I felt sad about the crusts. Four of us ordered three pizzas at Bungalow, the brewpub recently opened by the formerly nomadic Middle Brow Beer Company. By the time we’d hit the wall, they sat discarded in front of us like a pile of firewood—if firewood was chewy and toasty with a dark, tangy interior structure that embodies the life-affirming powers of good bread.
The pizza comes from Jess Galli, a baker returned to Chicago from San Francisco’s The Mill and Josey Baker Bread, and chef-about-town Mickey Neely (Scofflaw, the Moonlighter, Dusek’s, Longman & Eagle), who recruited Galli in the days when he and Middle Brow cofounder Pete Ternes were first plotting the direction the brewery’s food would take.
The pizza is available at lunch and dinner but it’s in the morning when this bread takes the stage, toasted and topped with cinnamon, sugar, and grains of paradise, or smeared with housemade ricotta and prickly pear jelly. Galli’s other breads are featured here too: toasted whole grain blanketed with things like pecan butter or turmeric milk jam; sprouted German rye with herbed cream cheese. As she did at her previous job, Galli is using local, non-GMO bread flour, most of it from Wisconsin’s Lonesome Stone Mill, which collects and mills grains from a variety of small farmers. The spreads are nice but the best way to approach these extraordinary loaves is also the simplest: slathered with the the funky butter Neely cultures from buttermilk reserved from his previous batch. (To sample what else Galli and Neely can come up with, check out the monthly morning ambient music series Deep Breakfast at Sleeping Village).
2840 W. Armitage 773-687-9076middlebrowbeer.com
