Late gift - NYC tap water

for what it's worth... you can send a little of it off to Ward Labs, and they will e-mail back a water report. Infact, in brewing, I probably have a similar profile of the water anyways.. You can get a couple easy to find minerals, like calcium chloride from beer/wine making shops online or locally, and then use reverse osmosis water and build the water back to what the NYC profile is pretty darn easily. I can take RO water and make any water profile from anywhere just about. I do it for brewing, and use a scale to measure out my additions based on how much water I need.

SGH said:

What is NYC water? Is that what we call belly water?

Its a bunch of hooey. 

Pizza people will say the mineral content of the water in NYC is part of the superior product one can buy in NYC.

@Terrebandit - I couldn't agree more. I like visiting NYC, but no way I could live there.

Doesn't that come from one of the rivers out there? Flint is now getting its water from the Flint River and no joke it's brown. My home is on well water, but I work in downtown Flint. I don't use the drinking fountain. But I'm sure the NYC water is screened from the garbage, medical waste, submerged cars, murder weapons, used condoms, raw sewage, body parts and whatever bums do in the river.

Good luck with the pizza.

I think they say the same about San Francisco and the water and sourdough bread.I am afraid I don't believe it. Did you know that most water in NY is fed from gravity rooftop tanks, mostly made from wood? I was surprised about that fact.

Ever try drinking a gallon of distilled water every day?
Especially as a scrawny little 8 year old.
That was one of the strange ideas my doctor recommended trying for my asthma.
It tasted yucky.  I felt bloated/water logged for a month.  I was glad when that trial didn't seem to produce any desired results and I could go back to normal amounts of tap water for my daily subsistence.  Although, i guess I would have been happy if it had cured my asthma, but it didn't seem to induce any noticeable improvement.

BTW, best water I have ever had used to come out of my grandma's tap.  it was from a mountain spring in the Sierras.  So wonderfully cold and a great flavor year round.

As some one who lives on Long Isand.....New York. There is something in the water that makes some of the best bread, pizza and bagels. What it is exactly, I have no clue. The water in NYC doesn't come out of the Hudson. The Hudson River is a tidal river which would impart some seriously saltiness to everything. The water comes out of reservoirs in upstate New York.

Kind of makes sense, cut a pipe in New York and let it dry, lot of minerals there on the inside of the pipe

I did some work at a Dupont plant where they pulled water from a river upstream, used it, cleaned it and put it back in downstream.  There was a problem downstream where they started having fish dying everywhere...  They discovered the water going back in was too pure.  They then started pulling water mid-way, remixing it with the cleaned water before discharging downstream. There is such a thing as too clean.

We missed Chicago tap water when we moved to Iowa for a few years! We would fill a few bottles of Chicago tap water to take back with us whenever we were visiting the city . It tasted a lot better than Iowa City water.

What's not to believe about water affecting the food you cook with it? Water is different in different parts of the country and the world - just like the soil, humidity, air, etc are different. Its why things can be made a certain way, or taste a certain way, because of where they were made. Its the concept of terroir.

There's no hooey in this. Anything you cook or brew includes water to some extent. I grew up in the northeast and never took water for granted until I moved to Florida. The water here is nasty and loaded with sulfur and chlorine and that affects everything from pasta to baked goods. There used to be a bakery that trucked NYC water down because it really does make a difference. Can you still cook good pizza anywhere in the country? Yes. Will it taste the same in each part if you use water from different regions? No, but only to some one who knows different and has a a tuned palate. My opinion based on experience. The best water I've had is spring water filtered through lots of moss. Lake water in Algonquin is pretty memorable too.

DaveRichardson said:

NYC water is actually some of the purest water due to the tanks on top of the buildings.  Water get pumped up to the top then has time for all the crap to settle into the bottom of the tank.  The intake for the building is about a foot or so off the bottom of the tank, so the sediment falls below that.

That may be true, but it also helps that NYC water comes from the Catskill Mountain area of upstate NY.  The Pepacton reservoir has a reputation for having great water.