Experience pure pizza joy from this roving wood-fired oven in Pierce County

It’s impossible to tell if the crowds are here for the cider, which is delightful; the experience, which is unparalleled; or the pizza — but every group has in front of them a Neapolitan pie (or the remnants of one) from Sirius Wood Fired Pizza, parked outside with oven burning around 900 degrees Fahrenheit.

Every Thursday, the line spills out the door of the petite tasting room at Cockrell Cider, but it moves briskly. Order a Bone Dry and a Yarlington and head outside, where your biggest hurdle to a near-perfect weekday evening is finding a seat on the covered deck or spacious grassy patio, scattered with wooden picnic tables and fire pits. Savvy regulars sneak their own camping chair into the nooks lining the 7.5-acre orchard, where brothers Richard and John Cockrell harvest heirloom apples on this more than 150-year-old farm in the Puyallup Valley.

Settle in, then send an ambassador from your crew back to the front to scour the Sirius menu — all pizza, all the time.

Two of the truck’s best pies are also the simplest. No matter what you decide, tack on a Roman Pizza Bianca — dough, roasted garlic, salt — to fully comprehend the mission of owners Chuck and Holly Preble.

“In Rome, this is what you’re gonna get and this is how you’re gonna get it,” said Holly Preble, a nurse and corporate consultant prior to launching the food truck and catering company with her husband, a U.S. Navy veteran, in 2018.

Shaped into a circle but sliced into narrow rectangles, it appears painfully simple, but this “garlic bread” boasts cloves slow-roasted in the wood-fired oven as it heats before every service. You’ll probably sneak a piece in between slices of the all-tomato Marinara, one of Preble’s favorites. If you’re committed to cheese, the Margheroni marries quintessential Neapolitan flavors — mozzarella, basil, bright red tomato sauce — with a few oversized pepperonis.

“We try to respect the craft,” Preble told The News Tribune. “You’re never gonna see us doing a ranch pizza with crushed Doritos — that’s just not us. We know who we are and who we aren’t, because I want you to actually try it. It’s really good dough! You don’t have to cover it in ranch.”

Every 12-inch pie starts with dough made with Shepherd’s Farm wheat flour, cold-fermented for three days and hand-stretched to order. You can’t build your own pie here, but trust me — you won’t need to.

“Most of it is just — people get too fussy, man!” laughed Preble. That means no balsamic drizzles, no sliced tomatoes. “The amount of time it takes for the bottom of the pizza, versus the top of the pizza to cook — if I don’t have a balance between the two, I’m gonna have a burned bottom and a doughy top.”

So is the woe of countless pizzas, especially thin-crust styles, but not at Sirius. Their commitment to the craft is obvious from the leopard spotting on the crust, uneven in a way that speaks to the detail you can cull from Preble if you inquire.

“What we’re doing with our dough, it’s artisan; it’s not 100% recipe,” she explained, accounting for fluctuations in the temperature outside, in the truck, of the flour and water itself. “We take temperatures of everything. It’s 100% math to get it where it needs to go. It’s very, very easy and very, very hard at the same time.”

SIRIUS PIZZA

Near the end of his military career, Chuck Preble saw a fellow with a pizza trailer in Hawaii and decided that was it. The family had long been enamored of pizza-making at home — they have a Mugnaini oven there and bought another for the Sirius trailer. Chuck applied and was accepted to train with World Pizza Cup Champion Tony Gemignani, based in San Francisco.

His stations took the family to Germany, where they discovered the caramelized onion-laden flammkuchen that stars on the Sirius menu today, and to Kansas, Texas and South Carolina, where Chuck learned to barbecue. As a kid he watched Julia Child with his grandmother while visiting her in Cape Cod.

Something about the Prebles’ pizza evokes that sense of wanderlust, of having tasted the best and the mediocre on both sides of the Atlantic. The resulting menu at Sirius focuses on the timeless culinary ideal that the best ingredients make the best food.

Tomatoes are exclusively whole peeled plums from Stanislaus Alta Cucina in Modesto, California. Wood for the oven sticks with regionally sourced maple, oak, honey locust and Pacific Madrone.

The Prebles — with the assistance of their teenage children — sling some of the region’s finest pies. It’s no wonder regulars return every Thursday to Cockrell and every Wednesday to Acorn Brewing in Edgewood, which also offers outdoor seating. Recently, they added Tuesdays at North 47 Brewing in Browns Point. On other days of the week, they cater weddings and events, curated in the same way they curate their pizzas.

“The people we cater for,” said Holly Preble, “they become family. They bring their babies. We get to be a part of your memory.”

The past four years haven’t been easy, she cautioned, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the financial support of her husband’s time in the military, but the passion for the product and the experience remains.

Food, she said, “It’s celebration, everyone getting together and being able to share a meal, it’s joyful.”

Bring a friend, or four, because there are no boxes. There is only pizza.

SIRIUS WOOD FIRED PIZZA

▪ Multiple Locations, 253-359-5259, siriuswoodfiredpizza.com

▪ Schedule: check Instagram for current updates — Tuesdays 5-8 p.m. at North 47 Brewing, 1000 Town Ctr. NE, Tacoma; Wednesdays 5-8 p.m. at Acorn Brewing, 2105 Meridian Ave. E, Edgewood; Thursdays 4-7 p.m. at Cockrell Cider, 6613 114th Ave. Ct. E, Puyallup

▪ Details: Neapolitan-style wood-fired pizza from a food truck; order on-site and receive text message when your order is ready for pickup at the window

This story was originally published July 29, 2021 at 5:00 AM.