I’ve also gotten confused about many details, which keeps bringing me back to one of my favorite phrases in Kitchen French. It rhymes with “Saves your ass.”
 
Welcome to another edition of the mise en place primer.
 
 
We’re calling this one, “Three Big Things The Knuckleheads Don’t Want To Understand.”
 
Obviously, that doesn’t include you. But since you’re here, come on in and take a seat.
 
There are some people who literally refuse to accept the idea of mise en place. I even know a few. 
 
They don’t understand what it is.
 
They think it’s about tiny little bowls.
 
They think it’s about being fussy.
 
They believe it destroys spontaneity.
 
Here’s the biggest surprise for these guys (and yes, it's always the guys—sorry ladies):
 
 
Mise en place is just a French name for something that championship athletes always use to win the game.
 
It’s about mental preparation and creative visualization.
 
Once upon a time, The Fabulous Honey Parker and I were running an advertising agency. And we had a pro bono client who was an Olympic hopeful in the winter sport of skeleton.
 
That’s the sport where a guy gets on a tiny sled and hurtles down an icy track through banked turns at about a zillion miles an hour.
 
One night, we were at Olympic Park in Park City, Utah to watch him race. Before the racing began, he was sitting by himself on a bench. He had his eyes closed and he had his arms out ahead of him. He was doing a little slow-motion dance in his seat.
 
 
It looked almost like he was trying to fly like a slo-mo Superman.
 
And in a way, he was.
 
He was visualizing his run down the bobsled track. He was reliving a run he’d made many times before, and what perfection looked like in the context of that run.
 
This is how a champion prepares for the big game. It’s all in his head.
 
Welcome to mise en place.
 
 
Mise en place Is about preparing the space—especially the space inside your head.
 
The number of times that I’ve made a lunch pizza on the fly are uncountable.
 
But every time I do it, there’s no mess to clean up. That’s because I already have a picture in my head of how the workspace looks.
 
I know the location of every item I’m using. I prepare all the toppings.
 
There are no tiny bowls involved.
 
I give everything a space on the cutting board. Anything I’m not using is put away.
 
And I work as efficiently as possible so as not to throw flour at the walls, on the ceiling and in my hair.
 
 
Results: Great pizza every time!
 
This does not destroy my spontaneity by any stretch. It actually leaves room for spontaneity.
 
When you don’t have to think about how you’re putting everything together, and suddenly you get a good idea, you can pivot and implement.
 
Or decide it’s an insane idea that you don’t want to deal with.
 
 
If I’m making a cheese pizza and I suddenly realize I wanna put grasshoppers on it, no problem!
 
A quick visit to the pantry, grab the bag of grasshoppers, rip it open, spread them around, and... grasshopper pizza on parade!
 
No tiny bowls required.
 
And it’s definitely not about being fussy. Somebody who’s fussy doesn’t change their game plan right in the middle of the play. “Who suddenly decides to put grasshoppers on a Pizza?!“
 
Not only is that spontaneous, it’s about as far as you can get from fussy.
 
 
It’s also going to alienate the picky eaters. Too bad. It’s my pizza.
 
Yes, today’s rant is a short one. That’s because I’m spinning like a top. I've gotta big pizza free-for-all in the bayou tonight.
 
Later on, I’ll also be sharing some of the new recipes that resulted. 
 
But mise has been on my mind. I decided it was time for my annual rant on getting things in order—especially because this is a problem I will enjoy for the rest of my life, I’m sure.
 
Making mise en place mistakes so you don’t have to is all part of the service I provide. And even when you’ve been brought into a disorganized kitchen already in progress, your mental mice will save the day. And your sanity. I know because I’ve been there, too. White straitjacket and a pink pizza not required. (Apologies to any Parrotheads who might be offended.)

-----
​
The five-star rated The Lazy Way to Pizza is now for sale at Amazon. As it says in the book description there:

The only special tool: A pan. The only special ingredient: Patience. (Just a pinch.) The only oven: the one already in your kitchen.
​
​Your friends and family won't believe you made this pizza yourself--especially after that incident with the burnt water topped with boiled toast. This is for real: one of the best tasting pizzas you've ever put into your mouth. The cheese, the tomato, the olive oil, the crunch--it's so good, you might never order delivery pizza again. You might even call this pizza "artisanal."

"This pizza made as instructed is one of the best pizzas l've had...an artisan-level experience while remaining one of the easiest pizzas to execute."
     --Kevin Godbee, Chef and creator of Pizza Is My Life
        (from the foreword to the book)

For more info, click here.

​
The book is shaping up to be utterly unexpected and glorious in the understated and dopamine-inducing way you expect of a good pizza.
 
Let’s just say it’s going to be far more entertaining and topical than you imagine. That’s because, in order to qualify for publishing it through Amazon KDP, your faithful circumlocutory scribe here needs to execute a high degree of verbal padding to reach printability.
 
A minor detail.
 
It’s also a detail that does not change the fact that, as promised: You are in the book!
 
If you sent me a haiku, I’ll be sending you an email to acquire a few additional details for your inclusion.
 
 
Here now, the two haiku runners up.
 
The two runner-up poems are very different.
 
One of the verses is very American style in that it's very personal and evokes sensuality.
 
The other of the verses is very Japanese, in that it is impersonal and evokes nature.
 
Each of the runner-up poets has their choice of a copy of either The Lazy Way to Pizza or Free The Pizza, autographed by the knucklehead who wrote them.  
 
Here they are those Runners Up in all of their 5/7/5 glory:
 
 
     Tomatoes
 
     Tomatoes stain red
     Mozzarella melts like snow
     The crust holds it all
 
          —Tuan Tran
 
 
About Tuan
 
Chef Tuan Tran runs a super-secret Miami pizza pop-up called Dough Ma Pizza that draws pizza fanatics from around the country. Despite living in a kitchen 24/7, he remains a hopeless romantic about pizza, as well as the Minnesota Vikings.
 
 
 
     Morning After
 
     Round rectangle square
     Hot bubbly cold stiff feel
     Leftover pizza
 
          —Clinton Ferrara
 
 
About Clinton
 
Clinton Ferrara has traveled the world as a merchant seaman, tasting all the exotic foods that were offered to him. He claims that, as a result, he is fearless when it comes to pizza toppings.
 
 
Now, a drum roll, please for the winner of the first-ever Free The Pizza haiku competition.
 
The judges agreed that not only was the winning verse both amusing and personal, but it included a dare—or was it an invitation? Or both?
 
Ultimately, this was the haiku that kept the conversation going and invited debate. 
 
 
 
Pineapple
 
Pineapple pizza
Is so good with barbecue
Come at me, sucker!
 
—Z
 
 
About Z
 
Z is a lover of pizza in all its forms. He especially loves eating it with his grandma while watching a movie. He will think more about his future career at NASA and whether it includes pizza after he completes third grade.
 
 
That’s right, friends: The winner of the Pizzaiku Throwdown is 8 years old.
 
We thank Z’s grandmother who’s a follower of Free The Pizza. She shared the original challenge with him. He’d been introduced to haiku through his studies, and is a prodigious poet of haiku already. Bringing his favorite food into the mix only amplified his appreciation for this expressive form.
 
Z wins copies of both books from Free The Pizza, autographed so as to diminish their resale value on the open market.
 
More to come on the progress of our pizza haiku pursuits as they develop.
 
Next week, we’ll be opening the door on some of the exciting R&D that’s happening in pursuit of pizza perplexity at the great big pizza blowout in the bayou hosted at the Suis Generis Tiki Food Lab in NASA Stennis Space Center-adjacent Pearlington, Mississippi.
 
 
Bloody Butcher heirloom red corn is involved!
 
Hard to believe I’m about to say this, but Chef Ernie has bestowed upon me the best tasting raw cornmeal I’ve ever put into my maw.
 
It was grown and milled by the chef himself on the grounds at the Tiki Food Lab. Talk about zero carbon footprint!
 
I’ve been flirting with the incorporation of corn meal into my dough, and this was the perfect excuse to make it so.

​Below are photos of each dough, taken in the same light at roughly the same time while I was making these doughs three days ago. 

 
What am I blathering about, you ask.
 
Next month, I’m partnering with an edgy New Orleans chef at a sneaky pizza event in his super-secret Tiki Food Lab hidden out in the bayou near NASA’s Stennis Space Center.
 
We’ll refer to this man by his code name, Chef Ernie.
 
One of Chef Ernie’s specialties at the Tiki Food Lab is fermentation greatness. Since I’ve been dabbling in lacto-fermentation myself, I thought it would be fun to try bringing additional fermented foods to the table along with my standard cold-fermented pizza dough.
 
 
If you’re new to all this and haven’t yet been issued clearance credentials, the top secret is that really good pizza doughs are made with less yeast and more time.
 
Giving microbes an opportunity to do their dance inside a mass of water, flour, salt and yeast creates an environment ripe for flavorful crust.
 
Good pizza dough relies on something called Alcoholic Fermentation. The yeast consume sugars, then release carbon dioxide and ethanol. Letting the yeast get busy in there for a couple of days results in a far better tasting pizza crust than an over-yeasted dough that's ready in an hour.
 
Lacto-Fermentation, on the other hand, is a simple food preservation method. Food is put into a solution of water and salt, and good bacteria turn the food’s natural sugars into lactic acid.
 
 
This is how you get real pickles or sauerkraut.
 
Other tangy tasting preserved foods can result as well. If you really want to bring the funk, you make kimchi this way.
 
That said, most commercial pickles, 'krauts and kimchi are not actually fermented. They’re quick-pickled in a vinegar brine and then pasteurized. Actual fermentation takes days to weeks, so it's not moving at the speed of industry. (With some notable exceptions that are slow-pickled and contain active cultures.)
 
Anyway, I’ve been making a lacto-fermented marinara sauce (tomatoes, onion, garlic, basil), which tastes great when tossed with freshly cooked hot pasta.
 
I don’t heat the fermented sauce, as that would eliminate some of the tasty byproducts of fermentation.
 
 
So instead of being piping hot, this pasta dish is more like a warm hug at the table.
 
The flavor has all the umami magic of a marinara with the added thrill of tangy bomblets and savory excitement.
 
In my zeal to unleash this newfound fermented fun onto my world o’ pizza, I figured that we could bake a kind of Pizza Bianca (read: a fermented pizza dough baked with nothing on it besides olive oil), then spread it with room-temp fermented marinara as per my pasta dish.
 
Then, bonus, we’d top that marinara-slathered crust with slices of fermented garlic.
 
 
SIDEBAR: Trust me on the excellence of this unexpected snack sensation.
 
In the fridge, I have about a pound and a half of fermented garlic cloves, and they are a killer snack.

The first time you pop one of these puny pickles into your kisser, you’ll realize you’ve wasted your life.
 
So anyway, this was the fermentation bomb I expected to unleash upon an unsuspecting audience out in Chef Ernie’s Mississippi science swamp super-secret kitchen hideout.

It was time to make a prototype. 
 
 
I went and baked an 8-inch test pizza.
 
I removed it from the oven.
 
(Mind you, the dough was a four-day cold fermented high-hydration product, which ends up like a crispy-crusted focaccia but much thinner.)
 
I spread the little pizza with fermented marinara (which takes about 14 days to ferment to perfection).
 
I strategically dotted it with translucent slices of fermented garlic. (The garlic is a product of a 42-day fermentation.)

In aggregate, that's 60 days of blissful fermentation at work. 
 
 
After drizzling with a good olive oil and garnishing with fresh oregano, this pizza was a site to behold.
 
And not a good one.
 
It looked anemic.

​Pizza is a foreign import. So is haiku.
 
Both began gaining traction in the United States at about the same time.
 
Pizza was a product of the Italian diaspora of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
 
It was brought to the US by Italian immigrants, then adapted and commercialized using the tools available at the time.
 
In the evolution of American pizza, one of the key figures was Frank Mastro. He developed recipes, adapted commercial ovens, created operational systems, arranged financing, and invented a model of pizza best represented today by the New York-style pizza we all know and love.
 
Haiku was also a Japanese import to the US—but bears little resemblance to the Japanese form.
 
 
In fact, comparing American haiku to Japanese haiku is far more difficult than comparing New York pizza to Neapolitan wood-fired pizza.
 
Both pizzas are flat and round and covered with tomato and cheese.
 
Haiku is not.
 
There’s a level of complexity to traditional Japanese haiku that most Americans never experience.
 
That’s because we’d been assigned haiku in English classes as little more than a writing exercise that involves counting syllables.
 
The two haikus are very different things.
 
Especially when, like me, you count all those syllables on your fingers.
 
 
That’s OK. We all gotta start somewhere.
 
Haiku in English was first executed at the end of the 19th century. We’re talking at the end of the Victorian era, which probably tells you something.
 
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward
All in the valley of death
   Rode the 600.
 
 
You know what follows: Jaws of death, mouth of hell, smoke, sabers, blood, death, dry cleaning bills, etc., etc.
 
At 55 lines, six stanzas, and 260 words, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is not a model of efficiency—and is certainly more violent than most haiku or pizza.
 
And Walter White’s infamous angry pizza throw in Breaking Bad is certainly a more haiku-like vision of casual pizza violence.

Trivia: It has been said that the local pizzeria in Albuquerque whose name is on that pizza box refuses to sell any more unsliced pizzas. Is it possible they’re tired of getting complaints about pizzas ending up on people's rooftops?
 
But I digress.
 
 
English-language Haiku first spread across England and Australia.
 
It took longer to reach the United States. But when it did, the first notable haiku-inspired verse here was from that upstart punk poet of modernist mayhem, Ezra Pound.
 
Pound shook up the poetry status quo and came out swinging against Victorian pomposity and verbosity when he dropped the haiku-like two-liner, “In a Station of the Metro.”
 
Ready?
 
The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
 
 
Well, there ya go haiku!
 
Not exactly the 5/7/5 construct we all rest our heads upon at night.
 
But you can see the minimalism at work because it cuts through the noise like a stainless-steel, Dexter-Russell pizza slicer cuts through the crust of a 20-inch New York pizza with a bang, a zip and a crunch.
 
Also, Ezra Pound was a maniac.
 
And now, we’re going to dump him at the side of the road because of his virulent anti-capitalism, his vocal support for Nazism, and his pro-fascist activism--all of which sour the mood to follow.
 
 
Sorry. Controversy abounds.
 
Little known fact: During Ezra Pound’s fascist Italy days, everybody wore T-shirts that said, “Ezra eats pineapple on pizza”.
 
But still, such cool name: Ezra Pound. Oh, well.
 
About the same time Pound was pounding out haiku-inspired verse, the Japanese writer Ione Noguchi was tweaking the pretenses of American poetry.
 
He published a piece in 1904 called, “A Proposal to American poets.“
 
He shared some of his own English language verse, then said, “Pray, you try Japanese haiku, my American poets! You say far too much, I should say.”


And really, look at what efficient little verses he wrote during that time. 

Despite it's bite-size form factor, his poetry tears it up:

Full of faults, you say
What beauty in repentance
Tears, songs--thus life flows

Wow. 
 
By the way, if the name “Noguchi” seems familiar, that’s probably because he was the father of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who created that sexy Art Nouveau wood and glass coffee table you always see in expensive mid-century modern bachelor pads on TV.

Like in Raj‘s apartment on The Big Bang Theory.
 
There's also a Thursday-night pizza ritual in the world of the show.
 
I'm told by my friend Googley Eye that Sheldon defines pizza as “A circle made of triangles served in a square box.”
 
I take exception to that description.
 
A true scientist would know that pizza slices are not triangles but circular sectors.
 
That said, the term “circular sectors” does not possess the same poetry as “triangles” unless you start digging deep into phonemes. So there’s that.
 
As for the Noguchis, there is no record of their opinions on pizza, though Imasu lived in New York. So he must’ve eaten it.
 
 
And Ezra Pound once wrote a poem that mentioned pizza because of a transcription error.
 
From a recording of Pound reading his poem “Canto XXXV,” the line, “side toward the Piazza” was transcribed as “side toward the pizza.“
 
Among that laugh-riot-prone poetry literati, hilarity ensued.
 
You can be certain there was hilarity because Google AI says so.
 
And “pizza” is, of course, an obvious mistake because the poem is about Venice and Venice is not known for its pizza.
 
But I digress.
 
Wow. We’re already almost 1000 words into this and I still haven’t gotten to the point.
 
 
The point is that all of this pizza haiku has been fun.
 
I’m having fun.
 
Free The Pizza readers are having fun writing it.
 
And for the most part, our English-language American pizza haiku has no resemblance to proper Japanese haiku.
 
It’s not as sophisticated, it’s not as imagistic, and it’s not as complex.
 
But you know what?
 
 
The one thing that both haiku and pizza have in common is about as important as it gets.
 
Ready?
 
Like a great pizza, a great haiku thrives on the philosophy that less is more.
 
One of the things that I have noticed with the haiku submissions I’ve been getting is that the best ones have far fewer words than you could imagine would be required to make them understandable.
 
Less is more.
 
Incomplete sentences abound.
 
Less is more.
 
Adjectives without nouns to modify.
 
Less is more.
 
Pepperoni scattered
Abundant cheese sneaks through
The better to taste
 
Mushrooms meet sausage
Yet mozzarella sees clear
Finessing the bite
 
Flavor profile wins
When balance moderates
Over muddled mass
 
Those are three haikus. Kind of a triptych. You don't need to do that. Separate haikus will do. That's just me being a pizza poetry overachiever. 

 
Anyway, you have the rest of today to enter the contest.
 
Who knows? There might even be some wildcard prizes.
 
And yes, an 8-year kid old could win.
 
Maybe.
 

But I know for a fact that you can’t win--

Unless you enter.
 
As the great Wayne Gretzky says, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, according to Michael Scott from The Office.
 
Conversely, 100% of the pizzas you don’t make will never turn into an accidental calzone. So there’s that.


HAIKU TIPS

It helps to have an action in a haiku. Like, "Hot cheese flap slaps upon chin."  (We call that slapstick haiku.)

It also helps to focus on the nature of pizza. Like, "Hot umami tingle taste."


HAIKU RULES

Remember the Haiku Rule (Written in Haiku)...

Three lines for haiku
Syllable count per line is
Five/Seven/Five and done
 
Pick your poison pie
Turn it into a haiku
Submitting right here
 
You have until midnight tonight.
 
Free The Pizza, Haiku writer-san!

----- 

The five-star rated The Lazy Way to Pizza e-book edition is now on sale at Amazon. As it says in the book description there:

The only special tool: A pan. The only special ingredient: Patience. (Just a pinch.) The only oven: the one already in your kitchen.
​
​Your friends and family won't believe you made this pizza yourself--especially after that incident with the burnt water topped with boiled toast. This is for real: one of the best tasting pizzas you've ever put into your mouth. The cheese, the tomato, the olive oil, the crunch--it's so good, you might never order delivery pizza again. You might even call this pizza "artisanal."
"This pizza made as instructed is one of the best pizzas l've had...an artisan-level experience while remaining one of the easiest pizzas to execute."
--Kevin Godbee, Chef and creator of Pizza Is My Life
(from the foreword to the book)

For more info, click here.
​

 
No, that previous modifying clause means nothing. But I don’t care!
 
That’s how jazzed I am by the continued response to the pizza haiku challenge: the haiku just keeps coming!
 
I’ve even had multiple haikus from an eight-year-old!
 
And they’re all great!
 
One is a pineapple throwdown. An 8-year-old talking pizza smack in haiku! How cool is that?
 
 
I’ve had haiku from a chef, and his is also really good.
 
One guy who’s been a Free The Pizza supporter for years even had the audacity to send pizza haiku written by AI.
 
AI haiku – is that the final irony frontier?
 
I don’t know, but it wins recognition for screaming cheek.
 
Dutch, the award-winning pizza dude at TriBecca Allie Café who told me two weeks ago that he’s not creative is now posting pizza haiku in his social media:
 
TriBecca Allie
Pizza so so delicious
First of three wishes
 
Sweet!
 
You know what else?
 
 
Even the Fabulous Honey Parker has started writing them—and she’s pissed.
 
She’s mad at me for telling her there would be a book, because now she’s going down the rabbit hole in the never-ending hunt for fame.
 
She just read me a pizza haiku involving snake meat and pea pods.
 
There’s also a pizza haiku about her husband who makes pizza.
 
(When I asked her to write a blurb for my newest pizza cookbook—for which she spent months being a taste tester—she gave me three words: “Make it stop.”)
 
And yes, Honey is disqualified from the prizes, so you’re not competing against a world-famous novelist and former advertising copywriter.
 
 
But you will be in the same silly little book with a world-famous novelist.
 
How about that?
 
How big a book it will be depends on how much everybody plays.
 
But let it be known: Off of one silly blog post last week, the groundswell of pizzathusiasm for writing haiku about the free world’s favorite food speaks to how each reader of my screed is an exceptional pizza thinker.
 
While other pizza “social” participants are out there, whining about pineapple or char, you’re in here doing something elevated and joyful and silly.
 
You are a pizza haiku poet.
 
 
About those prizes…
 
The grand prize is both of my top-selling pizza cookbooks, Free The Pizza: A Simple System for Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want with the Oven You Already Have, and The Lazy Way to Pizza: How to Make the Best Pizza Possible with the Least Amount of Work.
 
They will be autographed by me personally, of course.
 
There will be two runners-up who get their choice of one of those books—autographed by me personally. (Or not, if you prefer.)
 
 
If you win and already have both of my books, I can autograph the book to someone you know and you can look like a hero.
 
Just by the way, I recently signed a copy of The Lazy Way to Pizza to Sebastian Junger.
 
That scares the crap outta me.
 
He writes books about being deep into far-away war zones while I write books about making pizza dough without leaving the house.
 
Courage abounds!
 
 
BONUS: Everyone who enters The Great American Pizza Haiku Huzzah gets a commemorative certificate of participation in the mail—PLUS THE PIZZA HAIKU BOOK!
 
You deserve to be acknowledged in as fancy a way as possible for your efforts.
 
And you will ultimately get a copy of the pizza haiku book with your pizza haiku inside.
 
You will be a published author.
 
Will it be a physical book or just an e-book?
 
That depends.
 
 
What’s your level of enthusiasm for all the haiku and hilarity?
 
Amazon KDP has a minimum page count requirement of 24 for a print book. That’s easy.
 
Amazon Kindle requires a minimum word count of 2,500 for an e-book. That’s not as easy.
 
But I can write enough front matter and back matter. (Think: Preface, Introduction, Acknowledgements, “Also by” book listings, “Further reading” links, and other space fillers that may or may not induce a spit take.)
 
And regardless of the volume of content, creating an ebook with my in-house PDF mill requires nothing but my own whims and caprice.
 
So at the very least there will be a PDF edition of the Pizza Haiku Mishegas.
 
 
But first, you must get writing!
 
Enter as many times as you like with as many haikus as you can craft.
 
The submission DEADLINE is one week from today: You must submit your haiku(s) by September 5, 2026.
 
SUBMIT your haiku here.
 
If you want to submit a whole batch of haiku and in one go, that's just fine. I will happily separate them.
 
 
Here are your RULES for writing haiku.
 
Remember, the RULE for writing a haiku is three lines with a syllable count of 5/7/5.
 
The first line is five syllables, the second line is seven syllables, and the third line is five syllables.

The OTHER RULE is the haiku does not have to be funny. 
 
Those are the rules.
 
We also have some TIPS.
 
These TIPS are not RULES, because you can break every one of them and write a great Haiku.
 
But if you take these tips to heart, they can improve your chances of writing a wicked hot memorable verse about pizza.
 
 
Here now, Haiku writing TIPS
 
Haiku is seeing and feeling.
 
Haiku is nature.
 
Haiku is action.
 
So what does all that mean?
 
 
Ask yourself…
 
What is the nature of pizza?
 
What do you see in pizza?
 
How does pizza make you feel?
 
What action happens when you pizza?
 
Making pizza.
 
Eating pizza
 
Looking at pizza.
 
 
But most of all: HAVE FUN
 
I was just watching a video of a pizza maker at a woodfired oven. Here’s what happened next:
 
Disk of dough spins up
Red flame licks air, melts cheese
Crackle crusted glory
 
 
And the heat of that inspired this sensation all pizza lovers know:
 
Red splash bleeds into
White bubbling lake of fire
Bite! Hot! Oh! No! Yes!
 
 
And then, that made me think about one of the biggest annoyances when making pizza:
 
What the peel is this?
Dough grabs, sticks, folds, across self
Oh no: the calzone
 
 
Everybody’s got a haiku inside them.
 
Even the “I’m not creative” people (who are creative every day and don’t even realize it).
 
You can be in the book.
 
You will be commemorated.
 
And you might even win a prize.
 
But first, you must free the pizza upon a blank page.
 
Get crackin’!

SUBMIT your haiku here.
 
Looking forward to witnessing your mayhem!
 
-----
 
The five-star rated The Lazy Way to Pizza e-book edition is now on sale at Amazon. As it says in the book description there:

The only special tool: A pan. The only special ingredient: Patience. (Just a pinch.) The only oven: the one already in your kitchen.

​Yeah, I know: you’re suddenly thrust back into the mindset of a horrific experience in English class in which you’re consumed by fear and loathing and mental chaos.
 
Forget about that.
 
My wife, the Fabulous Honey Parker, (novelist and my periodic writing partner) refuses to do this exercise because she knows exactly how addictive it would be. She already spends too much time playing puzzles. She’s gone way down the Wordle hole and plays other puzzles I’ve never heard of.
 
I know when I started writing these haiku, I was resistant as well.
 
But in short order, I had about 15 of these things.
 
Most of them are stupid—which is half the fun!
 
 
If you don’t know anything about haiku, it’s easy and fun.
 
Haiku is a Japanese poetry form. In its bastardized Americanization, a haiku is three lines long. The first line contains five syllables, the second line contains seven syllables, and the third line contains five syllables.
 
That’s it: 5/7/5
 
Traditionally, the poem focuses on nature or a fleeting moment in time.
 
An example of a classic haiku is this one from several hundred years ago by Haiku master Matsuo Bashō:
 
An old silent pond
A frog jumps into the pond
Splash! Silence again
 
So this one is both nature-centric and focused on a moment in time.
 
Here’s the first pizza haiku that I wrote:
 
Crushed San Marzano
Mozzarella freshly weeps
On pillowed love crust
 
See? The nature of pizza and a brief moment in time.
 
And ridiculous. Truly.
 
Here’s another :
 
Leopard spots of char
Dotting the undercarriage
The crunch of New York
 
That might be even worse than the first.
 
But here’s the thing about it: Once you start playing the game, it’s like pizza: it’s hard to stop.
 
 
I sent a couple of these over to Dutch, pizzaiolo at wood-fired joint Tribecca Allie Café in Sardis because I joke that he likes to speak in Zen koans about pizza.

His first reply was a haiku from his wife, Rebecca:
 
Bubbles and grease
In my hand then my mouth
The dream is complete
 
Dutch said, “I’m not as creative as she.” Then she sent another one:
 
Oh Margherita
Pretty lady tastes so good
Crispy and hot—ahhh
 
But Dutch finally did pony up…
 
A perfect fire burns
Deft touch spin swirl pinch and slide
Ninety seconds done
 
And yes, this kept going on into the next day.
Just when I figured it was over, another one came across my messages.
 
Bubbles blister char
Steamy salty oily pure
Pizza perfection
 
 
Wanna play?
 
Here’s the deal.
 
Write as many of these things as you want.
 
I recommend just taking a blank page and doing a brain dump.
 
The more you do them, the better they get.
 
Or the sillier.
 
Or both.
 
Pick the one or ones you think are best.
 
Send them to me by clicking here.
 
If I get at least half a dozen people playing this game, the contest is on.
 
I hope I get a blizzard of entries and they’re good enough—meaning, they are literate, or awful, or hilarious, or all of the above).
 
 
Because if I do, I’ll consider making them into a book and publishing it on Amazon.
 
And you—yes, YOU—will be a participant in one of the most ludicrous pizza publications in my X years of being a published author.
 
How much fun will that be?

The deadline is next week at this time: Saturday, August 29, 2026 at 3:15pm.
 
Remember, just three lines with a syllable count of 5/7/5.
 
The pizza haiku is about a pizza nature and/or a brief moment in time.
 
Pizzaiku, Grasshopper!
 
(I know: Haiku is Japanese and “Grasshopper” is from the TV series Kung Fu, which was about a Chinese monk. I hope I get a pass on this one.)
 
-----
 
The five-star rated The Lazy Way to Pizza e-book edition is now on sale at Amazon. As it says in the book description there:

The only special tool: A pan. The only special ingredient: Patience. (Just a pinch.) The only oven: the one already in your kitchen.

ABOVE: The book and the genuine Lloyd Pans that were onsite during a recent Utah pizza night...


​Your friends and family won't believe you made this pizza yourself--especially after that incident with the burnt water topped with boiled toast. This is for real: one of the best tasting pizzas you've ever put into your mouth. The cheese, the tomato, the olive oil, the crunch--it's so good, you might never order delivery pizza again. You might even call this pizza "artisanal."

"This pizza made as instructed is one of the best pizzas l've had...an artisan-level experience while remaining one of the easiest pizzas to execute."
--Kevin Godbee, Chef and creator of Pizza Is My Life
(from the foreword to the book)

For more info, click here.
​

​Thus began a long affair with fresh chilis on pizza.
 
This pizza, however, raises the bar—mainly because it uses what happened to be in my fridge that day. Since that lucky accident, I know I'll be doing this pizza over and over again.

But right now, I’m in New England.
 
It’s a leafy green bluebird day. I’m having a difficult time focusing on sociological challenges regarding long-dead Greeks of fiction.
 
That said, Greek pizza has been very much a centerpiece of our trip to the Live Free or Die State of New Hampshire.
 
Here near the edge of Massachusetts, a different kind of Greek pizza is involved. And it has linked to the Proust Effect, which is the subject of a project I’ve been long developing related to pizza memories.
 
This nascent project asks the question: “What bite of pizza takes you rushing back to another time and place?”
 
 
For me, it’s a bite of a big, juicy New York slice finished with an abundance of dried oregano.
 
That big, bold New York pizza joint flavor, the jammy, umami sauce of a reheated pizza slice, and the crackle of the well-baked bottom crust—all of that takes me back to the Caruso’s pizza counter in Grand Central Station when I was in high school.
 
It was always a late hour, typically on the way home from a half-price Broadway show. We were always running for a train. And we always had just enough time to grab one of those slices the size of your face along with a 28-ounce paper cup that said it was Coca-Cola but was filled with ice-cold Schaefer from the tap before we began heading down the tunnel to the platform for the last train home.
 
I’m finding that this week, I’ve inadvertently stepped into the Pizza Prousti time machine and dragged some friends with me.
 
 
It involved memories, hilarity, smiles, glee, anticipation and nostalgia.
 
I know: None of those things sound like they dovetail with Proust.  
 
In case you’re not familiar, author Marcel Proust penned the classic, one-million-word French novel, In Search of Lost Time.
 
To our parents’ generation, that book was known as A Remembrance of Things Past.
 
And they also didn’t read it.
 
 
I don’t even pretend to have read it.

I've read just enough to know more about it than most people.
 
I might keep reading if I wasn’t so busy doom scrolling pizza social.
 
In the book, Proust writes a scene that has become ubiquitous for literary food lovers: His adult narrator is eating a bite of madeleine sponge cake dipped in tea—and runs smack into a forgotten childhood memory.
 
It involves the same tea, the same cake, and his beloved great aunt.
 
Because of Proust, the concept of food memories linked to emotional moments has become an inspiration for everyone from university anthropologists to Disney filmmakers.
 
Yes, Disney. The animated film Ratatouille apparently relies on the Proust Effect to great effect. I’ve never seen it, but it’s on my short list—that despite my better judgment about not letting anthropomorphic rats cook my food, even in a professional French kitchen.
 
In my new book, The Lazy Way to Pizza: How To Make the Best Pizza Possible with the Least Amount of Work, I show how the style of pizza I’ve developed is based on a much-loved regional style known as New England Greek Pizza--
 
 
As I remember it from my misspent post-college youth...
 
The style is a round pan pizza that is crunchy, crispy, oily and unctuous in the best ways possible.
 
Especially for those pizza lovers who ardently claim to love extra sauce, or extra cheese, or a bulk of extra toppings, or all of the above, this is a pizza that delivers big, bold flavor and doesn’t creak under the weight of over-abundant toppings.
 
And here now, today, we’re visiting an idyllic place that even sounds like a Disney film itself.
 
It’s called Cricket Hill Farm, and is a sprawling green hillside with a rambling, colonial-era clapboard house and barn.
 
It’s all the residence of Beth, an old friend who works in TV, and her husband Bill who’s an extraordinary woodworker and photographer.
 
Situated on 10 acres of New Hampshire countryside, the lawn is lush, the trees are towering, and the birds are cacophonous in ways you think you’re supposed to remember from childhood.
 
As a hostess gift for our visit, The Fabulous Honey Parker and I presented our hosts with a copy of the new book, along with a pair of Lloyd Pans for making 12-inch round pizzas.
 
 
I also took the new Lloyd Pans on their maiden voyage.
 
I made Lazy Way pizza for our friends, and it was a time machine moment.
 
The four of us shared two 12-inch pies. One was plain cheese pizza—the pizza that is a measure of the pizzamaker’s craft because it offers nowhere to hide. The reaction was “Wow!”
 
The other pie was a meaty-meat meat-lover’s pizza with ham, bacon, sausage, pepperoni and mushrooms (the latter being, of course, the meaty-meat of the plant world) because Bill, the guy with the woodworking Photoshop chops, loves a meat-forward pizza.
 
 
I knew they’d enjoy it. But I didn’t realize what would happen next.
 
Bill was marveling over this meat-on-meat action, which he is now prepared to make his own with regularity despite having a giant Ooni undercover in the back yard.
 
Beth, however, began past-tripping in the pizza time machine.
 
That happened when I mentioned the first time I had experienced a New England Greek pizza—which came from one of the neighborhood pizza joints of her youth.
 
Quickly, there came a flurry of thumb-typing, searching and texting and trying to remember the name of the pizzeria.
 
 
Nobody knew. Nobody could find it. Nobody could come up with it.
 
But all were clear on one thing: Yes! That pizza with the crunchy, pan-baked crust and big, cheesy, saucy, olive-oil forward flavor that her family always ordered the night before Thanksgiving every year.
 
With all the artisan pizza puffery that’s happening nationwide, it’s easy for the pizza of our youth to become lost in the sauce of distant memories from more innocent times.
 
And the arguably artisan version of this pizza past that I’ve cobbled together using low-friction techniques is scratching an itch that people didn’t know they have.
 
This is not an appeal to you to buy my book. Not that I would stop you. It’s a fun read and the pizza is a delight. (And I offer autographed book plates for both the Kindle and print editions.)
 
 
Really, this is just a reminder about how powerful food memories can be in our lives.
 
The food may have even been objectively unremarkable.
 
It doesn’t matter.
 
That food is forever linked to whatever was happening in the moment.
 
Our past lives on in our mental catalog of tastes and scents. Important moments loaded with longing we didn’t realize and fueled by flavor we’ve forgotten but will suddenly recall with joy.
 
 
Our hosts embraced their new pizza prototype with glee and time traveled back to good old days and it was so much fun to watch happen.
 
As much as I’d like to credit the pizza with inspiring that, it’s really about what they brought to the party with their pizza memories.
 
They brought joy to a pizza night linked to nostalgic recollections.
 
It’s so much fun the way people have been embracing this “new,” Lazy Way to Pizza.
 
Experienced pizza makers are saying they love the flavor bomb as much as the virtually nonexistent cleanup.
 
Newbie pizza makers are in disbelief at what they’ve accomplished in getting from zero to pizza in a single, simple effort.
 
 
It’s a total thrill.
 
Have you tried The Lazy Way to Pizza and have a thrill to share?
 
I’d love to hear about it.
 
And if it happens to involve not just making pizza, but reliving a pizza memory, feel free to share that, too.
 
(I’ve already heard from one guy who says this pizza completely nailed his memories of a Greek pizza joint in Connecticut—where he still occasionally visits today.)
 
Free the pizza—the lazy way.
 
----
 
The five-star rated The Lazy Way to Pizza e-book edition is now on sale at Amazon. As it says in the book description there:

The only special tool: A pan. The only special ingredient: Patience. (Just a pinch.) The only oven: the one already in your kitchen.

Your friends and family won't believe you made this pizza yourself--especially after that incident with the burnt water topped with boiled toast. This is for real: one of the best tasting pizzas you've ever put into your mouth. The cheese, the tomato, the olive oil, the crunch--it's so good, you might never order delivery pizza again. You might even call this pizza "artisanal."

"This pizza made as instructed is one of the best pizzas l've had...an artisan-level experience while remaining one of the easiest pizzas to execute."
--Kevin Godbee, Chef and creator of Pizza Is My Life
(from the foreword to the book)

For more info, click here.
​

ABOVE: The Thanksgiving Leftovers Pizza. Do not try this at home. Or, try your own version of it. This one looks benign. But it was truly a pizza mistake. 


The flavors were muddled. There was no star performer. It lacked any of the mouthwatering mélange of a Thanksgiving dinner plate or a post-Thanksgiving turkey hash.
 
But I’m glad I did it.
 
I know that there are people out there who make a similar pizza and put it on their seasonal menu.
 
Clearly, if I’m going to be doing it, I need to experiment more. And be more judicious with my toppings. And maybe leave some of them out. Like the cranberry sauce.
 
These are the kinds of things that come only with improvisation. Rarely is there a recipe for a pizza like that.
 
 
Another improv pie happened when we had leftovers from a low country boil.
 
We’re talking about shrimp, sausage, corn, potato and asparagus.
 
I put all of that onto a traditional cheese pizza with a tomato-based sauce that was boosted with boil spices, and it was fantastic.

Not only did they have hot dogs, they had good Atlantic City rolls as the buns.
 
I was not too ill to cook a hot dog. But I didn’t have any. Then I realized, I had honest-to-Thibodaux genuine andouille sausage on hand. But no rolls.
 
However, in the fridge I did have a 175-gram dough ball for an 8-inch Lazy Way pizza. That would very easily stretch out into a 10- or 12-inch panuozzo “roll” for a hefty Cajun sausage with substantial  toppings.
 

And Sick Pizza Man’s Independence Day celebration was on.
 
It was fantastic. The bread was hot, fresh and airy with some chew, and the correct tool for the job, to wit: holding onto a big, meaty cased meat product smothered with homemade chili, American cheese, mustard and Louisiana hot sauce (Crystal being our preferred brand here in the south).
 
I’m going on about this because I’ve been too ill to deliver the treatise on the Red, White & Blueberry Pizza with Bacon as promised last week. That will follow soon.
 
In the meantime, if you’ve never experienced the panuozzo, I’m sharing an article from about a year ago: “Turning Your Leftover Pizza Dough Into the Best Sandwich You’ve Ever Tasted.”
 

This recipe should work with any kind of pizza dough you have handy.

I’ve done it with a traditional Neapolitan-style dough, a New York-style pizza dough, and the Lazy Way dough, which is high-hydration pan-pizza dough. Just stretch, launch and bake.
 
TWO IMPORTANT NOTES:
 
1. The hydration of your dough will affect the bake time, to keep an eye on things--and if you have a probe thermometer (like an instant-read meat thermometer), check the temp; 205F is ideal;
 
2. And if you’re a pan-pizza maker without the tools for launching, go ahead and just make the panuozzo on a pan. It should work fine. But put the oven rack low in the oven as you would with your pan pizza.
 
And while I often do this with leftover dough, I’ve also made dough expressly for panuozzo parties. Visiting friends in Cape Cod, we served a party of eight with panuozzo BLT sandwiches and homemade New England-style clam chowder and it was a freaking hit. Heads exploded all over Mashpee.
 

Freeing The Pizza has a lot to do with a spirit of independence.

And being independent enough to whip up your own sandwich flatbread whenever you want, free from the clutches of the commercial grocery machine, is all part of it.
 
With any luck, I will be out of the cellar soon and we can return to our regularly scheduled pizza programming.
 
Click here to read about panuozzo and see the recipe.
 
-----

The five-star rated The Lazy Way to Pizza e-book edition is now on sale at Amazon. As it says in the book description there:

The only special tool: A pan. The only special ingredient: Patience. (Just a pinch.) The only oven: the one already in your kitchen.

Your friends and family won't believe you made this pizza yourself--especially after that incident with the burnt water topped with boiled toast. This is for real: one of the best tasting pizzas you've ever put into your mouth. The cheese, the tomato, the olive oil, the crunch--it's so good, you might never order delivery pizza again. You might even call this pizza "artisanal."

"This pizza made as instructed is one of the best pizzas l've had...an artisan-level experience while remaining one of the easiest pizzas to execute."
--Kevin Godbee, Chef and creator of Pizza Is My Life
(from the foreword to the book)

For more info, click here.

May you have a fantastic Fourth of July and a sizzling bisesquicentennial--which is such a much better and easier and more poetic word than semiquincentennial which has been foisted upon us by whoever's in charge. But I’m sure that somebody got their knickers in a knot over the fact that my word starts with the prefix “bi.” So they saddled us with the more Victorian and baroque sounding word that nobody can either pronounce or remember.
 
We’ll be back next week with more pizza nonsense when your ears have stopped ringing from the fireworks, the heat wave has broken, and you've poured out the last of the alcohol-infused coolant beverages in favor of still water, carrot juice, and green tea.

Excelsior!

-----

The five-star rated The Lazy Way to Pizza e-book edition is now on sale at Amazon. As it says in the book description there:

The only special tool: A pan. The only special ingredient: Patience. (Just a pinch.) The only oven: the one already in your kitchen.

Your friends and family won't believe you made this pizza yourself--especially after that incident with the burnt water topped with boiled toast. This is for real: one of the best tasting pizzas you've ever put into your mouth. The cheese, the tomato, the olive oil, the crunch--it's so good, you might never order delivery pizza again. You might even call this pizza "artisanal."

"This pizza made as instructed is one of the best pizzas l've had...an artisan-level experience while remaining one of the easiest pizzas to execute."
--Kevin Godbee
Chef and creator of Pizza Is My Life
(from the foreword to the book)

For more info, click here.

I have a problem, and that problem involves you. You just aren’t aware of it.
 
And really, why should you be?
 
We all live our lives on a need-to-know basis. Until your life involves making pizza with me, you and I do not have much of an overlap in the Venn diagram.
 
Anyway, here’s my problem: When I write a book, I want the book to be a) entertaining and b) useful.
 
If I can solve that problem, and my book keeps you along for the ride, you’re more likely to find what I’ve done to be useful and exciting.
 
Useful because you made a pizza.
 
Exciting because it’s a pizza you want to make again and again and again.​

Why I embrace e-book cookbooks (and e-books in general), and I think everybody should.
 
They save you money, they save you time, they give you more utility, more convenience, and more fun.
 
Not that all that is worth saving a few trees.
 
You also do not need to own a dedicated e-book reader.
 
I carry around the same 2,000-book library on both my phone and my tablet—and it’s even accessible on my computer.
 
 
Call it in-flight entertainment that will never make it to the seat-back screen.
 
This is especially handy when there is no seat-back screen.

I spent a flight from Philly to New Orleans with a copy of Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice on my tablet, researching recipes for two specific projects.
 
I was able to work out two little programs that I was going to run: One for banana bread as holiday gifts (he has a killer recipe from when he was a bread-baking hippy in Boston), and one for true NYC-style bagels.
 
Lemmetellya, people down here in the Magnolia State lost their minds when they laid hands on legit carpetbagger bagels.
 
At 35,000 feet in the dark of a late-night flight, I was able to highlight passages in the book, make bookmarks, and order special ingredients from Amazon over the inflight WiFi.
 
And the e-book version of this excellent, James Beard Award-winning cookbook cost me a mere three bucks. (As I write this, I think it's about 7 bucks.)
 
That three-dollar additional expense vastly increases the utility of the $23 hard copy that’s on my shelf at home and not on the plane.
 
 
And at home, the fun continues.
 
E-books are searchable in ways a hardcopy cookbook never will be.
 
And when I went into the kitchen to make the banana bread and bagel recipes, I didn’t need to take the hardback book with me.
 
Nor did I take the tablet or the phone.
 
Instead, on my tablet, I just made recipe screenshots.
 
I printed them out, then taped them to my backsplash.
 
When I needed them, they were right in front of my face.
 
No smudging or spilling ingredients onto my expensive cookbook.

And so much more extra counter space!
 
Why don’t more cookbook publishers build in an online component where you can just do kitchen cheat sheet printouts?
 
 
I’ve done this for you because it seems like you should have it.
 
This is one of the reasons I often encourage people to buy my own books in e-book.
 
Both of my pizza books have links to my website—which includes a download link for printable kitchen Cheat Sheets.
 
Instead of having to take the book or the tablet into the kitchen, you just print out a PDF of the recipe you’re using.
 
That’s such a simple feature with a clear and present benefit, I cannot understand how it is that more traditional publishers don’t use it.
 
I have got about 200 cookbooks in my digital library, and as far as I know, not a single one of them has a link to anything that doesn’t prompt another purchase.
 
Call me an innovator! All for you my pizza making friend!
 
 
“I don’t read e-books because I don’t have a Kindle.”
 
You really need to come to the party for the free apps! (These are the puns, folks!)
 
The Kindle app is free.
 
It works on your phone, on your tablet, and even on your computer.
 
When writing things at my computer, I have literally stopped in the middle to find the answer to a question that I know is in a book.
 
I go to the Kindle app online, search the book, find the answer, then copy and paste it into what I’m working on.
 
And literally all it requires is going to Amazon, searching for the book I bought, clicking the “read now” button, and tapping the little magnifying glass in the upper right-hand corner.
 
 
Are you in the I hate Amazon crowd?
 
Well, Amazon is the single largest seller of e-books. And that is in the Kindle format. It accounts for about 80% of the market.
 
However, other major e-book providers in the 20% balance include Apple, Kobo (whoever they are), Barnes & Noble with their Nook format, and Google Play.
 
I will admit, my books have been available only on Amazon. I’ve been a Kindle devotee because I had to figure that the other 20% of the market that doesn’t buy on Amazon probably isn’t interested in my books.
 
But I am going to start making my books available elsewhere. It is time.
 
 
I don’t need a vision of that guy who’s sitting in a corner in the dark, shaking his clenched fist at my website and saying, “Damn you, Blaine Parker why won’t you put your books on Nooks?”
 
Anyway, that’s it.
 
 
My new book, The Lazy Way To Pizza: How to Make the Best Pizza Possible with the Least Amount of Work, is now available on Amazon.
 
The Kindle edition is presently $2.99. The print edition is $9.99
 
But this is a soft launch. Don’t buy it yet.
 
Next week at this time, I will have lowered the price on the Kindle addition to $.99
 
And if you’re one of those who requires persuasion, you can have your own almost-free Kindle edition and try it out as your first foray into digital cookbooks.
 
Free The Pizza—the Lazy Way!
 
-----

Until next week's 99-cent deal on the new book, here's a 99-cent deal on the OG! 

Still haven't bought your pizza oven yet? That might be a good thing. Because you don't really need one, especially if you're just starting out. It's much easier to start by making pizza in your home oven. I endorse baking pizza on steel. But if you need to do it on the cheap, you can even start with a big, upside-down cast-iron skillet and my silly little book: Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. When you’re just starting out, it’s much easier and more productive to learn about pizza in a way that demystifies everybody’s favorite food—including the flying in the face of the belief that great pizza is possible only with a special oven. Speaking as a guy who has two portable pizza ovens sitting in a shed, and who used to have a 1,200-pound wood-fired oven in the kitchen, the best oven on which to learn pizza is a regular home oven with a few simple tools. And the Free The Pizza book is designed specifically to take a newbie from zero to pizza in as short a time is possible. It’s also a lot more fun than the heartbreak of a tiny, cruel oven in the yard. Want to make a pizza at home? Homemade pizza success happens with Free The Pizza at Amazon. ​

ABOVE: Dough ball in a cast-iron skillet. This is a test batch that proved the secret to this pizza is a wet, sticky dough. That dough ball is very dry and manageable, which does not make the best pizza in this particular equation.  


​Quick-Pizza Heresy Dough

NOTE: There are no weights specified here because a) newbies are often scale-resistant, and b) not all yogurts measure equally. If you wish to weigh your ingredients, refer to the data on the product labels for the flour and yogurt. It's very simple. (It's also how I do it.) 
 
Ingredients
 
1 cup self-rising flour (preferably White Lily)
1/2 cup + 1 tbsp Greek yogurt, divided
1/2 tsp fine sea salt
1 tbsp refined olive oil for the pan
2 tsp extra virgin olive oil for brushing the dough
 
Equipment: 12-inch pizza pan or a cast-iron skillet with a 12-inch bottom, or two 8-inch pizza pans or cake pans. 
 
Mix the self-rising flour together with the salt using a whisk.

Next, incorporate the yogurt using a metal spoon. Once they’re mixed together, remove excess yogurt and flour stuck to the spoon and knead it into the dough, forming a consistent ball.
 
You should now have an easy-to-handle ball of dough. Add enough additional yogurt to make the dough sticky and a little shaggy. With my particular flour, yogurt and climate, I’ve found that one additional tablespoon is sufficient. It goes from being easy to handle like a good biscuit dough to wet, sticky, a little shaggy and kind of annoying.
 
Using a brush or your fingers, oil the pan with the refined olive oil.
 
Press the dough ball into the center of the pan and flatten it into a round.
 
Pour the extra virgin olive oil on top of the dough. Spread it with a brush or your fingers. Using your fingertips, begin dimpling the dough. Your goal is to spread it evenly throughout the pan, all the way to the edge. It will make a very thin, even layer of dough. You may find yourself pressing through the dough to the bottom of the pan. Just gently push the holes back together.
 
It will require a little finesse, but you will eventually be able to spread the dough evenly all the way around. It is a feat and you will be a master in short order.

ABOVE: Same-size dough ball panned in a cast-iron skillet. The dough doesn't quite fill the skillet to the edge, as the diameter is a half-inch larger than the 12-inch pizza pan. But this is the dough that yielded the crispy edge in the finished pizza at the top of the recipe. 


​Topping The Pizza
 
Ingredients
 
7 standard slices of, low-moisture part-skim mozzarella (typically about 4 inches square)
350g marinated tomato (about 2 medium tomatoes the size of a baseball)
extra-virgin olive oil for drizzling
20g pecorino Romano, shredded

​Position 3 slices of cheese across the diamater of the pizza.
 
Position 2 more slices perpendicular to the first row of cheese so there is now a cross.
 
With the last 2 slices, cut each of them in half diagonally. Position each of the four triangles at the four open corners in the cheese cross layout.

ABOVE: The pizza fresh from the oven. While it's still hot, I like to drizzle the olive oil and spread the Pecorino Romano cheese.
 
 
IF USING A CAST-IRON SKILLET: This will extend the baking time. Depending on the skillet, I’ve found that it requires an additional 2 to 4 minutes baking time, and the skillet can remain on the bottom rack the entire time. But this will all depend on your oven and your pan. Check the bottom of the pizza and use your own judgement.
 
When done to an inviting color, remove the pizza from the oven.
 
Using the offset spatula or similar tool (a flat silicone spatula works), coax the pizza out of the pan and onto a cooling rack. You may have to loosen some clingy cheese crunchies around the edge of the pan.
 
Drizzle the top of the pizza with olive oil. (I recommend using a small squeeze bottle for even, controlled drizzling.)
 
Sprinkle the pizza with the shredded Romano.
 
Once the pizza is set, slice and serve and enjoy with reckless abandon.

ADDITIONAL NOTES  
 
Make substitutions at your own peril.
 
I’ve made this recipe using conventional flours and baking powder. It doesn’t work as well as self-rising flour. Most important: It doesn’t taste as good.
 
Make sure your flour is fresh. A year-old bag of White Lily worked, but not as well (and not with as much flavor) as a brand-new bag of White Lily.
 
Bread flour does not work well here. There are various technical reasons for that. But the bottom line is that all the reasons it works for traditional pizza dough do not help us in the realm of this dough. It lacks both the desirable structure and the desirable flavor.
 
I’ve made versions of this pizza where I added the olive oil drizzle and Romano cheese before the bake. Adding it after the bake tastes better.

-----

NOW JUST 99 CENTS FOR A LIMITED TIME! Still haven't bought your pizza oven yet? That might be a good thing. Because you don't really need one, especially if you're just starting out. It's much easier to start by making pizza in your home oven. I endorse baking pizza on steel. But if you need to do it on the cheap, you can even start with a big, upside-down cast-iron skillet and my silly little book: Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. When you’re just starting out, it’s much easier and more productive to learn about pizza in a way that demystifies everybody’s favorite food—including the flying in the face of the belief that great pizza is possible only with a special oven. Speaking as a guy who has two portable pizza ovens sitting in a shed, and who used to have a 1,200-pound wood-fired oven in the kitchen, the best oven on which to learn pizza is a regular home oven with a few simple tools. And the Free The Pizza book is designed specifically to take a newbie from zero to pizza in as short a time is possible. It’s also a lot more fun than the heartbreak of a tiny, cruel oven in the yard. Want to make a pizza at home? Homemade pizza success happens with Free The Pizza at Amazon. ​
​

ABOVE: Clinton Ferrara's Fresh Tomato Pie based on the recipe in last week's story. 


​I also had a text message from Peter Reinhart.

I didn’t see this coming.
 
I was waiting for him to say, “What’s wrong with you?”
 
But he’s too nice a guy for that.
 
Instead, he called the tomato series, “Terrific” and “Full of great ideas.” I don’t usually get props of that caliber.  

I am humbled. 
 
 
At the same time, Dutch at Tribeca Allie Café reached out to me on an unrelated topic.
 
I’ve been doing some consulting for him (yes, way above my pay grade) and showed him a photo of the fresh tomato pie.
 
He replied, “Looks good. Excellent and very doable.”

ABOVE: The new, quick & crazy tomato pie that may induce guilt and self loathing. 


​Free The Pizza’s social media maniacs have lined up as well.

Hardcore David Hering who says of this week’s pizza photo (above), “Looking forward to [the recipe] because that’s a good looking pie.”
 
Chef Tuan Tran (whom we interviewed back in 2022) shared the statement, “I must have it!”
 
A bunch of foodie friends have applauded, including the legendary pizza blogger, Albert Grande of Pizza Therapy.
 
Who knew that simple, fresh tomatoes on a pizza could inspire such a widespread bout of enthusiasm?
 
Last week's recipe was for a traditional pan pizza as an homage to world-famous New Haven apizza at Pepe's Pizzeria Napoletana.  

How disappointed will they be when they learn the truth of this forthcoming recipe?
 
 
Here now, I prepare you for the crime to come with an explanation of my guilt.
 
All of this tomato love that’s been flowing from the pizza-committed masses, and I was thinking about how sad it is.
 
The sadness is that people who love tomatoes—and love pizza—but don’t make pizza at home for various reasons.
 
Like they don’t cook much.
 
Or they’re scared of breads.
 
 
Or as one friend says, “I’m too impatient.“
 
Since I now live in the American South, The Land of Quick Breads, I was wondering about the viability of a quick-bread fresh tomato pie.
 
We already have the Southern Tomato Pie in a traditional pie crust (which may have been a Sicilian-influenced recipe by immigrants in the late 19th century).
 
But what would happen if the quick bread were to fraternize with the pizza-loving curious?
 
If it were viable, it would solve a lot of problems.
 
 
Non-pizza makers could enjoy a quick & easy, pizza-like canvas for homemade marinated tomato artistry.
 
Of course, there are pizza fundamentalists who would argue that I’m proposing a sacrilege—that I’m on a race to the bottom.
 
I counter that by proposing this: I’m providing a gateway for the race to the top.
 
It would be Baby’s First Homemade Pizza.
 
A base camp from which to begin an ascent of the cheesy slopes of Tomato Pie Mountain in an effort to fulfill the intrinsic promise in our name: Free The Pizza.
 
Anyone can make an artisanal-grade pizza at home in a home oven. All it takes is the right tools and a little practice.
 
 
I admit: I make a damn good pizza—to the exclusion of doing anything else well.
 
I’ve evolved into a pizza obsessive who can steer any conversation about politics, economics, art, film, travel, muffins, pumpkins, wax paper, mahogany, elbows, toll booths or men’s hosiery to pizza.
 
“Nice socks.“
 
“Thanks. I’ve got some socks with pizza on them, ya know.“
 
OK, that’s a stretch.
 
I’ve never spilled pizza on my socks.
 
But I did once give a birthday gift to a pizza geek friend that was a pizza box containing seven different pairs of pizza-print socks. I think he wonders what’s wrong with me.
 
Anyway. I digress.
 
 
“Pizza for the people” sounds like some kind of Soviet era propaganda lie to misdirect everyone in the spirit of Bread & Circus.
 
Not that anyone in 21st Century US Culture would understand anything about that.
 
But the truth is, sharing the skill of pizza with people gets them excited, makes them feel a sense of accomplishment, and it makes the world seem just a little bit better.
 
If I can give the newbie a way to make a pizza in under an hour and enjoy the flavor blast of fresh tomato celebration in a new and hairstyle-changing way, what’s wrong with that?
 
 
Pizza is a gateway to all kinds of STEAM competency that doesn’t get taught in our schools anymore.
 
Pizza is also a drug.
 
It’s a dopamine rush on a plate.
 
Wouldn’t a quick-bread pizza dough that’s worthy of your mouth would be a fantastic thing?
 
It would. I know.
 
How do I know?
 
Because I did it.
 
Yes, I have committed the heresy.

ABOVE: A slice of the culprit pizza...


I have made a pizza with a 20-minute dough and the angels sang, “Swing Low, Sweet Pizza-Wheeled Chariot.”
 
No, I’m not hallucinating through an Ozempic haze.
 
I made a three-ingredient dough with self-rising flour.
 
I topped it with marinated tomatoes (from last week’s recipe) on mozzarella.
 
And I knew we were onto something when The Fabulous Honey Parker (who has an excellent palate and will tell me when I've insulted it) stops what she’s doing to do a taste test—and it evolves into scarfing down an entire pizza.
 
Granted, the pizza was only 8 inches in diameter. And I ate half.
 
Why am I sharing this?
 
 
You should know it because it’s too tasty and too simple and too enjoyable to eschew purely on principle.
 
It is a joy-inducing journey into a head-spinningly simple bread with something on it.
 
I swear. I swear on a stack of Tony Gemingani Pizza Bibles.
 
On a whim, I made a batch of dough with self-rising flour, Greek yogurt, and salt.
 
I let it rest for 20 minutes, pressed it into a pan, topped it with cheese and marinated tomatoes, baked it for 12 minutes, cut into slices, and next thing you know…
 
 
Our heads exploded.
 
Yes, we do feel unclean.
 
I went to Peter Reinhart and asked him about this. (Only as a theoretical query. I did not confess my sin.)
 
I wrote, “Since you define pizza as bread with something on it, what about a quick bread with something on it?
 
“Is that still a pizza?“
 
He replied, “A thin, crispy biscuit, which is really a variation of pie dough, seems quite viable. Should it be called pizza? That depends on whether you’re itching for a fight with the purists. But why not?“
 
Why not, indeed.
 
 
This thing that looks and tastes like a pizza that has consumed my kitchen during the past week with its crispy, crunchy, oily (in the best way), cheesy and umami magnificence?
 
 
I’ve made it in expensive pizza pans and old, cast-iron skillets.
 
I’ve covered it with cheese and marinated tomatoes, and experienced umami ‘mato mania in a new, guilt-inducing way.
 
My wife was pretty clear about it.
 
“Your New York Style 2.0 or whatever you call it is my favorite pizza.
 
“The Lazy Way pan pizza is the pizza I didn’t know I was missing.
 
“But this,” she said as she held a tiny slice of Sacrilege Biscuit Dough Tomato Pie, “This is so good. Who wouldn’t want to eat this?“
 
 
Next week: a heretical recipe.
 
Sorry for the lengthy tee-up to a tease, but I’m still dialing it in.
 
I don’t want to share until I’m sure of a fool-proof formula with some necessary alternatives.
 
But you’re gonna love it.
 
Especially if you’re too impatient to make pizza.
 
Meanwhile, if you want to share any of your own tomato-laden lovelies, feel free to send them here—photos are great, or even just lurid memories.
 
Also, please send a message if you understood the veiled Frank Zappa reference. I need to convince my wife I'm not the only person who finds such arcane nonsense amusing. 
 
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