Walk into our place on NW Market Street in Ballard and you will not see anything about flour on the wall. There is no sign, no plaque, nothing on the menu. Hardly anyone has ever asked.
But it is the decision we think about most, and it is the reason the crust tastes the way it does.
We are an Indian family. At home we make roti, and we have always made it with organic flour. Not because it is fashionable, but because that is how it was done, and because you can taste the difference in something as plain as a flatbread with nothing on it.
When we opened a pizza place, the question answered itself. If we would not use commodity flour at our own table, we were not going to build a business on it.
Our dough is made with organic flour from Cairnspring Mills in the Skagit Valley, about an hour north of here.
Cairnspring buys grain directly from Washington farmers and mills it fresh, rather than shipping in commodity flour from wherever is cheapest that month. The farms have names. The wheat has names. That is not something you can say about most flour.
We stay in touch with them constantly. We have still never made it up there to see the mill, which is a little embarrassing given how much of it we go through.
Cairnspring flour costs us roughly five times what commodity flour would.
That is not a rounding error on a pizza menu. It is a real number that turns up every week, and there is no version of this where it pays for itself in customers who came specifically for the flour. Hardly anyone knows.
We do it anyway, for the same reason we use it at home.
Flour this good does not need much help, so we do not give it much. Our dough is flour, water, yeast, salt and oil. That is the whole list.
The rest is time. Slow, cold fermentation is where the flavor comes from, and you cannot rush it or fake it.
The result is a crust that tastes like something on its own. Pull the edge off a slice and eat it plain, with nothing on it. That is the test, and it is the one most pizza fails.
Is the dough vegan? Yes. Flour, water, yeast, salt and oil. No dairy, no egg, nothing from an animal. Our Maui Wowie is fully vegan too, built with vegan mozzarella and soyrizo rather than a cheese pizza with the cheese left off.
Is it gluten free? No. Our cheese and sauce are, but the dough is not, and we would rather tell you plainly than have you make the trip for nothing.
You do not have to care about any of this to enjoy the pizza. Most people do not, and that is fine.
But if you have ever bitten into a crust and thought there was not much there, it was probably the flour.
We are at 2446 NW Market St in Ballard, open Monday from 2pm and from noon the rest of the week. Dogs are welcome inside as well as on the patio, and there is no cutoff time for kids.
