Local bakery debuts ghost kitchen pizza joint St. Bruno Pizza Co.
St. Bruno will soon be pumping out pizzas direct to customers 🍕🐶
Hot and fresh from the ovens of St. Bruno Bread Co., a new pizza option is coming to Baton Rouge.
Announced in an Instagram post, St. Bruno Pizza Co. is launching as a pre-order and pickup concept with four pie options and an appetizer. Owner Steven Gottfried says the bakery will operate as a ghost kitchen for the new pizza concept and its menu will expand as the operation gets up and running.
A website for pre-orders will launch soon, where customers can choose their pies along with pickup times, which will take place weekly on Thursdays. The first pickup date is set for Thursday, April 2, and pickups will take place at the bakery on Town South Avenue.
Gottfried has teased the thick, rectangular pizzas, which he classifies as a mashup between a Detroit style using black steel pans and classic pizzas they’ve been making at the bakery since its inception, on the bakery’s Instagram stories before, but today’s post gave the official announcement. He says he and his team have always played with pizza at St. Bruno, but the last six months have been dedicated to perfecting the recipe.
“Pizza was my gateway drug into the world of baking,” Gottfried says. “So I always knew it was going to circle back to pizza in some facet. But St. Bruno is very much a wholesaler, and we don’t have any storefront presence. So this will be our first kind of foray to direct to consumer.”
The starting menu includes four pizzas: the JCP, aka Just Cheese Please; Baker’s Choice, with pepperonis and jalapeños; Green and White, a pesto pizza topped with pepperoni, dollops of ricotta and drizzles of hot honey; and Hot Hog, a sausage and bacon pizza finished with a sweet sriracha. An appetizer of hand-carved country sourdough slices and homemade whipped butter will also be available.
Of course, the pizzas made by the bread bakery will focus on a hefty, sourdough-based crust. Crusts are parbaked in black steel pans with butter on the bottom. Then they’re loaded up with toppings and flash baked in high heat, resulting in a deep-fried-like crust and slices with great texture.
“We wanted to do a thicker crust, because it’s all about the dough for us,” Gottfried says. “We didn’t want to do a cracker crust. It was important that we found that middle ground. So it took quite a while to get the pizzas dialed in.”
While the focus is on fresh pizzas, Gottfried shares that since St. Bruno is in the wholesaler game, frozen pizza distributions will happen soon, too.
“That’s something we played around a lot with, too, was trying to make the frozen pizza experience as close to the bakery experience as we could,” he says.
As for the future, Gottfried tells 225 that a brick-and-mortar pizza joint isn’t out of the question. It all depends on demand. But right now, St. Bruno Pizza Co. will be more of an “underground deal.”
The ghost kitchen will serve up its first ‘zas to the public on Thursday, April 2, preceded by a pre-order that is expected to open Monday, March 30. Keep up with all the latest on St. Bruno Pizza Co. by following its Instagram page.
