![]() ![]() Melissa Swanson grew up in Berkeley, where as a child she became a fan of dining out. His first taste of a fresh fig suddenly made sense of the Fig Newton, and on learning to make mayonnaise, he remembers thinking: “It’s egg yolks and oil? I thought it came from a jar.” Moving to the Bay Area, Peter took a job at Lark Creek Inn, where he had his first epiphanies about fresh produce and hand crafting. But the young chef persevered and found his rhythm in the camaraderie and fast-paced energy of the line at kitchens in Vail and Denver, Colorado. When the time came to choose a career, Peter wandered into a fine-dining kitchen, where one boss told him he was slow (and worse). His vegetarian stepfather didn’t want meat cooked in the kitchen, so his mom bought her son a grill so he could cook it outdoors. It was as a 12-year-old living in Kent City, Michigan, that Peter got his start in cooking. The pizza at the new location is nearly the same recipe, although in Oakland, for whatever reason, it requires 200 grams less water. “It was so awful we almost moved to Mexico.” I couldn’t stretch it, and it was falling apart like crazy,” Peter says. When he finally had a recipe he was happy with, they opened the original Benchmark, only to have their meticulously crafted dough completely fail the first two nights. He says he’s still using the original starter he created at home in El Cerrito before Benchmark opened and guesses he must have made hundreds of batches of dough through the process, taking copious notes, weighing everything to the gram, and recording the day’s heat and humidity, how long the dough rested, and every aspect of proofing and fermentation. Peter’s nerdiness takes on real cred when you understand he’s on the 45th iteration of his dough recipe. That pizza first came about when a server’s friend passed along an abundance of fresh sage to Peter, who invented a use for it. Those who got hooked on Benchmark pizza in Kensington will be happy to find Swanson’s popular fried sage, brown butter, garlic, and lemon pizza at the Oakland location. ![]()
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