From left to right: Thomas Garnick Grand Prize Winner with a Mexican-style cheese pizza; John Alers for the REAL California category and Giovanni Labbate winner of the All-Cheese category.
Thomas Garnick’s stepfather is a Mexican immigrant, and even though Garnick owns a pizzeria today, Mexican cooking is part of his heritage.
“I like playing with the cooking techniques I picked up from my childhood,” says Garnick, who owns Brava! Pizzeria in Denver.
Garnick’s skill with Mexican ingredients paid off when he entered the 2019 Real California Pizza Contest. His Bandera de Fusión Pizza won the Mexican-Style Category and the Grand Prize, earning Garnick a cool $15,000. The finals for the contest, sponsored by the California Milk Advisory Board, were held May 9 at the Culinary Institute of America’s facility in Napa, Calif.
Garnick’s pizza was inspired by the Mexican flag and included pork carnitas, salsa verde and mole and four California-produced Hispanic-style cheese and dairy products – Oaxaca, asadero, cotija and crèma Mexicana.
Garnick says the Mexican experience in his award-winning pizza begins with the crust. He mixed some sprouted corn masa into the pizza dough, then deep fried the disk to give it sopapilla-like texture. He topped it with the Mexican ingredients and finished it in a woodfired oven.
“Pizza is a blank canvas that you can use to talk about your culture,” Garnick says. “Italians get credit for pizza, but it’s not really an Italian creation – it’s a global infusion of ingredients.”
Garnick says his Bandera de Fusión pizza is not a normal menu item – he created it especially for the contest – but he does occasionally use Hispanic ingredients in his pies.
“Every week we rotate specials, and that’s where we push the boundaries on ingredients and technique,” he says. “We play with a lot of ideas.”