Find this new pizza restaurant in a different location nearly every day. It’s on wheels
Chuck and Holly Preble have counted pizza as a favorite food since honeymooning in Italy.
They’ve eaten and made it all over the world.
After Chuck was stationed in Germany for the Army, they adapted a recipe for a local German pizza, called flammkuchen, they fell in love with.
When Chuck deployed to Iraq, he missed pizza terribly. Holly mailed Chuck some of the ingredients to make his own pizza feast. He improvised by buying pita dough from an Iraqi baker.
Pizza dough making has become a serious family activity since Chuck left the military in November. The family opened their mobile restaurant, Sirius Wood Fired Pizza, in May.
Holly and Chuck run the pizza trailer equipped with a wood-fired oven with their four children, ages 15 to 7. The truck’s name came from a bedtime ritual during Chuck’s deployment.
“Daddy might be gone, but Daddy looks up and he sees the same stars we do,” Holly told the kids before bedtime while reading to them from a book about stars. “Our kids would look up at the sky every night and wish on the stars.”
Because it was the brightest, those wishes usually landed on Sirius.
All four kids — Robin, Charlie, William and Violet — contribute to the business. They stretch dough, collect money, stock napkins and deliver finished pies to customers
The pizza trailer has found regular gigs at local breweries such as Puyallup’s Off Camber Brewing, Sumner’s Half Lion Brewing Co. and DuPont’s Forward Operating Base Brewing Co. It also has appeared at food truck festivals and regularly serves at Puyallup’s weekly concert series.
The Prebles’ pizza category is Neapolitan-style. Their dough is hand stretched until thin and comes with a mild tang from a three-day cold ferment.
They’re picky about their dough and don’t reserve leftover dough for the next day’s pizza. Instead, they bake it into loaves they donate to the Nourish Pierce County food bank in Puyallup.
Pies, spanning about 12 inches across, arrive with blistered edges, a gift from the scorching heat from the trailer’s wood-fired oven that reaches up to 900 degrees. They fuel that oven with maple, oak or Pacific madrone.
The high heat leaves the pizza with a texture that seesaws from a crispy edge to a center with pliable resistance.
Pies are priced $10 to $12 each. Other than pizza, they offer garlic bread, but that’s it.
The menu changes frequently and the Prebles sometimes create a custom pizza they’ll only serve at specific locations. For instance, when serving at Off-Camber Brewing, they flavor the dough with the brewery’s amber beer and also make an amber beer reduction sauce to finish the pie.
They intentionally keep the menu short with around six pizzas.
Margarita is the family’s favorite, and I appreciated the whole basil leaves, the sharp tomato sauce and that the mozzarella pulled into hot, stretchy tendrils ($11). Robin has a version she created with pepperoni. They call it the Margheroni ($12).
The New York was blanketed in spicy sausage and slices of pepperoni so big, they yielded broad coverage across the entire pie that was built with mozzarella and red sauce ($12).
The pizza influenced by their military time in Germany is a must order. Flammkuchen is an unusual find outside of a few Tacoma destinations (Parkland’s Citron European Bistro and Stadium’s Rhein Haus). The Prebles stretch the dough thin and cover it with decadent toppings of fresh cream, Swiss cheese, caramelized onions, thinly-sliced bacon and sliced green onions ($12).
In the coming weeks, the family hopes to debut new menu items, including wood-fired puccia sandwiches.They also have been testing dessert pizza recipes.
Get it now because when the weather turns, the truck likely will shutter for the colder months.
Sirius Wood Fired Pizza
Info: 253-359-5259
Check the schedule: facebook.com/SiriusWoodFiredPizza