Liza: Welcome everyone to "food.

curated.," a show that takes you behind the scenes to meet today's most inspiring food makers.

Stick around as we showcase businesses who advocate for issues close to their hearts.

(upbeat music) I'm Liza De Guia, documentary filmmaker and food lover.

I invite you to discover the people and passion behind good food in New York City.

This is "Food Curated."

Funding for food.

curated.

is made possible by.

Stele is a globally curated collection of artisanal and independent perfumes.

Hand-picked olfactory experiences that tell a story.

Available online and at two New York locations.

For more info, we're at Stele (dot) nyc.

Support for food.

curated.

comes from CMD Psych.

Bringing a holistic approach to child wellness and women's mental health care.

Helping patients find balance and harmony in their lives.

For more info, head to CMD Psych (dot) com Additional Funding provided by.

What does it mean to truly center your business around helping others?

Here in New York, you'll find the idea of allyship growing.

Small businesses that align themselves with do-good missions and intentions to support others on their platform.

In today's show, we feature food makers inspiring us to care more.

No matter if your focus is corn or pizza, or feeding mothers who have just given birth.

(bright music) - Miriam: Oh my God, the texture I just get so excited for people to eat this.

Like, this is, there's no amount of money I can put on this.

Look at that.

That's so beautiful.

I think I'm an Italian.

Yeah, you know, I'm a Jewish girl from Ohio.

Hello, my name is Miriam Weiskind.

I am in Brooklyn, New York, also known as the pizza girl, the Za Report, the girl who baked 5,000 pizzas out of her apartment during the pandemic to help New Yorkers in need.

I currently run a pop-up twice a week and I'm in the process of becoming the next female-owned pizzeria in New York City.

Fun fact, out of the 2,500 pizzerias in New York City, only about this many are owned by women and I'm gonna be next.

(soft music) - [Liza] Were you always like a kind person?

- Well, my last name is Weis-KIND.

(laughs) I'll bring it out to you when it's done.

And what's your name?

- Aaron.

- Aaron, Miriam, slice to meet you.

So I like to put 18 on, 'cause 18 is symbolic to life in Judaism.

- Really?

- Yeah, it's the way I pay like nod to my mom.

But yeah, I guess to answer your question, I've always been kind, I try to do my best.

(soft music) I love this.

So I have tiny hands, so I roll like a French baker.

Dough day!

We are at Velvette, which is a coffee shop here in Brooklyn, New York.

I use their kitchen as a commissary kitchen.

It's not a big space.

This is a, this is my workstation right here.

For me, pizza is art.

I have been in New York City for 18 going on 19 years.

And I moved here as a graphic designer.

And I've always had a passion for art.

Today we're making dough for my Neapolitan pop-up.

This is my recipe book.

So like- - Oh, I love that- - Just write all these.

When I just started, when I just really started, it took me almost a decade to start baking pizza on my own.

And when I decided to switch careers, I got a job firing pizzas at Paulie Gee's And the very first pie that I baked, I say that it was love at first bake.

I found happiness baking pizza.

So the reason I love using this flour is that it goes against the norm of people saying you have to use a double zero flour for wood fired pizza, because here I am using a high-protein, all-purpose flour.

So I studied like the science of everything.

The thing is, the more commercial yeast you use, the more you get that stomach, like pizza gut rot.

You know, if you eat a piece of pizza, you're like, "Oh my God, I'm so full , I feel sick."

That's because you're eating a pizza that's got a ton of commercial yeast in it because they're doing it in 24 hours.

I'm taking my dough and I'm stretching it out, the Sicilian, seven days, the round pizza, anywhere from 4 to 5 day process.

You're allowing time to develop the flavor.

So, you're getting a cleaner, better bread.

You can have the best cheese and the best sauce, but if your crust has no flavor, it falls short.

So right now, my dough temperature is beautiful.

It's beautiful.

It was during the pandemic that I lost all of my jobs in pizza, and I was baking pizza out of my home to stay busy.

And, you know, I can only eat so much pizza.

So my mom's like, "Why don't you give them away for free?"

I put up a menu downstairs, and I said to all of my other neighbors, I'm like, "We all could use a reason to smile.

Pizza's keeping me happy.

Pick out a pizza, it's free."

People outside of the building caught wind of what I was doing, and I suddenly went from two pies a night to 20, and the wait list went from, "Oh, we'll just come by and pick up a pizza," to a week, and eventually at one point, it was three months for the Sicilian pizza.

Look in there.

(exclaims) - Full of love.

- Oh, look at that.

Oh, nailed it.

All right.

(soft music) During the whole thing, you know, my mom was a do-gooder.

And she had told me, you know, that, you know, give the pizza out, to help people out.

And in the whole process of that she and my father both got COVID.

And in August of 2020, my mom passed away from that.

So this is the poolish, by the way.

So this is my Auntie Elaine.

All of my poolishes are named after my mom and her two sisters.

This is life.

And I love that if you watch it, you see all the little bubbles.

Like, you just keep watching, you'll see a bubble.

Boop, hello.

Everything I'm doing is to honor my mom and to take her legacy and to continue to do good and to be good to others, because kindness is such a small gesture that can carry us so far.

You ready?

Let's dough this.

So now we're gonna slowly add oil.

Generally not in a Neapolitan dough, but I do it.

This is my favorite part of my week, is when I get to do this.

Pizza was this gift that you could give a free pizza to somebody who didn't have a job or somebody who just lost someone or someone who's just struggling And it brightened their day.

And so even today, here I am three years later, still giving away those free pizzas.

I have a rule.

Every pop-up, the first person in line gets a free pizza.

(soft music) Mona, the next pizza you ring up is free.

- That's yours?

- For real?

- Yeah.

(customers cheering) The day she passed away, I had 20 pies for pickup, and my mom would say, "Those people still need to be fed."

So through all the tears, I baked all of the pizza that day and still fulfilled all those orders.

And none of those people knew.

You spend all those days getting that gas in there.

So you want to be real nice.

Yeah.

--[Liza: Respect the gas.]

-Miriam: I always get, I get teary-eyed, and I, like, think about my mom.

And, like, this morning I was running, and I saw, like, light peering into the trees, and I'm like, "Ah, this is mom looking down right now."

But she's always with me, so you'll see at my events, I always have a little frog somewhere.

My logo has a frog jumping in 'cause my mom's name meant frog.

She would've never tried my pizza, but she actually caught wind of the momentum because I'd already been written up in the New York Times for what I was doing, so she would be so proud of me.

And to see me finding a path in life that makes me happy, I think that's huge.

(gentle music) (people chattering) Cheers!

If you do not eat your crust, 90% has to do with the fact that that crust has no flavor.

I was taught this process that enables me to have this Sicilian that's light as a feather, and it has this incredible crunch.

Feel how light that is.

Whoa!

My mom was the one person that used to peel the cheese off and leave the crust, so, in a way that inspired me to create a crust that my mom would wanna eat.

Oh, you guys are beautiful.

My journey at pizza right now, I have been actively looking for brick and mortar space here in New York.

Gosh, look at that.

-[Liza: Oh my gosh.]

That's art.

I had gained confidence in dough, confidence in stretching, and confidence in knowing that if it's coming from my heart, that it's gonna win people over.

- [Liza] Is that the last one?

- The last ones are in there, yeah.

Oh, that's- -[Liza: It's a good feeling?]

-Miriam: Yeah.

(upbeat music) Hi, slice to meet you.

These pies take seven days to make.

So they're special.

Now that the cheese looks beautiful, that's done.

There's a bro culture in pizza baking.

And it's very intimidating and it can be very difficult to work with the men.

You know who has the secrets?

Men.

Yeah, it's men that like to have, "Oh, it's a secret, I can't tell you."

My sauce, it's a secret.

I put water in it.

But very rarely would you see women firing pizza or stretching the dough and topping it.

And the more of us that continue to put ourselves out there and join that movement, it starts to break that stigma and it helps to create equity with both genders.

And I think that's a beautiful thing.

Give me your hand.

Sprinkle that on.

And my whole philosophy with making pizza is it's an art that you should freely share.

So like whatever lessons I learn, I want to pass that on to other people.

- Toss it a little bit for you.

Not supposed to, but.

I will walk out the door and people recognize me.

I'll be at the grocery store and somebody will say, "Can I get a pizza?"

And I'm like, "Well, there's now a place I bake the pizza."

Pizza hugely did that for me.

Ah, smells delicious.

(bright music) (soft music) -Chef Zack: I just want people to have awareness of what they're eating, you know, when they go to a restaurant and be picky about their tortillas, you know?

Just like they're picky about pizza, I want people to be picky about their tortillas.

(soft music) I think most people in New York have yet to discover or experience a true tortilla.

-Diana: Hi, I'm Diana Montano.

- And I'm Zack Wangeman, and together we're the owners here at Sobre Masa, based in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

(bright music) - [Diana] We met 13 years ago when we were in high school.

- Yeah, we've always been really good friends, and when we started Sobre Masa, started, you know, hand pressing all those tortillas, it kind of almost started as a joke of like, "Hey, you should move to New York City and help us."

And then she was like, "Okay."

I'm like, "Okay," you know?

- For me, like first seeing him like, "Oh yeah, let's make you a tortilla."

And then like seeing the tortilla puff, I was like, "Oh man, this guy knows what he's doing."

So, yeah.

- And then she went back, but for her stuff.

- Yeah.

(laughs) - Sobre Masa is a tortilleria restaurant and bar.

We specialize in working with heirloom corn and their producers, and we try to do that as much as possible from the decor, going from local artists to the coffee that we also get, you know, from small producers in Mexico.

So everything we do is, in one way or another, we're trying to empower Mexican producers.

But it's important for us to work with people out of Mexico because we want the wealth to stay in Mexico.

(upbeat music) - I think the quality of tortilla depends, like, 100% of the corn.

- This is where we store our corn.

We store it in the dining room, and right now, we have it divided between coffee and corn.

But right now, we have a varietals of chalqueño, which is from the state of Mexico, blue corn.

And then we also have two different colors of bolita.

We have the yellow and the white.

Tomorrow, we're gonna do bolita amarillo, which is what I'm gonna open up right now.

Here we go, this is the bolita amarillo.

It's shiny, it's clean, it's consistent in size, it's been processed very well.

Sobre Masa, it translates to about masa, right?

Sobre, about, but it's also a play on words.

Sobre masa from sobre mesa.

Sobre mesa is a conversation you have after dinner.

So Sobre Masa is kind of like a play on words on that.

And then it's also, you know, about masa, which is what we are about.

Everything here is an excuse to serve a tortilla.

(gentle music) Well, you know, I was trying to look for how to make a good tortilla in New York, not even how to make a good tortilla, how to make an acceptable tortilla that wouldn't make me long for, you know, tortillas back home so much.

I mean, masa in Oaxaca is a way of life.

(gentle music) Yeah, so this is our little factory in our restaurant, well, Sobre Masa, it's 6:00 AM.

This is the corn that we've been cooking and it's been resting overnight.

It's the first real process of the nixtamalization.

Nixtamalization is a chemical process where you're cooking the corn with calcium hydroxide and you're making all the nutrients available, essentially, for the corn.

They're all locked in these complex starches and what the calcium hydroxide does is it breaks it down.

You can see how the skin starts to peel off.

You know, there's niacin and other vitamins and minerals in the corn, and if you don't nixtamalize it, your body won't absorb those minerals, right?

This corn is called maiz bolita, and this one in particular is from Oaxaca.

It's one of our favorites.

It makes really good tostadas and chips, this yellow one.

The whole thing that we try to do here at Sobre Masa is we try to speak about the diversity of the corn as much as possible, so we're not really married to one particular varietal of corn.

Today, we're doing three bags, so that's 150 pounds of dry corn, which will yield us around 300 pounds of masa.

But that's a lot for us, you know?

- Demand is growing.

That's good.

I always wanted to move back to Oaxaca and somehow be a part of the community.

And when I really fell in love with corn as an ingredient and the community behind it, I wanted to have a restaurant that could be a voice for that community.

(laughs) This is our mill.

It's made by a guy in LA, Campbell Machines.

We hand chisel these stones.

The corn will come out of the hole and the further out it progresses, the smaller it gets.

So you can see how it like starts big and then it starts getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

During this grinding process, it's important you're not just grinding it, you're not just making the corn smaller, you're also kneading it, you're also hydrating it, right?

So there's a lot more that's going on.

You also get a little bit of friction heat so it actually cooks a little bit as well.

- [Liza] And what is that made out of, Volcanic?

- It's volcanic rock.

So this is a cacahuazintle.

This is corn that's very, very soft.

It's actually traditionally used for pozole.

I think you've actually bought this corn before.

So we're gonna start milling now.

(upbeat music) Just from Mexico, there's 59 different varietals of heirloom corn.

We probably worked with maybe 15.

The oldest corn found so far is around 9,000 years old.

So that means that we've been hand selecting, hand picking this crop for the last 9,000 years.

You know, there's a lot of history.

There's a lot of wealth just in that.

A lot of the people that grow corn, for instance, I don't think they really value or they don't know the value of what they have.

You know, they've had it their whole lives and we want them to have that pride and be that encouragement and say, "Hey, what you do is amazing."

And look like, you know, people here are really enjoying it.

We opened in October 2021, then, you know, Omnicron came, labor shortages, and like a whole bunch of other challenges.

But we stay optimistic.

(Diana laughing) What's next world?

So this is also a very important process.

It doesn't seem that important, you know, but it's very important because what we're doing is we're incorporating oxygen into the dough.

Oxygen makes it softer, kind of like, it's like OxiClean makes your clothes soft.

Same science behind it.

So we're trying to incorporate as much oxygen as possible into the masa.

This corn is so soft, and the tortillas are very flour-like.

(upbeat music) Masa culture is growing very big in New York.

There's a lot of Mexican restaurants opening, and they're all thinking, you know, like, oh, we need to serve tortillas, and you know where our tortillas are gonna come from.

So yeah, I think we're kind of headed in the right direction.

I think it's only gonna grow from here.

(gentle music) So this is our machine.

This is how we crank 'em out.

You can see Sita there is making sure it's consistent, the thickness.

(bright music) To me, the perfect tortilla is, like, 80% the smell.

It's, like, aromas of, like, popcorn and toastiness.

And you really can only get those deep aromas with, like, a little bit of, lik the burnt edges from the corners, creamy in texture, but also a little bit of resistance, a little bit of a chew, you know nobody likes your taco to break on you.

- Also fills your soul, not only your body.

(gentle music) - [Zack] These tortillas, we cook them halfway through the cycle.

And then once they're cooked halfway, we remove them.

Because these tortillas get reheated at home, so when you reheat them, they still consume some moisture.

- They can be like different in flavor between the varieties, you know?

Like the blue one is a little bit more like sweet than the white one.

And I think little by little, people are starting to notice that.

- At the end of the day, we started Sobre Masa for very selfish reasons, right?

It's because, you know, we wanted to have a good tortilla in New York for us.

But now to see other people as well enjoy it and catch on and be like, "Oh, wow."

That's our biggest motivation at the end of the day is that feedback.

(upbeat music) At this point of the restaurant and our career, we're more into sparking curiosity, you know, smell a tortilla, right?

And be like, "Oh, I wonder how this tortilla is."

And at least spark a curiosity.

We're proud of our heritage and we know what we're representing and what we want to represent.

And we're just happy to share that.

(upbeat music) (bright music) (gentle music) - Definitely in the pregnancy postpartum sphere, nutrition information and education is very unclear.

A lot of people kind of go through that stage confused or anxious, like they're so scared about what's supposed to happen when they are delivering the baby that they don't even think, oh, I'm supposed to eat after, or my family needs to eat.

Like, who is then feeding these other people here?

(laughs) -Dr.

Lily: I know you can't smell it through the camera, but it smells so yummy.

You just gave your essence to the baby.

You are depleted.

Almost imagine in the video game, This is your power line, power bar.

You just lost half your power to the baby.

-Jenn: Postpartum especially, there's so many ebbs and flows.

Like, maybe you'll have a good day, but maybe the next day is an awful day.

And it's like, how can we help those people, whether that's resources or information, or obviously through food, that like we're taking one more thing off their plate.

- Irene: So for me, it was just that I wanted to exist in that world.

Like I knew that this was what I would want and what I would want for my friends and family and what they would want.

- [Irene & Jennifer] Hi, we're the founders of Chiyo.

- I'm Irene, I'm the CEO and co-founder.

- Hi, I'm Jennifer, I'm the chief culinary officer and co-founder, and this is JP.

(laughs) (gentle music) - Chiyo is the Eastern Food Therapy meets Nutritional Science stage-specific program.

So from fertility through postpartum, we take care of all of your nutritional needs.

I'm a nutritionist and I've also been serving this clientele for a really long time, essentially a private postpartum chef.

And so when Irene and I started to conceptualize like what Chiyo could be, essentially we wanted a lot of the nutritional science and then a lot of the kind of traditional Chinese medicine that we essentially incorporate into everything.

- Chiyo means thousands of generations or eternal.

It's a Japanese baby name.

And then we did want a name also that had some Asian influence because that is such a core part to our company.

We wanted to bring that to the forefront.

(upbeat music) Compared to other countries that have longer cultures and generations, there isn't a practice around postpartum care in the US.

My family's from Taiwan, and so Taiwan and I know Korea and China, you stay at a postpartum hotel.

That's like the standard for the first 40 days.

There is like clinical markers for it, but I think that the point is more that you're taking the time for resting and recovering in a way that's about you, so that you can take care of your baby and be there for your family.

And I think that is what it represents.

And that in itself is an important concept.

- [Jennifer] We've been experimenting with buckwheat cookies.

Everything that we do is gluten-free, dairy-free.

- We make sure that the food, the soup, and the herbs, they work wonderfully together to create a harmonious state for the body.

We are here to take care of your body.

You might not know it yet, but you will feel it.

(laughs) - [Jennifer] Every ingredient for us really has a purpose and is designed to really treat typical things that you're dealing with at that very specific life stage.

- Chiyo Customer: I think leading up to our delivery, I knew that we needed like a food support system.

I didn't have to choose between spending time with my baby or being in the kitchen.

- [Jennifer] We very much designed it in a way that it should be for the modern person.

We want it to be ready to eat.

Takes maybe a minute or two to heat up.

You don't have to think about anything else.

You don't need to supplement it with anything else.

- And I loved that like I plated up my meal and it was delicious and satisfying and so craveable.

And I always looked forward to the next meal.

-[Irene] So people have tried this before, right?

Like we're not like making something like completely new and making up like what black fungus is.

Like these have come from like generations of wisdom and we want it to be something that people are excited about opening, are excited about reading about ingredients and learning about other types of food.

- We really want to help the modern woman.

We can be your mom, we can be your aunt, without asking too many questions, but we would just deliver your food and give you the support that you don't know you need yet.

(upbeat music) - From heirloom corn masa to postpartum meals to female-led pizzerias, New York City has always been a place to advocate for a better world, no matter the cause.

That's it for this episode of "food.

curated."

Thanks so much to all our featured guests.

I'm Liza de Guia.

As Miriam would say, "Slice to meet you."

Be sure to connect with us on social media and eat more stories.

I'll see you next week.

(bright music) Funding for food.

curated.

is made possible by.

Stele is a globally curated collection of artisanal and independent perfumes.

Hand-picked olfactory experiences that tell a story.

Available online and at two New York locations.

For more info, we're at Stele (dot) nyc.

Support for food.

curated.

comes from CMD Psych.

Bringing a holistic approach to child wellness and women's mental health care.

Helping patients find balance and harmony in their lives.

For more info, head to CMD Psych (dot) com Additional Funding provided by.

Craving more about the stories behind the craft.

Dive deeper into the makers we care about.

On our social pages, and at foodcurated dot com.

[music] [music] [music]