A leading Dallas pizza brand is moving to Houston and bringing “Romo,” its signature sourdough starter, along for the ride.
Pie Tap, led by Rich Hicks and Italian chef Giovanni Mauro, is scheduled to open in Houston next month. The first Pie Tap location opened in Dallas in 2016, and six more stores have followed since then.
Chef Mauro’s pies undergo a 96-hour fermentation using natural yeast “to achieve a good balance of crunch and chew,” according to Culture Map Houston. Mauro said his dough is “the kind of dough our great-grandparents used to eat. It’s a very natural, slow process. We don’t use any commercial yeast. We started a ‘mother dough’ [the aforementioned Romo] with a starter that’s proprietary to use. It’s a five-day process, an absolute minimum of 96 hours, from when we start to when we put the pizza on the plate.”
Pie Tap has an outstanding website, too, with a detailed About section that describes its food in appetizing detail. “The airiness of our pizza comes from a special, natural technique,” the site explains, “yielding a high percentage of protein without sugar. That’s why our pizza comes out of the oven healthy, light and easy to enjoy guilt-free.”
Mauro and his pizza-making team use a “special mixture of wheat flowers and wheat germ combined with olive oil, water and salt” for a pizza that’s “pure and exceptionally crispy,” the website states.
“We’re just obsessed with the process of dough,” Hicks told the Dallas Observer in 2016.
“The resulting dough has plenty of crunch with just the right amount of doughiness,” the Observer’s Beth Rankin noted in that article. “It’s the perfect vessel for toppings like the fresh clams, Calabrese peppers, garlic and the Parmigiano Reggiano on Pie Tap’s clam pizza, a beautiful specimen that is equal parts creamy, salty, spicy, crunchy and doughy.”
Rankin also raved about Pie Tap’s prosciutto pizza, which “comes piled with La Quercia Prosciutto, medjool dates, pistachios, house-made ricotta, balsamic and a small mountain of fresh arugula. The fresh ricotta is perfectly creamy and salty, flavors that bounce nicely off the sweetness of the dates, the richness of the prosciutto and the crisp, peppery arugula.”
