At Good Luck Pizza Co., gluten-free diners will find masterful pizza dough

It isn’t luck that makes the gluten-free pizza dough rise impressively at the Good Luck Pizza Co. Although, if you’ve eaten as many bad gluten-free pizzas as my family has over the past year since our daughter’s celiac diagnosis, many of which resembled cardboard crackers or densely doughy bricks, you’ll know that finding a good one can feel like a minor miracle.

But something special is baking in the dedicated gluten-free pans at Marcie Turney and Valerie Safran’s pizza-centric new Italian replacement for Jamonera, which debuted at 105 S. 13th St. last week.

“Are you sure this is gluten-free?” asked my wife suspiciously, holding-up a slice of puffy, tender-crumbed, crunchy-edged Grandma-style pizza between her fingers.

Indeed, it was. And the secret behind its notable lightness and dynamic crust is the painstaking trial and error process undertaken these past few months by ace food experimenter George Sabatino, the consulting chef and Barbuzzo alum hired to develop the doughs.

Sabatino, who frequently documents his research on Instagram, was determined to create a gluten-free counterpart to the high-hydration dough he’s already mastered for the standard pizzas here, pan pies with crispy bottoms and pliant crumbs full of fermented holes that keep them light and allow them to rise just shy of the trendy Detroit-style.

“Trust me, I made a lot of really heavy, dense doughs to begin with because when there’s no gluten, there’s nothing to hold the structure. Some of (the failed experiments) almost looked like spackle,” he said.

There’s still a difference if you hold Good Luck’s standard and gluten-free pizzas side-by-side, with bigger air pockets and more suppleness to the wheat flour pizza’s crust. But Sabatino’s gluten-free dough, the result of at least 20 different experimental variations with different flour blends, hydration levels and preparation techniques, is one of the most convincing g-free versions I’ve tasted. Most pizza shops in Philadelphia that offer gluten-free pizza use outsourced pre-packed crusts. The Queen Village branch of Emmy Squared makes a tasty gluten-free dough for its Detroit-style pizzas, but it’s inconsistent, and rarely has the rise of the crust we tasted from Good Luck.

Sabatino ultimately landed on a blend of corn flour, potato and tapioca starches, and just a touch of xanthan and guar gums for binding. But it’s the process that made the biggest difference in texture, he said, with a pre-fermented portion of dough used to jumpstart the larger batch.

Like the gluten-full dough, the gluten-free version, once mixed, is fermented for an additional 24-hour period to develop more flavor and textural complexity before it’s pressed into long steel pans, dimpled, and then dappled with olive oil like focaccia.

Good Luck purchased those skinny pans exclusively for its gluten-free pies. The dough is prepared in the same kitchen as the rest of the menu, which may be a limitation for some who are extremely sensitive to gluten, but all of it is made first thing in the morning with separate tools and cutters. It’s then baked inside the dedicated top deck of a three tier oven to avoid cross-contamination as much as possible.

If your party is not exclusively gluten-free, the standard pizzas, as well as the rest of the menu being cooked now by Good Luck’s chef Bill Braun, are absolutely worth checking out. I loved our wheat flour pizza with sausage, peppers and broccoli rabe, as well as the sesame-encrusted chicken Milanese with celery-walnut salad.

Yes, there are several other intriguing projects competing for your pizza dollars in Philly these days — even on 13th Street, where longstanding slice shop, Zio’s Brick Oven Pizza, will soon be joined by Prunella from the Schulson Collective in the former Zavino space. But diving deep into the task of creating a pizza made from a fresh gluten-free dough is a task that few pizza shops in town have tackled and mastered. That alone is a reason to give the Good Luck Pizza Co. a try.

— Craig LaBan

Gluten-free pizza, $20.50-$25.50, at Good Luck Pizza Co., 105 S. 13th St., 215-922-6061; goodluckpizzaco.com