The Secret To Jon & Vinny's Breakfast Pizza Is Cooking The Egg Separately - Exclusive
When it comes to late-night comfort food, nothing is as satisfying as a large slice of pizza. It doesn't matter if it's Chicago, New York, or even Neopolitan. If it has mozzarella, a thick, rich tomato sauce, and an assortment of toppings, this pie is the perfect meal. While it's often devoured by families for dinner or college students during intense study sessions, there's nothing that says it can't be eaten for breakfast. As a matter of fact, at Jon & Vinny's, an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles that serves pizza all day, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo believe it's a great way to start the day.
"These pizzas naturally lend themselves to people wanting them in the morning. We do a breakfast pizza that has a cooked potato, that's grated and put on top of the dough and has Parmesan and has a fried egg," Shook explained during an exclusive interview with Tasting Table. It's for this reason that the chefs have several different pizzas on their menu. There's the classic that comes with cheese and your choice of meat, there's one that's served cold, but there are also two that come with potatoes and fried eggs — two ingredients that scream breakfast. For these two pizzas, the chefs do something unusual: They cook the egg separately.
The egg isn't part of the initial cooking process
Usually when making pizza, the dough is tossed, the toppings are placed on top, and it's deposited in the oven to cook. But Jon & Vinny go about things a little differently when it comes to their breakfast pizzas. While most of the ingredients are cooked with the dough in the oven, the egg isn't. It's added at the end instead. "We used to for a long time cook the egg actually on the pizza in the oven, and now we've switched to actually cooking the egg in a pan and putting it on top of the pizza when it comes out of the oven," Shook says.
The award-winning chef admits that they made the change for consistency reasons. Since there are currently four Jon & Vinny's restaurants with more on the way, the chefs wanted to be sure that patrons would get the same pizza no matter which restaurant they visited. The same pizza means the egg is cooked exactly the way the chefs want it every time. "We want to have a runny egg, especially a runny yolk in the middle," declares Shook. By cooking the egg in a pan and then placing it on the pizza, they can keep an eye on the egg as it cooks and guarantee that runny yolk everyone desires.