Recipe: Ann Kim’s Lady Zaza Pizza from the Netflix Show Chef’s Table: Pizza (2024)

Ever since the Netflix show, “Chef’s Table: Pizza” came out in the summer of 2022, everybody’s been wanting to make the pizzas seen in the different episodes, including me. It’s nice to change it up every once in awhile. You can’t just eat pepperoni and Margherita pizzas all the time. (My girlfriend Lori could though.)

Episode 3 of Chef’s Table: Pizza features Korean, James Beard Award Winning, Chef Ann Kim. We learn that Ann’s first passion was acting, but after being constantly type-cast, she was over it. Her new passion became making pizza, and she wanted to do it her way by infusing her Korean heritage into some of the pies.

Ann owns four restaurants in Minneapolis. The Lady Zaza Pizza is featured on the menu at Pizzeria Lola. As you can imagine, a James Beard Award Winning chef takes no shortcuts. However, a home cook that wants to eat good pizza that doesn’t take days to make will hopefully appreciate the easier version that I created.

Ann makes the kimchi from scratch using her mother’s recipe. She pulls each Napa cabbage leaf open and individually salts each one. Then they brine for three hours. After they brine, she then again individually rubs the spicy kimchi paste onto each leaf. The kimchi paste includes Korean red pepper powder, fish sauce, scallions, fine chopped brined shrimp, garlic, ginger, and sugar.

I bet it is freakin’ amazing! For this recipe, I bought a jar of kimchi. You’re welcome.
(I used a local boutique brand, St. Pete Ferments.)

However, I did make the Spicy Korean Sausage because I couldn’t find anything like what Ann makes, and it is quite easy to do. I made it the day before to make pizza day go smoother.

Little Differences …

I made some changes to make this a little easier for the home cook, and interestingly enough, Ann also makes little differences herself. For example, here is the menu description of Lady Zaza as of this publication.

Lady Zaza – Italian Red Sauce, Gochujang, Kimchi, Sakura Pork, Scallion, Sesame.

Sakura pork is from a specific farm in IA. When Ann makes the Lady Zaza Pizza on Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives, she is usingBerkshire pork, and she is using it to make a spicy Korean sausage that is the actual topping. Serrano Peppers are never even mentioned on the menu, although they are there. The “sesame” is black and white sesame seeds, and there is a sesame oil drizzle.

I used regular ground pork from the supermarket, and based the ingredients and amounts and how she did it on Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives for the spicy Korean sausage. I also used an amazing gourmet spicy jarred tomato sauce and a great packaged spicy Gochujang sauce for the drizzle at the end.

Here’s the Korean red pepper powder I used.

Ann’s pizza uses a Neapolitan dough and is made in a wood-fired commercial pizza oven. I use a NY-style dough recipe, and bake it in a regular home oven. Trust me. It comes out great. I do it all by hand, just like Ann.

This recipe is for a 14″ pizza, with some measurements also given for a 12″ pizza. See my NY-style Pizza Dough Recipe here, and see my How-To on Forming the Pizza Base here.

As I said, I baked this in a conventional home oven. I have a pizza stone on the bottom rack, and a pizza steel on the top rack. The oven gets preheated to 525º F, and then holds for one hour before baking the pizza. (If your oven will go to 550º, do that, and if you have convection, do that too.)

I went for 7 minutes on the stone on the bottom, and then switched to high broil, and moved the pizza to the steel on the top rack for 1.5 minutes. (Keep an eye on it though. It may need more or less time on broil.)

If you only have a stone, just keep it on the bottom rack the whole time. If you only have a steel, keep it on the top rack, and just switch to broil at the end.

The prep time does not include making and fermenting the dough, which is linked in a separate recipe. You can substitute a store-bought dough if you want, but making your own and fermenting it isn’t hard, and yields phenomenal results.

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