Wild Rise

A simple dough of flour, water, salt, and yeast has been mixed via ancient mixing techniques. Precision scientific equipment carefully regulates the temperature. A wild yeast culture captured in Italy stirs to life. Two days later, the dough has risen, ready to support its counterparts: crushed San Marzano tomatoes picked from the mineral rich soils at the base of Mount Vesuvius in the bay of Naples, Bufala mozzarella made from the milk of Neapolitan water buffalo, and basil.  Once assembled, the pie is baked at 900 degrees in a custom-made oven.  Out comes a pie greater than the sum of its parts. This is Wild Rise — this is primal pizza.

Wild Rise is a Neapolitan pizza venture on a quest to push the frontiers of pizza into the sublime. Wild Rise is about combining science and origin to elicit the passion and soul of authentic Neapolitan pizza while elevating what good pizza can be to a new level. Wild Rise pizza is a fragile, pure food with no bells or whistles, but a fanatic attention to detail.

A perfect Neapolitan pizza is about the crust foremost—a crust that’s light and airy and neither chewy nor Chicago-thick. It spans 10-11 inches and boasts few toppings beyond sauce, cheese and basil. For a pizza purist, all the flavor you need is already there, it just needs to be coaxed out.  A rich, deep taste that hits the senses like a complex wine — never one-note, but rather releasing a harmony of flavors that play off each other.  It all starts with the wild yeast.

Why wild yeast? We want to extract superb flavor from simple ingredients. Using commercial yeast doesn’t do that. Commercial yeast is difficult to digest and tastes one-noted, whereas wild yeast lowers the Glycemic Index of the dough itself, promoting lower blood sugar, and is chock-full of organic amino acids, vitamins and byproducts that give it a flavor like no other.

At Wild Rise, we ask ourselves, how can we make a pizza that lives up to these ideals? It’s by constantly pushing the boundaries of innovation. It’s like a science lab around here. We’re consumed with excellence. This dough can be fickle, demanding, finicky…whatever you want to call it. It’s wild after all, and you won’t find us just slapping it together the same day it’s served. It’s all about getting the yeast culture right, nurturing it along its slow journey, and letting it reward us in return with the best possible flavors in the crust.

Word has it that you might be ruined after trying Wild Rise pizza a few times. You might not be able to go back to the commercial stuff.  Don’t say we didn’t warn you.