My Pizza Journey

I couple of years ago I decided that I wanted to learn how to make pizza.  Really, really good pizza. It seemed like whenever I made it at home it was good, but never really excellent.  I found this ironic because I have owned two Italian restaurants that served pizza.  The first place served a ton of pizza and we had a huge customer base that came in just for the pizza.  It was probably the best pizza I have ever tasted.  Crispy thin crust and many items that could be ordered on it.  The pizzas were topped with some mozzarella and pecorino Romano cheese.  Absolutely delicious.  I decided that this was what I wanted to make at home.

After experimenting with different dough recipes, sauces, and toppings I still couldn't quite get it right and for some time I resorted to using Trader Joe's rectangular flatbread for the crust.  I decided that I needed to get my shit together and figure out how to make pizza like what we served in the restaurant.  I did some less than thorough research on the web and decided that what I wanted to make was Neapolitan pizza.  As a retired professional chef I should have known a lot about pizza already but I didn't.

As luck would have it, I have a friend who was even more obsessed with pizza than me.  He had been experimenting with pizza for quite some time before I decided to get serious about it and he gave me a ton of pointers.

My friend had built a wood burning pizza oven in his back yard out of fire bricks and used it to develop his technique and dough recipe.  We don't have much of a back yard and I didn't want to build an oven in the front yard.  We have a small dog with limited common sense who would almost certainly become entangled in the oven or possibly even wander into it while it was ripping hot.  So the front yard was out.  The brick ovens use a ton of wood to get up to the required temperature of 900 degrees, so cooking even one small pizza would be prohibitively expensive.  The oven on my stove in the house only went to 550 degrees so it wasn't hot enough.

By this time my friend was almost totally immersed in learning the pizza craft and he had purchased a small tabletop propane powered pizza oven.  I wasn't excited about it but I bought one too.  And a propane tank.  And propane.  And a portable table to put it on.  And two pizza peels -- one for launching the pizza into the oven and another one just for turning the pizza while in the oven.  And an infrared thermometer.  And an oven brush.  And a digital scale. And a special pizza cutting knife.  My wonderful and very understanding wife bought me some imported pepperoni and Italian olive oil.  As you can imagine, this project was getting very expensive.

While I was waiting on all the necessary pieces to arrive, I went to look for flour.   Neapolitan pizza requires "00" flour.  This is not the flour you find at the grocery store unless it's an Italian grocery store.  We don't have one of those in Omaha, Nebraska, so it was another Amazon order.  Caputo makes a flour for pizzas cooked at a higher temperature such as Neapolitan, so I ordered a small bag of that and some Caputo pizza yeast.  It was expensive.  By now I figured that I would have to make my own Neapolitan pizzas for about 15 years and we would need to eat about 20 of them each week just to break even on the whole deal.

While all the pieces were coming together I was reading every Facebook pizza group I could find to learn more.  Eventually I decided that I needed a really good pizza book.  I had seen references to "The Pizza Bible" by Tony Gemignani so I ordered a copy and began to read it.

Eventually I was ready to make my first pizza.  The dough is more complicated than you might think.  You have to make it one day and let it sit in the refrigerator for 24 hours before shaping it into pizzas.  I won't bore you with the details of making good Neapolitan pizza dough, but I'll tell you that it's complicated and it isn't easy at first.  There's a lot of technique involved.

On the day I was finally going to make pizza I got all my ingredients together and set up the oven on the front porch.  The oven fired up pretty easily and in about half an hour it was at a little over 900 degrees.  So far so good.

I got one of the dough balls and after a few minutes I was able to shape it into a somewhat round circle on the counter.  I put on the sauce and the toppings.  The next task was to get it onto the pizza peel and then take it outside and slide it into the oven.  This is not as easy as it sounds.  Neapolitan pizza dough is a little sticky so getting the peel under it was very difficult.  By the time I got it onto the peel it was nowhere near round anymore.  I took it outside and figured it would just slide off the peel onto the pizza stone in the oven.  I figured wrong.  Despite my best efforts, the pizza was sticking to the peel.

If you've ever used an oven running at 900 degrees you probably know that once something is in there you can't just reach in for a second and adjust it.  The wave of heat that was coming out of the front of the oven was so intense that it would simply melt the flesh right off your arm in a few seconds.  You have to get it where you want it on the first try.  For pizzas if you happen to get it a little over to one side you can wait about 30 seconds and possibly reposition it with the turning peel.  If you get it too close the the burners in the rear then your pizza will burst into flames in less than 5 seconds.

After some amount of struggling I got the pizza off the peel and onto the stone.  It was no longer round and about a quarter of the toppings had fallen off in the oven and burst into flame.  I was able to put out the flames from the toppings, but by this time the part of the crust in the back of the oven was on fire.  I rotated the pizza several times before pulling it out of the oven.  It was by this time a smoldering black thing shaped like a deflated football.  Not exactly what I was hoping for.  My wife was trying to be encouraging, but she was getting hungry and was not too happy about seeing our dinner in that condition.  I cooked three more pizzas that day and some parts of them were edible, but the whole effort was pretty much a disaster.  Back to the drawing board.

After some more research I made several more attempts and eventually made some pretty good pizzas.  Not stellar, but pretty good.  The thing about Neapolitan pizza is that it's cooked from start to finish for only about 90 seconds.  This leaves the edges thick, puffy, and bready and the center thin, barely cooked, and limp.  and you can't load up a Neapolitan pizza with lots of toppings and cheese.  They usually have a little tomato sauce and only one or two ingredients plus cheese.  Less is more.  This is not what I was looking for.

Over the next year I tried my hand at Detroit style pizza.  If you haven't tried Detroit pizza then you should.  There's a guy here who converted an old school bus into a food truck specializing in Detroit pizza.  It was wildly successful and he later opened a small pizza restaurant for takeout orders of his Detroit pizza.

Detroit pizza requires a special pan.  The one I bought is and 8"x10" heavy carbon steel pan with slightly slanted sides.  It is made specifically for making Detroit pizza and it is very expensive.  On Detroit pizza you use brick cheese.  It is not available anywhere in Omaha so you have to order it.  What makes Detroit pizza so good is that you use a lot of butter or shortening in the pan and spread cheese all the way to the edges of the pan.  As it cooks the cheese makes a caramelized "crust" along the edges.  It's delicious, but the crust is thick and bready so you can't eat too much of it in one sitting.  The dough is similar to focaccia.

Recently I discovered a pizza dough called piadina.  It's apparently very popular in Rome.  It's different in that it uses milk instead of water and for leavening it has a little baking soda in it instead of yeast.  Once the dough is mixed you let it rest for 20 minutes and then roll it into balls.  You let the balls rest another 20 minutes and then you roll it into crusts with a rolling pin.  Each crust is cooked on top of the stove in a frying pan with a little olive oil until it is lightly browned.  This whole process for 4 crusts takes less than an hour from start to finish.

Once the crusts are cooled you can top them with whatever you like and finish them in the oven for a little while just like you normally would cook pizza.  This yields a thin and crispy crust that doesn't wilt while still remaining pleasingly tender.  This is what I was looking for all along.

My friend who built the stone oven in his yard has made his pizza obsession into a successful business.  He and his partner converted a trailer into a mobile pizza kitchen and they serve excellent Neapolitan pizza all over town.  I wouldn't be surprised if their next move was to open a brick and mortar location.  I just hope they open in an area where their customer base lives and works.

So that's about it.  Now I keep a few piadina crusts in the refrigerator so we can whip up a great pizza in about 15 minutes when we want one.  I'm thinking about selling my propane pizza oven and all the accessories since I may not use it again.  Then again...you never know.