The Uncle Teddy

Three ingredients. Red sauce, mozzarella, meatballs. No fruit, no white base, no cured fish, nothing to explain to anybody.

This is the pizza on our menu with the least going on, and it is by some distance the hardest one to fake. When there are only three things on a pie, every one of them is load-bearing. There's nowhere for a mediocre component to hide.

The meatballs are the whole pizza

Meatball pizza is usually bad, and the reason is almost always the same: the meatballs came out of a bag. Pre-cooked frozen spheres have a texture like a pencil eraser and a flavor like salt, and no amount of good sauce rescues them.

So we make them. That's the entire premise of this pie and the reason it's on the menu.

A few things matter when you do:

A panade, always. Bread soaked in milk, worked into the mix. It sounds like a filler and it does the opposite: the starch holds moisture through cooking, which is what keeps a meatball tender instead of springy. A meatball of pure ground meat and egg tightens up and goes rubbery. This is the single biggest difference between a good meatball and a bad one.

Don't overwork the mix. Handle ground meat too much and the proteins link up and you get something dense. Mix until it just comes together and then stop.

Season it properly and taste it. Fry a small piece before you commit the batch. Under-seasoned meatballs on a pizza disappear entirely.

Torn, not sliced into coins. We break them up rather than slicing them neatly, so there are craggy edges that catch heat and go brown in the oven. A smooth disc of meatball just sits there. The rough bits are where the flavor concentrates.

What to expect when you eat it

It tastes like the pizza you remember from being a kid, except the meatballs are real.

Red sauce, uncooked crushed tomato and salt, going sweet and concentrated in the oven. Mozzarella pulling properly. Then the meatballs, tender in the middle with browned edges, sitting on top rather than buried.

There is nothing surprising about it and that's deliberate. Some nights you want a pie built on fondant potato and caviar, and we have one of those. Most nights you want this.

It's the most filling pizza we make. Plan accordingly.

When to order it

Any time. This is the one pie on the menu that doesn't care what month it is.

Tomatoes for the sauce are preserved at their peak rather than bought fresh in February, meatballs aren't seasonal, and mozzarella doesn't have a window. While the rest of the menu rotates with whatever the growers have, as described in what Spokane grows, this one just stays.

That makes it the pie to order in the dead of a Spokane winter, when the interesting produce is three months out and you want something that was never trying to be clever. It's also the right call for kids, for a table that includes someone suspicious of restaurants, and for anybody who has had a long week.

What to drink with it

A red wine, finally. Most of what we make fights with big reds, and this one doesn't.

Something Italian and medium-bodied with decent acidity is the natural fit. Chianti is the cliché and the cliché is correct. A Montepulciano or a Barbera does the same job.

For beer, an amber or a lager. Nothing too hoppy, because there's no sweetness here that needs cutting through.

About the name

It's named after somebody, and that part stays between us and him.

What we'll say is that it's exactly the pizza he'd order, that he would have no patience for a pie with figs on it, and that he'd be quietly pleased to have his name on the plainest thing we make.

If you'd rather build one at home, crust matters explains the dough and pizza basics covers the fundamentals. The overnight pizza dough is the one to start with. Meatballs are on you.

The current menu has what's on this week, and this one usually is.