was like, "What?"

[Sarah laughs]

[Sarah] When we opened the pizza place,

I had no choice
but to step in the kitchen.

I didn't want to be at someone's mercy
if they decided to leave.

At that point, I had never
made a single pizza,

or dough, or anything like that.

[Sarah] My sister and I had fears
that it wasn't gonna work out.

[gentle ambient music playing]

[Sarah] We just thought,
"This is our last sh*t."

"We have to make it work."

First time I made pizza dough…

I went to the grocery store
and got Gold Medal flour.

I had some active yeast.

I put it in the KitchenAid,

mixed it for minutes.

It was a dry, sad blob.

I didn't end up making pizza with it.

I doubted myself.

Did I make the right decision?

I closed this restaurant
that everybody loved.

At the time,
my son was not even a year old.

Some of those key parenting things
weren't there.

I remember this one morning I was like,
"Mom, can you take Otto today?"

"I have to go to work early."

"I have to learn how to ball dough."

And she was just like,

"He's a baby!"

It was a really intense time.

I had to work
an astronomical amount of hours

to learn the job.

It was really hard.

[Sarah] Okay, so for soup…

What do you think?
Do you-- Would you rather do lentil?

-Sure.
-We could do it with potatoes.

We have those nice carrots…

-[Sarah] Yeah. With yogurt?
-[Emily] Mm-hmm.

-Nice.
-We have some nice dill back there.

Okay, let's do that.

[Sarah] One day, I saw an advertisement
for the Tartine Bread book.

I'd read in that book that pizza dough
and bread dough were the same.

I couldn't go do
a week-long workshop somewhere.

So, to teach myself,
I started making bread every day.

[alternative rock music playing]

[Sarah] I had a real desperation
to get good at it.

My first day, it was really poofy.

So I made a couple of adjustments
the next day.

It was better.

I made a couple of adjustments
the next day, and it was better.

I started to run with that.

I was able to see how it worked.

Fermentation,
the different ways of balling it up,

the results from using different flours.

All the little details of it.

One day, I decided
I would change the pizza dough.

This regular,
who was a little intimidating,

I saw him coming up to me.

I was at the pizza station.

He was like, "So I noticed it was
a little shaky there for a while."

And I was like, "Yes."

He was like,

"But now you're coming back up.
It's getting better."

And I was like, "Oh God. Okay, good."

From that point on,
we never had an issue with the dough.

We were in a really good place with it.

[Sarah] I read this, probably, times.

Pretty… It's pretty b*at.

I mean, I made bread every day
for probably over five years.

[chuckles] So, many hours.

[Sarah] I had become really comfortable
making the dough for pizza.

I was like, "Okay, well, I think
there's time to learn more things here."

So it's gonna be toppings.

[Sarah] When I first started
to go to the farmers' market,

I would buy produce from my friend, Lane.

I thought she just sold vegetables.

Somewhere along the line, she's like,

"No, I actually do research
for seed growing and seed breeding."

She asked me if I wanted
to come to one of her events.

[mellow rock music playing]

I was looking for some chefs

that paid a lot of attention
to flavor and texture.

[Lane] I noticed how Sarah
picked out vegetables.

She was no-nonsense.

So I introduced her to farmers,
plant breeders, and seed growers.

Sarah really dove into it.

[woman] Over here is the purslane.

I don't know why anybody eats spinach.

It's so much more flavorful
than most vegetables.

[Sarah] When I first met
Anthony and Carol,

they gave me a little bag
of dried Astianas.

It used to be that people would think

that a tomato wasn't ripe
if it had this green shoulder.

But it actually is an indicator

of enhanced flavor.

[Sarah] It's a deep, deep tomato flavor.

They were delicious.

[man] The orach's a little bit
lower to the ground.

Even when they're larger,
they're more compact.

[Sarah] Dan introduced me
to the more idiosyncratic greens.

When Dan grows orach,

he's buying green orach, purple orach.

He's letting them overlap
because he thinks that that's beautiful.

[Sarah] It opened my eyes up
to another world of ingredients.

It was something you wake up to
and then can't go back from.

[faint birdsong]

[leaves rustling]

[Anthony] These are the blackberries.

When I first started at the farm,

I would look and say,

"Every single berry
that drops into the bucket

must break your heart
because you're not going to eat it."

[laughs]

[Anthony] Let's see if they will
break your heart.

Mm. Yeah. It did.

Mm.

[Sarah] From the first time I ever met
seed breeders and farmers,

I was blown away.

I wanted to highlight what they grew.

[upbeat electronic music playing]

[Sarah] At the time, Portland started
to have a year-round market.

Every week, I'd get up really early,
go to the farmers' market,

and see what they had.

Lug a bunch of pounds of produce,
come back to Lovely's, prep it all,

make a hundred pizzas.

I got really good at incorporating even
some of the most scraggly ingredients.

I tried everything.

Plantain weeds
with the roots still attached.

Fermented tomatoes.

Grapes.

Chicories.

All kinds of weird stuff.

Not the things that people
normally think of for pizza.

Eventually, I got all the cheeses
in the right place.

I mastered the toppings.

At one point I was like,
"We're putting out seriously good pizza."

I was just sure of that.

[patrons chattering]

[Sarah] A few years in,

I started hitting the mark
where I knew that it was really good.

But we weren't getting
that extra push of business.

We needed someone to notice.

[soft ambient music playing]

[Sarah] One night, Karen Brooks came in.

I had known her
from reviewing the previous restaurants.

I was pretty nervous.

If she writes something
in Portland Monthly,

it will be something
that people read and respect.

[Karen] One night in ,

I go for some pizza.

I take a bite.

There's barely any sauce.

There's a minimum of cheese.

There are flavors
that you do not associate with pizza.

Sour, floral, spice, and funk.

It was enchanting.

It was idiosyncratic.

It was what happens
when you no longer care

about New York pizza cred,
or Neapolitan purity.

Only happiness.

And that's a Portland pizza.

[Sarah] After that,
there were new customers noticing us.

This place was full of kids.

Full of families, full of people.

We did it all ourselves.

We just made it good,

and got it so people would notice
on our own.

[Karen] Sarah Minnick
went totally down the rabbit hole

and emerged
the bold auteur of the Portland pie.

[Karen] Within a year,

the rest of the world discovered
what we've known for some time.

Portland is one hell
of a great pizza city.

[alternative rock music playing]

We should put calendula on that one, Alex.

[Sarah] For a long time,
I saw the restaurant as being something

where I sacrificed time with kids.

But in the end, there were many things
that trickled down to them.

[soft ambient music playing]

[Sarah] For my daughter, Sophie,

she knows if you
really want to do something,

you can do it by pure hard work.

I'm happy that I provided that for her.

[Sarah] It was apparent at an early age

that I really enjoyed
working in restaurants.

But I was a little worried
about it being a career.

Pizza ended up being my passion.

The thing I'm really good at.

But it took a lot of ingredients to see
that that was the answer.

Being happy,

having a job that I love,

and being able to provide for my family.

I will never, ever take that for granted.

[Karen] A friend of mine said to me,

"I was wrong. You were right."

"It's the weird sh*t that's great."

Sarah Minnick changed what pizza can be.

What she does is completely different.

There is only one Lovely's Fifty Fifty.

And there is only one Sarah Minnick.

To pizza. To family.

[soft ambient music playing]

[alternative rock music playing]

[soft ambient music playing]
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