Introducing Gladstone Street's Shut Up & Eat Pizza

To help celebrate Pizza Week, Eater paired up chefs with neighborhood pizzerias to collaborate on special, one-week-only pizzas. Next up: Gladstone Street Pizza welcomes Shut Up & Eat's John Fimmano.

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[Avila, 3/17/14]

At his East Coast-style sandwich shop Shut Up & Eat, co-owner/chef John Fimmano offers a roast-pork sandwich "that's pretty traditional from where I grew up," he says. "The sandwich itself comes hot; it's kind of like a pork French dip, with an au jus. It's a wet sandwich." For a Pizza Week collaboration, Fimmano grabbed the pork-sandwich ingredients from his shop's new deli case and headed across the street to nine-year-old neighborhood pizzeria Gladstone Street Pizza, where co-owner/pizzaiolo John Mitchell re-creates the sandwich, subbing bread and provolone for pizza dough and mozarella. The result tastes close to the original sandwich: "Just in a different shape," Fimmano says.

The dough: Mitchell uses a traditional Neapolitan-style dough — just flour, water, salt, and yeast — creating what he calls "teeny little batches" in an old German bread machine (sometimes, Mitchell and his team will make six or seven 13-pound batches in one night). The result is a "soft and stretchy" dough, which Mitchell prefers to cook in a hotter oven: Set to 700 degrees, the Gladstone oven cooks a large pizza in four minutes.

The pizza: For the special Eater pizza, the duo use Mitchell's usual California-tomato sauce and a cheese blend of mozzarella and fresh-grated Pecorino-Romano, subbing them from the provolone and sharp asiago combination that would normally accompany the pork sandwich. Then, Fimmano adds the Shut Up toppings: To create the pork, Fimmano roasts a Carlton Farms pork butt to a medium-rare temperature, chilling the roast overnight before thin-slicing the meat, cold-cut style. The pork hits the pizza alongside blanched rapini (sauteed with garlic, olive oil, and chili) and house-roasted red peppers, which retain a char and sweetness normally not found in a picked version like Mama Lil's. The result is a savory slice of pizza with a dual crunch: from Mitchell's crust and Fimmano's rapini.

The details: The Shut Up & Eat pizza will be available at Gladstone Street Pizza all through Pizza Week: Score a 14-inch pie for $19 or an 18-inch pizza for $26. Gladstone's hours of operation: 5p.m. to midnight, daily.
· Gladstone Pizza [Official site]
· Shut Up & Eat [Official site]
· All Pizza Week 2014 Coverage [Eater PDX]