FOOD

A slice of love: Homemade pizza, good times at Valleau home

ANN MARIE BARRON
Correspondent

Clint Valleau has a nickname for the round pizza he lovingly creates for family and friends in his home in the Whippany section of Hanover Township: The wheel of life.

A cheese pizza served at a recent pizza party hosted by Clint and Anne Valleau.

After all, homemade pizza is the dish that always brought his family together during his boyhood days on Fairchild Avenue.

It's also the only offering that can be counted on to draw his mother, siblings, friends and his own grown children to his Vale Avenue table any time a little life and laughter are in order.

Clint Valleau takes a Margherita pizza out of the oven.

"The food brings us all together," he said of the tasty discs he serves almost weekly in the home he shares with his wife, Anne. "Just seeing everyone happy and smiling — I love to have that feeling. This isn't about me, or a recipe. It's really about my family."

Filling his kitchen with hungry bellies and good conversation is never a challenge, he says. "Almost nobody says no." Pizza is almost universally loved, he said. "If I put it out in an email, almost everybody shows up. Our home has become the hub and I like it that way."

Homemade sausage pizza served at the Valleau home.

The pizza tradition pre-dates his childhood, when his grandfather, Harold (Pop) Valleau and his buddy Pete Esposito made pizza on weekends at the Morris Plains Drive-In during the 1950s. Valleau still has the antique wooded-handled pizza cutter they used back then. After using for four decades, Valleau had it encased in glass.

Valleau's father, Dick, and mother, Dot, carried on the tradition in their Fairchild Avenue home until 2004, when Valleau took over after the loss of his dad. With his parents, the pizza was often the frozen kind, purchased in a supermarket. Eventually, they progressed to buying pizza shells to doctor up themselves. Valleau has been making his own dough for the past three years.

A fresh arugula pizza.

The recipe is pretty simple, he says. He creates the dough by hand, using Antimo Caputo Italian "00" flour, which has a very fine, silky feel. "I actually put some malt into it now to help it brown and give it a different flavor," he says of the dough, which also comprises only the flour, water, yeast and salt.

A favorite store-bought pizza sauce, Don Peppino's Pizza Sauce, and Fiori de Latte mozzarella cheese (purchased at Costco) are crowned with a variety of toppings, including sausage, peppers, onions and mushrooms.

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A family favorite is his arugula pie, tossed with balsamic glaze and covered with fresh Parmesan cheese. Margherita pies are always on the menu, featuring only sauce, cheese and fresh basil. "I always get in trouble for using too much basil," he said. "But, I just love fresh basil."

Valleau pops the pizzas into his Pieson Pizza Oven, a propane-powered pizza oven that reaches 750 degrees, and the piping hot pizzas are ready to please in short order. The oven resides on the deck in warm weather; in the winter all pizza making takes place in the garage.

On a recent Saturday night, Valleau served up 10 pizzas to a crowd of about 20 friends and family members gathered around his extra wide, extra long kitchen table and a few extra "six-footers" tables set up in the family room. And though meatballs, Braciole, salad and cheeses were also on the menu, no pizza was left over.

Anne and their children, Kenny, 31; Matthew, 27, and Kimberly, 25, have all helped with the food prep, but it's Clint who runs the show. "Anne is the hostess with the 'mostest,' but I'm the cook. We do every other part of it together."

His wife of close to 35 years wouldn't have it any other way.

"He just loves to cook and he loves to entertain," she said. Their pantry and refrigerator brim with ingredients at all times, she said, ready for unexpected guests. "If somebody came over now, he'd whip something up."

Valleau also hosts corporate events at his home from time to time, and has entertained as many as 24 colleagues. The pizza is well known at Allied Building Products in East Rutherford, where Valleau worked his way up from truck driver to vice president of purchasing during his 25-year career.

But the family events are closest to his heart, generating memories so precious, he doesn't take any chances. Dates, guests and other details are dutifully listed by the host in black and white marble notebooks. The particulars make for sentimental reading long after the last guest leaves.

"It brings up all kinds of feelings," he said. "It's always interesting, and sometimes sad. People have died. People move away. Just watching the kids grow, seeing them come of age, progressing, it's really centering. There's good times and bad and — knock wood — we've been in good times for quite a while."

Do you know of a great home cook in Morris County? Email Eva Abreu eabreu@GannettNJ.com