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This week in Omnivorous I wrote about the Gruene Coal Company in Englewood, the last coal yard in Chicago. Gruene's only customers for their Kentucky bituminous coal are D'Amato's #1 Bakery and the best pizzeria in Chicago. The photo demonstrates just what coal can do for Italian bread. What you have on the bottom is a toasty, crusty loaf baked in Victor D'Amato's 100-something-year-old coal-fueled oven. On top is a softer, more elastic loaf baked at the other D'Amato's, operated by his brother a few blocks west on Grand. 

I've always liked the bread from both bakeries, but it wasn't until I did a side-by-side comparison that I had to give an edge--no, a furlong--to the coal-baked bread.

Coal: D'Amato's #1, 1124 W. Grand, 312-733-5456 

No coal: D'Amato's Bakery and Deli, 1332 W. Grand, 312-733-6219 


Images:


 
Comments
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sbh
July 7th - 11:48 a.m.
not that coalfire isn't a good little bite for the money and who doesn't love byo. but to call it the 'best pizza' is a gross misunderstanding of food and a lack of knowledge by the reader staff.
the sauce is at best adequate , blending mid quality canned roma with paste, over herbed to where the the taste is reminiscent of the era of prego consumerism. as for the cheese , it is hard to call those terse wads of lackluster milk fat mozzerella, the olive oil, whose colour is that of soured chicago rain water, has no depth , no intrigue or length. though you are right , the bread is quite tasty with bite, proper tear from good yeast cultivation, and a nose redolent of char. it is by no means nepoletana. i quite like the establishment and the people who work there, but i humbly suggest that the reader be more aware of your culinary vocation, many read its uneducated voice like the bible



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