Local ingredients bring world-class flavor to “Maine Craft Pizza”
Wood-fired pizza made with local grains and seasonal toppings at Tinder Hearth in Brooksville, Maine. PHOTO: WYLDE PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF TINDER HEARTH
By Amy Paradysz
ANY GIVEN SUMMER NIGHT, Flight Deck Brewing in Brunswick serves upwards of 400 artisanal pizzas hot out of a copperclad, wood-fired oven made in Skowhegan. The dough is from The Good Crust, made from 100% Maine grains, and the pies are topped with local seasonal ingredients.
“There are few places in the world where you can source a pizza entirely—from the oven to the finishing oil—from one region,” said Nate Wildes, a managing partner at Flight Deck and one of the founding members of the Maine Craft Pizza Initiative. “Maine is one of those places and makes darned good pizza.”
To qualify as serving “Maine craft pizza,” each restaurant needs to meet one or more of these criteria (and gets one star for each):
★ It features dough sourced from a mill in Maine that uses locally grown grains.
★ It includes toppings sourced seasonally from local farms.
★ It is baked in a wood-fired oven using sustainable energy sources.
★ It’s served alongside Maine craft beer.
“The Maine Craft Pizza Initiative celebrates restaurants and breweries striving toward these concepts and gives customers a clear way of identifying restaurants and retailers with a Maine Craft Pizza seal of approval,” Wildes says.
The Maine Craft Pizza Initiative started organically—excuse the pun—over pizza and beer in 2021 at The Miller’s Table, a farm-to-table café and bakery at the Maine Grains gristmill in Skowhegan. The formation of the Maine Craft Pizza Initiative seems like destiny when you consider who was at the table: Wildes from Flight Deck; twin sisters Amber Lambke of Maine Grains and Heather Kerner of The Good Crust; Tristan Noyes, who leads the Maine Grain Alliance; pizza oven maker Scott Barden of Maine Wood Heat; and Amy Rowbottom of Crooked Face Creamery.
Amber Lambke of Maine Grains, Amy Rowbottom of Crooked Face Creamy, Scott Barden of Maine Wood Heat and Heather Kerner of The Good Crust. PHOTO: DANA VALETTI
“We have this natural kinship,” says Rowbottom, who grew up on a dairy farm in Norridgewock and started smoking cheeses on nights and weekends when she was a sales representative for Maine Wood Heat. Today, Crooked Face Creamery—named after a beloved asymmetrical but productive dairy cow—has a shop in the Maine Grains gristmill, which is also where The Good Crust started and where The Miller’s Table serves a fresh ricotta pizza called The Crooked Face.
“It’s so, so local,” Rowbottom says. “Everything on these pizzas is sourced from this robust agricultural area.”
Grain being cleaned on a gravity table at Maine Grains, sorting the chaff from the plump sound kernels. PHOTO: DANA VALETTI
Kerner, a former occupational therapist who taught her students how to work with pizza dough, says, “In our area, for years, there has been a lot of pizza making, pizza fundraising, pizza teaching … and I said to my twin, ‘Why isn’t anyone making pizza dough that has only local grain in it?’ So I set out to solve that problem.”
Because grains grown in Aroostook County and the Northeast have a slightly lower protein content than grains grown in a warmer, drier region like the Midwest, pizza makers were late adopters of Maine grains.
“There was a myth that we couldn’t make a pizza dough that would function the way we want it to,” Kerner says. “But it’s plenty elastic. There are some considerations, though: It’s a whole-grain flour, which is thirstier than white flour. We use more water than a highly refined white flour would require.
We also use a traditional sourdough to achieve the qualities we want in a pizza dough: crispy and crunchy on the outside and tender and chewy on the inside.”
After The Miller’s Table, Flight Deck Brewing was another early adopter of The Good Crust. Flight Deck’s pizza team drove to Skowhegan to tour the Maine Wood Heat shop, select a wood fired oven and work with Kerner on dough-stretching and other technical aspects of working with local grains.
Before long, Flight Deck and other restaurants were asking how to describe this style of pizza. Was it like New York style? Detroit style? Neapolitan style?
“We are not going to call it any of those things,” Kerner says, “because we are deliberately using only Maine ingredients.”
That’s when she called together that pizza “summit,” where a half dozen friends with pizza-related careers came up with the concept for the Maine Craft Pizza Initiative and the four-star system. Maine Grains Alliance stewards the initiative on their website and, with a grant from the Maine Office of Tourism, hired a graphic designer to create an interactive locator map.
“We encourage businesses that want to make Maine craft pizza to join the initiative through the website,” Kerner says. “This might be a Maine farmer who grows San Marzano tomatoes. Or a small cheese producer making mozzarella. Or a pizzeria or brewery committed to using local ingredients. We call it an initiative because it’s something we’re committing to. But we try not to exclude anyone trying to follow this concept.”
The growing number of restaurants and breweries that have joined include Strong Brewing in Sedgwick, Poland Provisions, East Outlet Brewing in Cambridge, Fogtown Brewing Company in Ellsworth, Tinder Hearth in Brooksville, The Uproot Pie in Thomaston, Bigelow Brewing in Skowhegan, Byers & Sons Long Island Bake House, Old Smith Farm in Falmouth and Flatbread Company in Portland.
Four years after Kerner suggested someone should make pizza dough from 100% Maine grains, her company was named the 2024 Maine Small Business Manufacturer of the Year. The Good Crust is distributed to restaurants, breweries, farm stores and schools throughout Maine and is available nationally through natural food stores.
The wood-fire oven custom-built by Maine Wood Heat for Flight Deck Brewing. PHOTO: BENEDICT CASSIE
In March, eight Mainers, from The Good Crust, The Miller’s Table, Maine Grains, Flight Deck, Maine Wood Heat, and the University of Maine, attended the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas, hauling over a hundred pounds of Maine ingredients there for pizza-making demonstrations.
“We attended a lot of sessions about pizza styles,” Kerner says, “and by style, Maine craft pizza can best be described as ‘artisan,’ which is defined by a thin crispy crust on the bottom, a one-inch ‘handle’ around the edges, and nontraditional or seasonal toppings.”
Perhaps the most important thing that the Maine contingent learned at the expo was that Maine has something unique in the pizza world: a mission.
“Nobody is doing what we’re doing, which is restricting ingredients to a region and intentionally fueling the local food economy,” says Kerner, whose pizza dough company also provides jobs and workforce training for people with different cognitive and physical abilities. “There has been quite a resurgence in the local grain economy here in Maine, and pizza is part of that.”
For a complete list of where to find Maine Craft Pizza in Maine, go to: kneadingconference.com/maine-craft-pizza
Can’t get enough bread?
Check out the Kneading Conference in downtown Skowhegan (July 25-26, 2024) hosted by Maine Grain Alliance and attended by bread buffs from across the country. And then there’s the Maine Artisan Bread Fair at the Skowhegan State Fairgrounds (July 27, 2024).
The Good Crust isn’t just for pizza as shown with these jam and cream cheese bialy, made with dough from The Good Crust. PHOTO: STACEY CRAMP
On the cover: Sebago Lake is a giant among Maine’s lakes and the deepest, too. With coves and forested inlets and opportunities to sail, angle, swim and camp, the lakes region is a favorite for summer adventures.