If you walk into almost any pizzeria in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx or Long Island and ask the pizzamaker what makes the crust so good, they will always tell you the same thing – it’s because of the water.

Now, without drilling too deep into the food science behind this, generally speaking NY municipal drinking water is among the healthiest and it’s unique mineral content makes it among the smoothest to drink. For over 100 years – New York bakers, pretzelmakers, bagel joints and pizzamakers have been crediting the water with being the stuff of legend. Brilliant marketing? Maybe.

Well for us, we needed to see if tap water from NZ stacked up, and had no choice but to challenge that most sacred of NY pizza tenets. So we did the hard yards in April 2008 – with Nick going all the way back to Auckland just to grab 5 liters of tap water and bring it back to NY in his suitcase.

A few days later we were using that water to mix the flour in the back of Sal’s kitchen – in Little Neck, NY. A day later, after sufficient retarding, we used those doughs to make pizzas and served them to regulars of Sal’s – and for us and the regs. there was no discernible difference – everything tasted delicious. This was a huge day for us!

So, as it turns out – quite poetically,  NZ water works too - beautifully smooth and great for making a tasty pizza crust. We certainly pride ourselves on importing the same cheese, tomatoes, flour and pepperoni used in the best NYC pizzerias, but we love our NZ water!

Now the story behind this story has to do with the name of our company in NZ. As you know, we trade under ‘Sal’s Authentic New York Pizza’, but our actual company name is NZ Waterworks Ltd. – people never understand that and assume we’re a water supply/power company or something. Well, now you know the true story behind our company name:)