The Dish: Baltimore’s most exciting pizza is at these pop-ups

On a perfect fall evening last week at a farm in Pikesville, families with small kids milled around a campfire while August Braatz and his crew of four hustled to feed us pizza.

“The dough is really good today,” Braatz said as he took orders. The weather was cooperating, the yeast was active, and the dough passed the window pane test: When Braatz stretched out a piece, he could see through it, before it snapped back in shape like an elastic band.

“That tells you that you’re on the money,” he said later.

Baltimore is in the middle of a pizza boom, with a rash of new restaurants opening to serve one of the city’s — and world’s — favorite dishes. This summer, it was Flour & Wood in Remington; this week, Viale will arrive in the former Paulie Gee’s in Hampden. Fausto’s, from the owner of Mamma Lucia da Fausto, is set to bring pizza back to the former Earth, Wood & Fire location in Baltimore County. “Chopped” winner Sammy Davis Jr. is opening OPP, or “Oysters, Pizza & Pasta,“ in South Baltimore.

But some of the city’s most exciting and sought-after options for pie right now are outside traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants. Instead, customers are clamoring for the pie at pop-ups like Pizza Mazone at Motzi Bread or Braatz’s Porto Pizza, which is serving food at Juniper Farms (500 Tristam Lane) every Friday this month and sold out around two hours after opening last week.

Porto started after Braatz left his job as sous chef at Woodberry Tavern. “Bring some side dishes and some beer, we’re cooking pizza,” he’d text the friends in his group chat. They gathered in the parking lot of his Hampden apartment building.

As a Wisconsin native who moved to Baltimore to study jazz trombone at the Peabody Institute, Braatz says he now finds creative fulfillment in cooking. “Food and music are very, very similar and scratch a lot of the same itches for people,” he said.

Like jazz, pizza requires good listening skills and the ability to pay attention. Pizza is “reactive cooking,” with dough responding to the conditions around it. “It will tell you what it needs.”

That includes Braatz turning off his gas-powered Gozney Dome oven just after placing the dough in to cook his pies with residual heat, and turning it back on to finish the pie and give it a leopard-spot char. Though the process takes longer, it results in a pie that’s sturdier than a traditional Neapolitan — all the better to support Braatz’s unique assortment of toppings, like butternut squash for his “pumpkin pie” or the salad-sized serving of kale and spinach atop another.

One of Braatz’s biggest cheerleaders is Hello Trouble owner Andrew Weinzirl, formerly head chef at Cross Keys pizza hot spot ZaVino. He and Braatz also worked together at Artifact Coffee in Hampden. After sampling Braatz’s pies at a pop-up at Toki Underground, Weinzirl invited him to use Hello Trouble’s kitchen as a commissary space during the cafe’s off hours. And on Saturday nights, Porto sells pizza at the cafe, too.

Weinzirl said structure is what sets Porto’s pizza apart from others. “There are very few pizzas right now that really live in that realm of neo-Neapolitan,” he said, meaning they take inspiration from Southern Italy but don’t get as “soft and gooey in the middle.”

“We had a very good version of that at ZaVino, but obviously he [Braatz] has much more control over every pizza that he’s doing,” Weinzirl said.

The pop-up format also allows Braatz to be more experimental with his toppings than a chef at a traditional restaurant. “He can be as chef-driven and creative as he wants,” Weinzirl said. “It’s very much, ‘This is August’s pizza.’”

The ability to innovate is part of the appeal for Ezra Riemer, a friend of Braatz’s and self-taught pizzaiolo who’s worked at Paulie Gee’s and Doppio Pasticceria. When he first set out to bake his own pies in the 2010s, he knew nothing about baking. “I don’t think I even knew what yeast was,” he said.

At his new pop-up called Pizza Mazone, a partnership with Motzi Bread based out of its 2801 Guilford Ave. space, Riemer uses only the freshly milled, locally sourced flour from the bakery and stretches all of his own milk curd to make mozzarella. “I went to Trinacria and begged them to get some curd,” he said.

It’s the kind of stuff he might have loved to do at his previous jobs but couldn’t. Larger kitchens need to scale up to serve perhaps hundreds of customers a day, whereas Pizza Mazone’s Thursday night pizza drops only sell a few dozen pies each week. “It’s a license to try all the crazy stuff that I had wanted to try at pizza jobs in years past,” he said.

After online preorders for Pizza Mazone went online last week — the shop’s first week in operation — pizzas sold out within eight hours. But Riemer isn’t going for exclusivity. “I want everyone to be able to try it,” he said. “It’s not meant to be this, ‘Check out the next drop.’”

While Riemer envisions opening his own restaurant someday, Braatz appreciates the flexibility of his new gig in the pop-up space. After all, he’s found the rarest thing of all in the restaurant world: work-life balance. On the heels of a busy summer and fall, he’s planning on taking some hard-earned time off to visit family in Wisconsin. “My folks are getting older, so I wanted to help them out,” he said.

For Baltimore diners, that means go now. Get the pizza while it’s still hot.