My Search and Quest to make a Pizza Bianca like Jim Lahey makes

I was searching more on the web about Sullivan St. Bakery and Jim Lahey’s pizza bianca.

I think the relevant parts of this article are:

Sullivan St became the name to look and ask for, and the bakery’s one retail outlet, in SoHo, became the place to go for the incredibly airy, oil-brushed, lightly salted pizza bianca, which is even better than that of the bakery in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori, Lahey’s model and mentor.

The location, at 72nd Street and Broadway, was convenient to my brother’s apartment, where I stay, and perfect for buying and packing a loaf of the incomparable sesame bread—not just scattered with but rolled in a dense bed of sesame seeds—just before going to the airport. The name was unfamiliar: Grandaisy, with a pretty pale-blue daisy logo on the bags. The clerks reassured me that indeed, the bread was the same.
The explanation, I learned when I went to see Lahey at his new Sullivan St Bakery headquarters in the far-west reaches of Hell’s Kitchen, was a romantic breakup that devolved into a rocky professional partnership that ended in a complete business split. Now there were two bakeries with two different names selling breads and cookies identically named and to all appearances utterly identical, one owned by Lahey and the other by his former partner, Monica Von Thun Calderón.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/10/half-a-loaf/6974/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/10/half-a-loaf/6974/2/


The no-knead method was born at the request of an Italian cook who wanted to serve a Roman-era bread at a Roman-themed dinner, and was Lahey’s attempt to reproduce the most ancient way of making bread.

Monica Von Thun Calderón, a longtime partner in Sullivan Street Bakery, acquired sole ownership of the original space and renamed it after her grandmother.

Grandaisy Bakery Facebook page with pictures of Roman style pizza

http://www.facebook.com/GrandaisyBakery?sk=app_7146470109 

Another article about Jim Lahey’s breads, Stecca - stick or small baguette, About My Bread, and Pane all'Olive - olive bread.

http://www.projectfoodie.com/spotlights/cookbooks/making-great-bread-with-my-bread.html

More posts on  pizza bianca on egullet:

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?/topic/125201-no-knead-pizza-new-york-magazine/page__st__30

I will do some more searching to see what I can find out about Jim Lahey’s Pizza Bianca or maybe about his use of starters.

Norma