Sette Osteria

1666 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington 20009

202-483-3070

Saturday marked my third or fourth visit to Sette–but the first time I ordered a pizza. I was told by a reliable source that there are only a handful of certified Neapolitan pizzerias in the city and Sette is among them. Also among them are Pizza Paradiso and 2 Amy’s.

So what is Neapolitan pizza?–I am not entirely sure. I know it involves a wood-burning oven and the colors of the Italian flag (red-tomato, white-cheese, and green-basil). But back to the nitty-gritty–Sette’s Pizza.

I ordered my typical–four-cheese pizza and marinara sauce on the side. The pizza arrived covered in gorgonzola, fresh mozzarella, pecorina campano, and grana. I expected such an outrageous use of strong cheeses to be too overwhelming on one pizza, but to my surprise the combination was nothing less than incredible. But let’s put aside the cheese for a moment and talk about the crust. The crust was hands down the best I have ever eaten. It was crunchy on the outside with a moist, almost egg-y quality, on the inside. In places where the crust was thin it had bubbled up in the heat of the oven (but wasn’t burnt on the bottom like Pizzeria Paradiso). Imagine the innards of a french cruller–this was the texture of the bubbled dough. The pizza by itself was incredible but before finishing the review, I had to dip the crust in the marinara. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was that I tasted in the sauce. I had to dip several times–not because I liked the sauce, because frankly I didn’t, but because I was trying to figure out if there was a dairy product in the marinara. For my tastes, the marinara was bland, but it had an odd creamy quality that I couldn’t put my finger on. I asked my wait-person and she asked the chef. The chef came to my table to explain the ingredients. In a strong Italian accent, the chef proceeded to tell me that it wasn’t cream but carrots, onions, and basil that I tasted. He said that the Neapolitan spices were much more subtle than the American (bastardized) version of marinara. Well…I am on a quest to find the “best pizza Americana”–and Sette is very, very close to the best…sans the marinara. The marinara is just too Italian I guess.

Since that fateful day of delivery, Josh-wa and I have been experimenting with a number of different juices. The results of our experimentation has led us to discover that juicing more than 3 or 4 vegetables and fruits creates an indecipherable medley of flavors, or worse, a hodgepodge of clashing flavors. We have also discovered that green apples make every other fruit or vegetable taste better. Take for example Josh-wa’s favorite: asparagus, celery, and green apples. You can literally smell the green. This is a wonderful diuretic because of the asparagus and celery and the apple gives the juice a nice sweet zing at the finish. I can not imagine what this would taste like without the apple.

My favorite isn’t much different from the aspara-cel-apple: green apple and celery. This is similar to eating a salted apple. The celery adds saltiness and the green apple adds mouth pucker.

Pictured is a beet, apple, and navel orange combo. The flavor is sweet with an earthy nose. The beet, however, does scary things to one’s excrement. Be aware that sipping on this concoction leads to purple poop within a day.

Don’t forget to add the pulp to your composting pile!

But my memories are tainted by time and scarcity, so in reality I would probably take Paradiso over, say, Maria’s (of Fremont, CA) side-by-side, if Maria’s hadn’t since been turned into a high-end tandoor palace and I could conduct a tasting of pies baked 3000 miles apart.

Tonight, we had the Pizza Salciccia (sausage, cherry tomatoes, cheese, pesto) and quattro formaggio. My standard for judging pizza quality starts with the crust – I’m a crust guy – and the crust on both was almost perfect – pillowy soft on the inside with a crisp outer shell that was improbably thin but broke quite pleasingly nonetheless. I’ve eaten at the Dupost Paradiso a number of times and I never recall the crust being quite this way, so maybe the ovens at Georgetown were calibrated differently, or perhaps the dough ferments differently closer to the miasma of the Potomac.

The toppings were uniformly excellent, although when P asked what I thought of the sausage during our debriefing I had to think for a moment before I could actually recall having eaten any. Not from lack – there was plenty – but the sausage was ground finer than most found in the environs of pizza, being dryer and more crumbly than the usual gelatinous globs generally used. It complemented the pesto and cheese and crust rather than serving as a meaty porky trophy reassuring carnivores that yes, they are indeed imbibing protein.

The Quattro Formaggio in particular was superlative – it actually tasted like, you know, four cheeses, actual distinct cheeses, rather than just being cheesy, as is usually the case, where quattro formaggio refers to four times as much cheese. It was savory and melty and crumbly and liquid all at the same time.

I do agree with P in that, for me, pizza requires only three ingredients to qualify as pizza: crust, sauce, and cheese. Paradiso does away with the sauce, using crushed tomatoes, or cherries, on the Salciccia, but the balance is still good. I’m sure that the recipes at Paradiso are generated from proper culinary-historical research, and that the saucy triumvirate is entirely American in origin, but it’s what pizza normatively is for me. Still, if the choice is between traditional crust-sauce-cheese embodied in an abomination like Uno or Bolis, or Paradiso? Well, I’m getting hungry again writing this, and I wish I had some goddamn Paradiso leftovers right now.

Environmental Efforts

Successes

· Taken public transportation at least once a week, sometimes as many as 3 times a week

· worked toward recycling everything that was recyclable if it was not reusable in some way (in two weeks I have only had one bag of to take to the dumpster–Hurray!)

· Brought my own coffee mug to starbucks to get a cup of coffee (no waste!)

· Signed up for greendimes to reduce the amount of junk catalogues and called several random catalogues to tell them to stop sending them

· Signed up to receive 100% of my household energy from renewable sources (landfill gasses)

Misstep

· Gave in to temptation and bought a new tea strainer ($1.99)

· Bought 2 cups of coffee from Dunkin Donuts and one cup of hot chocolate at starbucks when I didn’t have my own mug to use.

Social efforts

Successes

· logged the Washington DChypothermia hotline into my cell phone to call for a van when a homeless person indicates that they would like to go to a shelter for the night (haven’t used it yet)

· saved the (otherwise unusable) banner sheets from the printer at work so that I may make them into small notebooks for others to re-use. This is under “social” because it is a gentle reminder to my coworkers to be environmentally conscientious.

Misstep

· Haven’t gotten up the nerve to call the responsible folks at my office to request that they replace the Styrofoam cups and plates with paper plates and cups.

Supermarket packaging: How you can fight back

If you are interested in ideas for recycling around your house–for renovations or even new construction, check out some of these great websites:

Green Home building

Green building

Global green

And check out some of the houses made out of recycled goods by my favorite architect and inspiration–Samual Mockbee.

In stark contrast to research suggesting that a reduced calorie diet may lead to a longer life, since 1970 the U.S. department of agriculture estimates that we Armarikens (Americans with an accent) have increased our per capita food consumption 16 percent, or by 523 calories, and the percentage of overweight Americans has skyrocketed as well. But regardless of how much we eat, we women (sorry fellas) spend a large percentage of time buying and preparing food.

A primary purpose of this blog is to express my thoughts and feelings on two seemingly different topics–the environment and on culinary experiences and experiments. The two do, in fact, come together. And while your ecological footprint is certainly higher if you are not a vegetarian or vegan, you can still behave as an environmentalist by becoming more aware of how and where you purchase our food and what you do with the by-products when you are done.

The store…

Paper or plastic?

What about choosing neither? This is such a simple way of reducing the amount of landfill waste and CO2 production–take your own cloth bags to the store with you. Of course you can recycle, but the simple act of bringing your own bags reduces the need to a) produce more bags and b) use energy to recycle–both of which ultimately increase the production of greenhouse gasses through energy consumption. By the way, it is also incredibly gratifying to walk out of the grocery store with your own cloth bags.

Buy from local farms and co-ops

There are a number of reasons to purchase from local farmers or from co-ops that stock shelves using local producers. First and foremost, for the purposes of this *green* blog, the closer to home that your produce was harvested, cows were milked, and your eggs were laid, the less fossil fuel needed to bring you those tasty morsels. Buying locally also helps sustain local farmers, promotes the local economy, and creates a link between the food supply and the community. If you are interested in finding local farms that bring produce, dairy or meat to your area, check out “local harvest” or for co-ops check out the community gardens link.

If you are unable to buy from a local farmer or co-op, consider choosing produce that is locally grown. Many of the large chain stores do not advertise where food stuffs come from, but Whole foods, albeit expensive, makes it their practice to label the origin of all of their produce–giving you the option to choose.

Reuse or recycle

Recycling is great, but I try to make that the last resort. I am perpetually trying to think of creative ways that I can reuse the packaging from food items. I have come up with a few:

1. Milk cartons

Cut off the bottom and the 1/2 gallon size milk container makes a nice scoop for your pet food or cut off the top and it makes an easy organizing container

2. Cereal boxes

Cut out diagonal pieces from the front and back about 2 inches from the bottom of the box and use to neatly store magazines

3. Yogurt containers

These make great cheap Tupperware for dry foods or organizers for small items.

But let’s face it–we can only use so many magazine organizers. An alternative to retooling and recycling is simply purchasing foods with less packaging. If you have come up with ways of using old packaging, I would love to hear about it.

Composting

I have the great fortune to know Josh-wa who is a composter–so I am able to add the pulp from my juicer to his compost pile. But until I met him, the only means of disposing of my vegetable scraps was via garbage disposal or waste container. Composting is a way of creating your own natural, nutrient-rich “peat” to mix in with top soil while at the same time reducing the number of bags of waste produced by your family. Leaves and vegetable scraps heaped in a ventilated container and occasionally turned will decompose, ferment, and eventually become fertilizer for your veggie or flower garden. Your local hardware store will carry outdoor containers for composting and you can read more about composting on line.

If you **really** get into the environmentalist/composting frame of mind, perhaps you can install a composting pooper at your house.

For you apartment dwellers, like myself, I don’t have simple recommendation for composting. My advice is to make environmentally friendly friends who compost or don’t mind you creating a compost pile in their yard or find a community garden space (sorry DC, there isn’t a comprehensive list of community gardens).

Happy Greening!

Well this beaut took about 3 hours, 5 packs of jello, and a 1/2 pint of sour cream. The trick is to use 1/2 the amount of water called for in the recipe to get the right consistency to layer.

9083 Gaither Road

Gaithersburg, MD 20877

Zios is a regular lunch time destination for my coworkers and me. Today I went with the sole intent of tasting pizza, rather than just getting away from the office and filling my belly.  As usual, when we arrived the dining room was packed and there were far too few servers for the number of customers but because I am reviewing the pizza and not the restaurant, I won’t complain too loudly. 

Once I was seated and served with a fine vintage of Chateau Coca Cola, I ordered the “mini” (7″) Pizza alla Graeco with a side of marinara sauce (this is a fav among friends and coworkers Dee and Lisa).  This pizza is loaded with spinach, feta, mozzarella, and garlic sauce–a gratifying combination of robust flavors.  While I have always enjoyed this particular topping combo, today the “garlic sauce” tasted raw and overwhelming and the toppings may have been too much for even a good crust. 

And that brings me to the crust. This was the part of the pizza that I liked the least.  The crust was reminiscent of that greasy crust first made popular by Pizza Hut.  My perception is that shortening is heated in the pan and then the uncooked dough is placed in the pizza pan and “fried” on the outside while the toppings are quickly layered on before going into the oven.  Theoretically this might make a tasty, crunchy crust if only a small amount of shortening was used.  Unfortunately, while the bottom of the crust was pleasantly crunchy, the body of the crust was soaked with hot grease.  My final attempt to “save” this poor cholesterol-clogged crust was to use it to swab up some red marinara sauce, a lovely well-seasoned red sauce with chunks of tomato bobbing around. In the end, though, I ditched the crust and hoovered up a few good swallows of that red stuff using a large spoon. 

 Rating from 1 (terrible) to 5 (best ever) 

Crust 1 

Toppings 3 

Sauce 4 

Would I go back? The pizza seemed good in theory, but after really tasting the pizza, the crust was just too greasy to revisit.