I liked Mozza until I found out their dough is made by Bub & Grandma’s. Not that I don’t like Bub & Grandma’s, but feels like cheating to use dough from another bakery when you’re a pizzeria to me.
I didn’t know that, that’s weak!
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Yeah I don’t think that was always the case but there was a Youtube video a while back (which I’m failing to find now) where they followed a day in the life of a Bub’s delivery driver and it showed him stopping at various businesses, including dropping off pizza dough for Mozza.
Also their website lists them as a supplier for Pizzeria Mozza.
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That is very surprising to me, given Nancy Silverton’s background as a baker and her having founded La Brea Bakery (though of course it was sold over 20 years ago).
On the one hand, it does seem a bit wrong to source from someone else.
On the other hand, is it much different than what something like Langer’s does? They get their pastrami et al from RC Provisions like everyone else, using a proprietary recipe and preparation. I imagine Mozza has a similar arrangement with Bub & Grandma’s.
I’m not sure this new information changes my future calculus on deciding whether I want to dine at Mozza. Their pizza is fantastic, regardless of who technically produces the dough. I do think I will bring it up with my server next time I’m there, would be interested in hearing their thoughts.
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Yeah when I found that out it took langers down a notch for me too.
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Yeah I’m not saying don’t go there, but I do think there is a certain value and craftsmanship that I personally value when I go to a pizzeria/restaurant and they are trying to make as much as they can by themselves. Of course I don’t expect everything to be house made (I understand they’re not growing the tomatoes for their tomato sauce), but something like the pizza dough for a pizzeria seems reasonable to be made in house.
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I think Nancy may have come up with the dough recipe and outsourced its production to B&G.
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Do you have a source for that? I’d be curious to know
According to this article it makes it sound like they made it for the restaurants: The Man Making LA’s Most Popular Bread Doesn’t Consider Himself a Baker | by Jamie Feldmar | Heated
The orders kept coming. Wax Paper, a sandwich shop beloved for its NPR host-themed menu, wanted a seeded loaf and baguettes. Fashionable all-day cafe Botanica wanted big squares of focaccia to serve with dips and eggs. Middle Eastern-inflected Kismet wanted barberi, a sesame-studded Persian flatbread. Mozza, Nancy Silverton’s temple to Italian food, wanted pizza dough, breadsticks, and three kinds of baguettes.
For some reason, I thought I heard that Mozza recently went back to making the dough in house.
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I remember hearing that too. May have been on Air Jordan if I’m remembering correctly.
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You’re right. It was Air Jordan.
NYTimes article from 2007. In Los Angeles, the Accidental Pizza Maker - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
I’ll say. Ms. Silverton, who started her career as a pastry chef and is an accomplished baker, makes crusts with extraordinary character: softly chewy in spots, crisply charred in others, ever so faintly sweet, even more faintly sour. There’s some rye flour in her dough and some malt, and she lets it sit for 36 hours before she uses it.
Although Ms. Silverton is fixated on dough, she doesn’t ignore the balance of the pizza.
I certainly came away with an impression that Nancy was responsible for the Pizzeria Mozza dough recipe. And she has a dough recipe in her Mozza cookbook.
If she later told Bub & Grandma’s that they could make the pizza dough following their own recipe, I would be disappointed. But if all she did is outsource production of her own dough recipe, that seems fine.
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Pizzeria Mozza had been open a good 7 or 8 years before Andy Kaiden of B & G started baking in 2015 according to an Eater article. It makes sense to me anyway that it’s being done to spec, they have a certain style of crust they are known for and I doubt Nancy would go away from doing it in house if the supplier couldn’t meet her standards.
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Nancy Silverton developed a relatively complicated dough recipe because she’s so picky about things. Outsourcing to a reliable supplier probably made more sense economically and/or produced more consistent results given the difficulty people have retaining staff these days.
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Y’all are really drowning out my shameless plea for a reservation at sei with pizzeria mozza talk 
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Well thank you everyone for the context. I guess I’d be curious to hear from someone at Mozza now since we can’t really confirm anything though I’d like to believe they just outsourced the recipe. I know Nancy is picky but she’s also way past the Nancy you see in Chef’s Table and more of a celebrity now IMO.
I guess I wonder is an operation as big as B&G now having a small amount of employees just make a single specific pizza dough for a single restaurant though? That seems impractical to me too.
I’ll check it out!
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I’ll be at the Mozza x L’Industrie collab later this month. Will ask that question.
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Me too! On Saturday at noon if you’re there to say hi
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