By Tracy Morin
Sometimes the best recipes come from messing around in the kitchen—or just messing around, period. That’s how the idea for an entirely new pizza style came to Chuck Ruiz, owner of Richie B’s Pizza in Albuquerque.
“It kind of started off as a joke,” Ruiz told PMQ about his attention-grabbing new pizza, which features a tamale stuffed crust. “We were actually trying to create a taco pizza for Cinco de Mayo. I’ve had a taco pizza that I’ve wanted to do for a while.
“We were making one just to test out in the shop, and I was telling my guys about it,” Ruiz continued. “I said, ‘This taco meat is just like my mom would make when I was a kid.’ We were planning on using Sadie’s salsa, from a popular local Mexican restaurant here. And one of my guys, joking, says, ‘Yeah, and it has a tamale crust.’ We all laughed, but it was such a great idea that it stayed with me.”
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A few weeks later, when Ruiz was whipping up his family-recipe red chili pork at home for himself, he took some into the shop to give the tamale crust a try. “It ended up being very, very good the first time,” he recalled. “But we went through three different iterations before we decided on the recipe.”
That recipe has landed him attention from local food influencers and television news programs—not to mention customers, both in-store and online, raving about the unique stuffed crust. PMQ Pizza recently chatted with Ruiz to find out more about his winning creation.
PMQ: How do you make the tamale stuffed crust?
Chuck Ruiz: It’s a corn masa harina that tamales are made out of, which is nothing like pizza dough. Traditionally, [tamales call for] red chili pork, though you can use different meats in them. Some people style them with veggies and all kinds of stuff. But, traditionally, it’s just very simple, and it’s a staple here in New Mexico—we have a whole tamale season, when they are extremely popular.
I stretch out a piece of dough, just like I’d do for our regular pizza. Right now, we’re only doing a 12” pizza [for the tamale crust], so I overstretch that 12” pizza, and then I take a bag of masa harina—corn dough, basically—and I put it in a ring around the pie, just like if I was doing a stuffed crust with cheese. On top of the ring of masa, I add the red chili pork, and then we roll the dough over it, and seal it to be a stuffed crust.
But the masa is raw masa when it goes into the oven. So this is something that is really cool and [I don’t think it’s ever] been done before—at least with tamales, for sure. The masa finishes cooking inside of the crust, and when it’s done, at the end of your slice, on the inside of that stuffed crust, you have a fresh tamale. Instead of cheese, it’s masa and red chili pork.
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PMQ: How did you need to refine the recipe to make sure it worked?
Ruiz: It came along pretty intuitively. Here in New Mexico, that’s what we eat. So we tried it one time with chili pork in the shop, and from the first time, it was just so flavorful, so good, but it was missing something.
So I tried it again. This time, we used some cornmeal. We don’t typically use cornmeal [for the crust], but I was hoping that the cornmeal would give a little bit of a corn flavor, to try to make up for that masa that wasn’t actually in it. It still didn’t hit right. So I went to a well-known local Mexican restaurant here, La Tortilla Company. They produce masa for people to buy for making their own tamales. And it’s well-known as being the best masa in the state. We’re lucky to have them here in Albuquerque. I went down there, picked up a bag of masa, took it back to the shop and then we tried it again.
I was kind of afraid. I didn’t know how it was going to finish, how the masa was going to come out—if it was going to be gooey, if it was going to come out overdone, or how it was going to be, but on that first try with it, it was just excellent, perfect.
PMQ: What is the process of making the red chili pork for the tamale crust?
Ruiz: I’ve had to invest in another large slow cooker—it’s a nice slow cooked red chili pork. I season it here at the shop, put it in the slow cooker, and slow cook for 10 hours. Usually, we leave it overnight, and when we come back in the morning, we take it out, break it down and get ready.
This is my family’s recipe for red chili. I come from Hatch, where the chili comes from—well, it comes from all over, but that’s where it’s known to come from. This is the place that made the New Mexico chili famous: Hatch, New Mexico. So it’s something that has always been in my life and in my blood. This ritual is something that I’ve done and that my family does very well. We have our own recipe for it, and that’s what I’m, thankfully, getting to offer my customers.
PMQ: Can customers customize with whatever toppings they want, or does it come with specific toppings?
Ruiz: They can order any pie, and then it’s just an additional charge. The orders are overwhelmingly for pepperoni and green chili. But also, it comes with a side of red chili, which comes out of that slow cooker. We turned that into a red chili gravy that comes with each pizza, and you’d be surprised how that red chili sauce works on pizza—it doesn’t even have to be with the tamale crust.
I saw a TikTok person doing a review on it, and I had only intended it to be a dipper for the crust. She said, “I think you’re supposed to just pour the chili on it,” and she poured the chili on the whole slice. Then she was talking about how good it was. That same day, I went and did the same thing, and I was like, “Oh my God, it works so well.”
PMQ: How do you handle the pricing so that this specialty crust is still profitable for you?
Ruiz: New Mexicans are very fickle and, as a restaurateur who’s been in the industry for a while, this is something that I know well. If something’s overpriced—even if it’s justifiable to you, but not to them emotionally—they’re not going to try it, no matter how good you tell them it is. But they also do need some people to tell them it’s very good for them to come out to try it. So it is definitely profitable, but I think next year I’ll easily be able to raise the price on it to justify more of the cost and effort that goes into it.
But last Saturday, we set a new company sales record. We had never crossed $4,000 in sales per day. It was something we’ve been kind of getting close to sometimes, but we just hadn’t quite gotten there. And this pizza got us over that hump, to $4,126. That was our new one-day sales record. We’re a small shop—there’s, like, two of us in the kitchen.
PMQ: It sounds a little more labor intensive to do such an elaborate crust, but outsourcing at least some of the ingredients must be helpful.
Ruiz: That helps quite a bit. Although I try not to pat myself on the back too much, it is a novel idea. It was kind of genius, and doing it has been fantastic for us. I’m thankful that it is a simple process. We’re able to crank them out in a fair amount of time.
We did get up to a two-hour wait time when we broke our sales record. But then we were getting feedback online—people were saying it was well worth the wait: “I waited two hours for mine, but it was so worth it.”
PMQ: The pizza has also been getting you some free press, like on KOAT Action 7 News. How did that come about?
Ruiz: Yeah, they reached out to me, to be on our Channel 7 News last week. And then for one of our other news stations, our Channel 4 News here, I was on their morning show yesterday for the tamale crust. I’ve also been in touch with two local foodie influencers; they should be in next week. One is going to do a podcast, and one’s going to do a food review.
PMQ: Sounds like your customers are loving it, too.
Ruiz: Yeah, people are loving it. And, of course, that’s what we’re shooting for. We’re always trying to cast a wide net with our products—make something that’s going to appeal to the most amount of people, or at least a large group of people, to drive its success. And this one, as successful as it has been, I was intending to do it for the locals. I said, “This one’s for us. This one’s for the New Mexicans—by New Mexicans, for New Mexicans.”
But there have been so many comments, like, “This is the best pizza I’ve ever had in my life.” I think because we fuse two things that we love here as New Mexicans: pizza and tamales. Online, on Facebook, I got tagged in a comment of a guy who was talking to his doctor, telling his doctor that he did cheat on his diet, but he tried the most delicious pizza of his whole life, the tamale crust pizza at Richie B’s. I responded in the comments, “I don’t think that counts as cheating.”
PMQ: With so much attention on this pie, are people also traveling from far away to try it?
Ruiz: I definitely have had some people travel from around the state already. One couple, they were doing a New Mexico tour—they’re from Panama, but they happened to see it online. They were like, “Oh, we’ve got to put that on our New Mexico tour.”
PMQ: That’s pretty major for a small pizzeria. Any expansion plans in your future?
Ruiz: Richie B’s is 10 years old as of last April. I bought it in April of 2019, right before the pandemic. Thankfully, the product is fantastic. We’re very, very well-known for our monster slice, which is one of those giant slices, a two-foot slice of pizza. I brought that out—we were one of the first ones in the country to do one of those slices. And that’s what got us through the pandemic and why we’re still around today. I’d just bought my restaurant, and a few months later, everything was shutting down.
But, nationwide, pizza seemed to be surviving, compared to everything else that we saw going away, and I just felt so lucky to be in this industry.
My shop is only 1,500 square feet, and it’s a dine-in shop as well, so half of that space goes to dine-in. I do not have a walk-in—only two refrigerators and one freezer. So we’re a tiny shop. But for the volume we’re currently doing, we’re going to need to expand soon!
