New Haven Apizza at Home: Plain, Mozzarella and White Clam Pies

New Haven, Connecticut has its own pizza vocabulary. It’s apizza, pronounced “uh-BEETz,” a holdover from the Neapolitan dialect of the city’s early Italian immigrants. Order a “plain” and it comes without mozzarella. The famous pie is topped with clams.

You can’t copy a coal oven in a kitchen, but you can get close to the style: a thin crust, sparse toppings, a lot of color, and a white clam pie made with fresh clams.

What makes it apizza

• The plain pie. Crushed tomatoes, a dusting of grated pecorino Romano and olive oil. Modernist Pizza compares it to a marinara with a sprinkle of cheese. Mozzarella, which locals sometimes call “mutz,” wasn’t common on New Haven pizza until the 1930s; it’s an add-on, not the default.
• The crust. Thin, dense and dry, made with very little salt. New Haven pizzaioli pat the dough out, as in Naples, rather than tossing it.
• The color. It comes out of the oven very dark, with heavy char on the rim and bottom.
• The oven. Frank Pepe’s and Sally’s still bake in coal-fired ovens. Early New Haven ovens actually burned coke, a cleaner coal product from a local supplier; the pizzerias switched to coal when it closed in 1968. Modern Apizza’s ovens run on oil.

Modernist Pizza thinks New Haven pizza may be one of the closest things we still have to the pizza of 19th-century Naples, which was thicker, denser and tougher than Neapolitan pizza is now, built to survive being sold on the street.

The pizzerias

New Haven’s Italian immigrants, many from around Naples, ran backyard bakeries in the early 1900s, and pizza grew out of them. Modernist Pizza, drawing on local historian Colin Caplan, lists several early candidates and notes that Frank Pepe wasn’t the first; Camposano’s Apizza opened in 1924. Pepe’s is the longest-lasting:

• Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana (1925). Pepe and his wife, Filomena, came from Maiori, near Salerno. He rented a bakery with a coke-fired brick oven, sold bread from a horse and wagon, added pizza, and by 1936 had a 136-seat pizzeria. In the 1960s Pepe’s started making fresh-shucked clam pizzas with Romano cheese, garlic, oil and oregano, and it still shucks the clams to order.
• Modern Apizza (1934). Named in the 1940s, when Louis Persano took over an existing pizzeria. Oil-fired ovens, and the only New Haven pizzeria the Modernist Pizza team visited that used a levain rather than cake yeast.
• Sally’s Apizza (1938). Founded by Salvatore Consiglio, who learned the trade at his uncle Frank Pepe’s.

Not everyone loves it

New Haven pies top a lot of “best pizza” lists. The Modernist Pizza team was not convinced: at every pizzeria they visited, they found the dough needed salt and the crust was dense and hard, and at several, including Pepe’s, the pizza was burnt rather than charred. Sally’s and Pepe’s were their least favorite stops; Modern’s plain and mozzarella pies were their favorites. They also call the white clam pie a brilliant idea and a great New Haven invention, and the clams they had were tender, not rubbery.

Taste is personal, and fans love exactly the char the book objects to. For a home cook, the useful takeaway is that you can choose how far to push both the salt and the color.

The home version

The Pizza Planner has no New Haven preset. The nearest is its New York dough, which is also a thin, hearth-baked pizza for a home oven: high-protein bread flour, 64% water and 2.8% salt, about 272 g for a 12-inch pizza, rested in the fridge for two days. The full recipe is in New York-style pizza dough.

Two adjustments move it toward apizza:

• Stretch it thin to the edge. New Haven pies don’t have a puffy rim. Pat and stretch the dough by hand and keep the rim close to the thickness of the middle.
• Decide on the salt. New Haven doughs are known for very little salt; Modernist Pizza counts that as a flaw. If you want to try the local profile, the Planner’s fine-tune lets you lower the salt to 1.6%. Otherwise, keep the 2.8%; the pecorino and the clams bring their own salt.

The three classic orders

Plain. Crushed or puréed canned tomatoes, uncooked and spread thin, with a generous dusting of grated pecorino Romano and a drizzle of olive oil. The Pizza Calculator starts a 12-inch pie at about 70 to 95 g of sauce.

Mozzarella. The plain pie with mozzarella on top. Low-moisture mozzarella browns more readily in a long home bake; fresh mozzarella stays softer.

White clam. No tomato. Olive oil, chopped garlic, chopped fresh clams, grated pecorino Romano and dried oregano, the combination Modernist Pizza describes at Pepe’s. The book recommends fresh-shucked clams and says canned ones just aren’t the same. Commercially canned clams are cooked, though, so they’re the simpler option if you can’t get or handle fresh ones; Cento, for example, says its whole baby clams are cooked in their natural juices (checked October 14, 2026). Follow the package directions.

Handling fresh clams safely

Fresh clams are worth the effort, but they need care:

• Buy them live, from a seller who tags them. The FDA advises looking for the tag on sacks or containers of live shellfish, which carries the processor’s certification number.
• Check every clam. Throw away any with cracked or broken shells, and any that are open and don’t close when you tap them; they’re dead.
• Keep them cold and breathing. Store live clams in the refrigerator in an open container under a damp cloth, never in water (Washington State Department of Health). Use them soon after buying.
• Shuck just before topping. Work over a bowl to catch the juice, keep the shucked clams cold, and use them the same day.
• If shucking is too hard. Use commercially canned clams instead, or steam the clams in their shells until they’re fully cooked; the Washington State Department of Health’s standard for shellfish is 145°F (63°C) inside for 15 seconds. Discard any that don’t open, then remove the meat and chop it. Don’t stop when the shells first open and count on the pizza’s short bake to finish them.
• Cook raw clams through on the pizza. If you top the pizza with raw shucked clams, they need to reach the same 145°F (63°C) for 15 seconds. Since a thermometer is impractical on a pizza, the Washington State Department of Health’s guide is that shucked clams turn plump and opaque when they’re cooked thoroughly. If yours aren’t when the crust is done, leave the pizza in a little longer on a lower rack.
• Know who should skip it. The FDA advises pregnant people, young children, older adults and anyone with a weakened immune system to avoid raw or undercooked shellfish.

Make it

This uses the steel-and-broiler method from Ken Forkish’s New York pizza, pushed a little darker:

1. Make the dough. Make a New York-style dough two days ahead, such as the Pizza Planner’s New York preset: about 272 g per 12-inch pizza at 64% hydration, refrigerated 48 hours. Take the dough balls out about 90 minutes before baking.
2. Preheat the steel. Put a baking steel on an upper rack, no more than 8 inches below the broiler, and preheat at 500 to 550°F (260 to 288°C) for 45 to 60 minutes. Switch to the broiler 5 minutes before the first pizza goes in.
3. Stretch thin. Pat and stretch each ball by hand to about 12 inches, thin all the way to the edge, and lay it on a floured peel.
4. Top. For a plain pie, spread 70 to 95 g of crushed tomatoes and add a generous dusting of grated pecorino Romano and a drizzle of olive oil. For mozzarella, add it on top. For white clam, use olive oil, garlic, chopped clams (raw shucked, fully cooked or canned), grated pecorino Romano and dried oregano, with no tomato.
5. Bake. Turn off the broiler, slide the pizza onto the steel and bake at 550°F for 5 to 6 minutes. Then broil for 2 to 3 minutes, checking every minute, until the rim and the bubbles are spotted dark brown to black.
6. Check and serve. If you topped a clam pie with raw shucked clams, check that they’re plump and opaque all the way through. Let the steel recover for a few minutes between pizzas.

The Planner’s home-oven window for this dough is 8 to 12 minutes; this version runs 7 to 9 minutes, around the short end, because the broiler supplies the color. How dark to go is your call. Modernist Pizza’s warning is that past a point, browning stops adding flavor and the crust turns acrid and bitter, so aim for spotted char, not a blackened base. Check that your oven allows its broiler to be used this way, and don’t use parchment under it.

For more on heating a steel, see the baking steel guide.

Sources

• Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1: page 39 (19th-century Naples pizza and New Haven), pages 50–52 (New Haven’s bakeries and pizzerias, the pronunciation of apizza and “mutz,” the plain pie, low salt, coke and coal ovens), pages 112–113 and 117 (the book’s critique, the white clam pie), page 228 (Pepe’s oven at about 600°F), pages 229–232 (key takeaways, Pepe’s clam pizza, Modern Apizza).
• Ken Forkish, The Elements of Pizza (2016): chapter 2, “Neapolitan Pizza”; chapter 7, “New York Cheese Pizza” (the steel-and-broiler bake).
• U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Selecting and Serving Fresh and Frozen Seafood Safely: shellfish tags, damaged and open shells, discarding shellfish that don’t open when cooked, people at higher risk. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Washington State Department of Health, Shellfish Handling, Storing, and Cooking: storing live shellfish, 145°F internally for 15 seconds, and doneness cues for shucked shellfish. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Cento, Whole Baby Clams: the clams are cooked in their natural juices. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Dough weight and sauce range are from the site’s pizza engine.