 Wednesday is Hump Day, where we slide down the remainder of the work week into weekend pizza. Wednesday in the North End of Boston is Prince Spaghetti Day (right, Anthony?). And Wednesday here along the Pizza Coast is Random Pizza Post Day. What does that even mean? I’ll tell you at the end. First, let’s get to the bidness. Last week, I received an email from a reader in Portugal who claimed to have, quote, a stupid question: “I can put the pizza onto the steel or stone using the peel, but how do you use the peel to get it back off once it's baked? I mean, you can't slide it under the pizza because the wood is too thick. (I told you it was a stupid question, but then, I don't cook any more than I have to.)"
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Welcome to Free The Pizza's "Cheap The Pizza, Part II." The pizza in the picture above? I did it “all wrong.” Still looks pretty good, right? Tasted pretty good, too. To recap last week’s rant: it’s crazy that there are “thought leaders” claiming it’s cheaper to eat out than to cook at home. My counter example: pizza. If you’re interested, you can make a 12-inch pizza at home with an ingredients cost of under $3.00--literally, about $2.50. That pizza, hot and fresh from your home oven, tastes better than one from your local joint that charges $14.00. It’s also easy to make, and I promised to show you how. BONUS: If you’re an experienced home pizzamaker, this is an interesting exercise and it's fun. (I’ve been doing this all week long. I’m having a blast. It doesn’t get old.) Today is about two things: 1.) an overview of the process, and 2.) a simple pizza dough that requires no kneading and demands only a few minutes of hands-on time. Next week, we’re baking the pizza on an upside-down cast-iron skillet in my home oven.  Careful. I might be on a harangue. I’ve stumbled onto nonsense and horse hockey. I got angry. You’re gonna laugh. There’s a new myth thriving in Social Baloney Land. Ready? “It’s cheaper to eat out than it is to cook meals at home.” As the trolls like to say when speaking webernet-ese, BWAHAHAHA! I am now launching a counterattack on this pernicious gift of dirt gargle. Ready? I guarantee you can make a 12-inch homemade pizza for under three bucks. 
So, just as I finished putting sauce and cheese on the pizza, my intuition said, "You could stop right there. That’s a great, simple pizza." But no, I was busy answering the same question I posed to you a couple of weeks ago: What outrageous homemade pizza inside you is growling to get out? And after my experience, I continue to believe outrageous pizza is fun. But be ready for the possibility that there will be blood. Not actual blood. Not even fake blood. Metaphorical blood. Maybe just tears. Or, as in my case, an annoyance that can be assuaged by sausage and judicious surgical removal of the genius toppings. If you were here for that last conversation, I asked you to send your ideas for your outrageous, locally inspired pizza.  Are you excited by fake hot dogs made of tofu and fake pepperoni made of wheat gluten? Unlikely. My normal take on such products is simple: Just stop it. If you stopped eating meat, stop pretending to eat meat. You know the only real taste is disappointment. So, when the email hit my in-box, my first reaction was doubt. The very cheery message read, “I saw your name on the press list for the Pizza Expo next week and was wondering if you'd be interested in stopping by the Prime Roots booth to try the world's first Koji-pepperoni.” Great. Fake meat. But there was one big difference here... I admit, koji is captivating. Mushrooms and fermentation are both fascinating topics—and koji is a fungi used in fermentation for various Japanese foods. But who makes fake meat out of koji? So after a sincere internal struggle, I replied to the email...  If you pay attention to what happens here in the pizza pages, you know I sing the praises of some classic and minimalist pizzas. Last week’s homage to pizza marinara is a perfect example. It’s a pizza so simple you might accuse it of being boring—until it shows up and whacks you in the mouth with a minimalist maximum flavor bomb that spins your head around and modifies your hairstyle. But that doesn’t mean I’m all about minimalism. Yes, may have heard me say that less is more—but that’s the nature of a good pizza. If you're making a pizza and you overload it with a hogshead of sauce, cheese and toppings, you’re going to end up with a regrettable and unfortunate situation that may require a shovel. But I do believe in unleashing your inner creative monster chef and coming up with your own classics--and they in no way need to be minimalistic, just well thought out. Stripping it all away: meet pizza in the nude. It’s a winner and it’s so simple to make.5/10/2025  I said I wasn’t going to bother trying. I had given up before I started. The hottest pizzeria in Los Angeles right now is Pizzeria Sei by William Joo and Jennifer So. It's a tiny, Tokyo-style pizza joint at Pico and Robertson, across the street from a kosher deli and a tattoo parlor. Reservations were two weeks out. But it was VPN pizzaiolo, pizza consultant, and “Professor of Pizza” Noel Brohner of Slow Rise Pizza Company who turned me around. He said in an email, “Don't blow off Sei. Go between lunch and dinner. Their simple pizza rosa is the best I've ever had. William is a pizza savant!” On the strength of that recommendation, I stumbled back online, began clicking buttons, and like a blind pig found the lone truffle: an unlikely reservation for two at 4pm Friday. (This place has only nine stools at the counter and about half a dozen chairs at some tiny tables.) So I booked it, and we followed Professor Brohner’s lead: the Pizza Marinara was one of three pizzas we ordered. Was it really that good? Let’s put it this way: good enough that a week later I’m still thinking about it, and... I’m encouraging you to attempt the heresy of making pizza marinara yourself. OK, maybe “heresy” is too strong a word. But almost every person to whom I’ve ever suggested pizza marinara has said, “That’s boring.” Oh, trust me. It’s not.  You may know of him. Seen him. The hats. The glasses. The grin. He is a character, and he is very much pizza famous. His name is Paul Giannone and he’s from Brooklyn. But he’s better known by his professional moniker, Paulie Gee—as in the very famous Paulie Gee’s Woodfired Pizza and Paulie Gee’s Slice Shops. And Paulie Gee is hungry for a pizza partner in The City That Care Forgot. Paulie recently said to me, “I need to find someone who has a passion for pizza and is entrepreneurial and has chutzpah.” I admit, the man is amazing. His enthusiasm is so infectious, I feel like I’m making a huge mistake by not becoming a pizzeria operator.  I am not a food pusher. But during a pizza night at our house, there comes that moment where I have to say, "Ya you know, I’ve got one doughball left.” There’s a lot of, “Oh, I’m full” and “No, I can’t.” But as happened last night, there’s usually one enthusiastic participant who says, “Yes, I will” And yes, we did. So I made that pizza, which we’re about to discuss. That’s because I knew my wife, who insisted that she could not eat any more, would take a bite of that pizza, look at me, and say, “Damn you.” She knows: this is The Simplest Pizza, yet is always a crowd pleaser because it sings a siren song of cheese. Despite such simplicity, it’s amazing at how much it can make you look like a genius. This is the magic pizza you want to know. It wins friends and influences people. It might even negotiate a better salary for you.  It seemed like a simple stunt. Why would it haunt me? At the end of 2023, I made a lightning-strike visit to Portland, Oregon—proclaimed by the globe-trotting pizza eaters at Modernist Pizza as the nation’s number-one pizza city. With a list informed by the Modernist Pizza crew’s favorite pizzerias, I hit five pizza joints in two days and wrote about the experience. In writing that story, I made a rather benign comment about Ken’s Artisan Pizza. Fifteen months later, the lesson is loud and clear: Be careful what you say on the interwebs. It can boomerang. It can come at you like Marley's Ghost carrying a pizza delivery bag--and who knows what's really inside?  Are you a fan of hot, hot peppers? As a home pizzamaker, you may not be. Or maybe you love hot peppers. But often, you're serving folks who are less adventurous. (I will refrain from calling them weenies. Sometimes, they lack proper conditioning. Or they're legitimately challenged by things such as Irish heritage. Or they're infants. Even the children of India aren't eating full-on, tongue-ripping vindaloo until age 6.) For capsicum-reluctant diners, cooking fired-up dishes—including certain arrabiata or “angry” pizzas—is challenging. One guy I know breaks out into a crazy sweat just eating a taco salad at the diner--a dish so pedestrian and benign, you have to wonder if it contains any capsaicin at all. But for some of these people so challenged (and for us!) I've started using an excellent midpoint pepper product with good flavor, enough heat to make itself known, and which is tolerable and enjoyable even for some of our pepper-fearful friends. Hailing from Turkey, it's common in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine. I feel a little like it's the lost note on the hot pepper musical scale. It's called the Aleppo pepper and it is so very tasty. Dude, it's just pizza. But can a pizzaiolo from New Jersey be an object lesson in finding the joy?4/5/2025  I saw an extraordinary thing at Pizza Expo in Las Vegas. Dan Richer of Razza, considered by some as the best pizzeria in the nation, was at the Ooni ovens booth demonstrating their new Halo Pro spiral mixer. It was arguably a glimpse at unbridled joy in the making of pizza dough. I know that a lot of people, newbies especially, approach pizza dough with trepidation. Some even regard dough as the enemy. Perhaps the requirement to knead dough gets the relationship off on the wrong foot. The idea of having to force water and flour to cooperate could be perceived as a kind of conflicted relationship fraught with animosity. I’ve said it before. Saying it again: pizza dough is your friend. And watching Dan Richer in action was an object lesson in feeling the joy that anyone making pizza could take to heart.  When it comes to my personal pizzamaking proclivities, I am the home oven guy. Just look at the subtitle of my award-winning, bestselling, self-aggrandizing book, Free The Pizza. It’s all right there: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. I say this because learning pizza in your big home oven is so much easier and forgiving than teaching yourself pizza while also teaching yourself how to use some no-name company’s tiny no-name oven that was engineered for doing exactly one thing well: burning the hair off your knuckles. (I have one of those no-name ovens. I also have an Ooni. The difference is night and day. If you're going to buy a portable oven, Ooni is worth considering.) If you feel you’ve outgrown your regular home oven, and you’re ready for a big home pizza oven, I recommend getting the biggest pizza oven you can justify. Just buy a big oven. After 20+ years of pizzamaking, it’s my opinion that a big oven will make you much happier over the long term. Fewer burnt knuckles and fewer horrific pizza-like blobs hurled into the back yard. For this exercise, I did some oven shopping on your behalf at Pizza Expo in Las Vegas. I talked to a few people who know a thing or two about bigger ovens. I was going to talk about the biggest ovens from Ooni and Gozney, and then changed my mind. We'll talk about them later in other blog posts. Instead, we're going BIG big.  Seems I’ve been repairing my pizza all wrong. Maybe you have, too. Hard to believe this tiny homemade pizza tip is coming to you from The Great Grand Perennial Palace Of Pizza known as the Las Vegas Convention Center. The tip is simple genius, it’s one of the single most useful snippets of pizzamaking intel ever, and I had to share it. Backstory: I’m in Vegas at the 41st International Pizza Expo. That’s the trade show for all things pizza. As someone once said to me, “There’s a trade show for pizza?” I replied that it’s a $65-billion a year industry. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a trade show for that. But using this miniscule bit of pizza wisdom I’m about to share is free, invaluable, and eminently useful in making a pizza at home. If you’ve ever felt the despair of tearing a hole in your pizza dough, you’re going to love this.  “Pineapple On Pizza.” That could be a syrupy love song. Or a punk protest song. Or both. Is there any more discordant and divisive topic around pizza than this intense and pointless debate? But get ready. I have a controversial opinion of equal pointlessness that you will not care about. Our beloved tomato, that key pizza ingredient for the contemporary masses, was once the pineapple of its time. The history of the tomato in European cuisine is well known: brought to Europe from South America in the 1500s, nobody would eat it. Ever. The tomato was primarily a decorative plant. That lasted for about 200 years because the tomato was “known” to be dangerous. To borrow a quote from the Neapolitan historian, Antonio Mottozzi (author of Inventing The Pizzeria), “it had been long believed to be poisonous (not to mention an aphrodisiac). These were twin reasons for banning the tomato.”  Is it possible to get too fussy about flour for homemade pizza dough? I ask this as a guy who’s fussy about the flour for his homemade pizza dough. Is there a point of diminishing returns that matters only to the person instigating the flour fuss? Will anybody on the receiving end of the homemade pizza ever be able to tell the difference? Or even care? Since a lot of newbies ask me for advice about flour (among other things), I thought we’d perform a little experiment. We held a flour showdown between four brands of that fabled flour of pizza perfection, “00” pizza flour. The results may surprise you. Or you may just not care. (See? Already, the apathy begins. Wait until you taste the pizza!)  Here at Free The Pizza, we are dedicated to the idea of making great pizza whenever you want with the oven you already have. It’s kind of a pizza liberation movement, freeing you from the tyranny of takeout or investing in tiny, cruel ovens. Sometimes, we’re offering newbie advice. Other times, we’re ranting on the state of pizza as we know it. Here and there, a possibly apocryphal history lesson. And once in a while, we’re digressing into a wild space having little to do with pizza. For instance, today was going to be a joyous screed about my brand new pizza shoes. Really. Special new shoes for making pizza. (But I’m still using my old pizza helmet.) Then, after sledding downhill on the routine wildcat excitement of this morning’s scintillating news headlines, we at Free The Pizza have a new goal: We want to be part of the Bread & Circuses of our time.  Have you been hoping to make pizza? Do you live and die by the recipe as written? I have some troubling news. It may make you recede to a corner, assume the fetal position and rock: pizza recipes are a moving target. Pizza recipes do not always work as you hope. You may get frustrated. You will make mistakes. You will cry—unless you are like me and you lack tear ducts and are genetically stoic. If you want to learn to make great pizza, a recipe is a good guide to help get you started. But it’s a guide only. Pizza is practice. Learning to make great pizza as a matter of routine means you have to be willing to make decisions—and mistakes. You also get to own those mistakes. That’s the bad news. The good news is, those mistakes are usually edible and enjoyable enough.  America, what have you done with pizza now? Of all the possible media outlets, Better Homes & Gardens is detailing your sins of Costco food-court hot dogs and pizza, and your new “hack” with which you are “obsessed.” That's right in the headline at BHG.com: "Costco Shoppers Are So Obsessed with This New Food Court Hot Dog Hack." The subhead reads, "The Costco food court is definitely a judgment-free zone." Well, Free The Pizza is not so kind a zone. Allow me to don my pizza-colored robe and bang the pepperoni gavel as I judge freely. Speaking as a longtime dabbler in pizza nonsense, it’s difficult for me to express just how disappointing all this is. America, you can do better.  Somebody recently asked, “Where do you get yeast, and which one is best for pizza dough?” And the first thing I thought was, Well duh. You get yeast from the air. That, of course, is not the first answer everyone else has. They will likely say, “Well duh. You get yeast from the supermarket.” Which is not untrue. And that was not a double negative. Or was it? I think, yeah. No. Whatever. And just by the way, if you’re reading this and you happen to be a mycologist or a fermentation specialist, know that I’m speaking as a layman who’s fully aware that you can tell me I’m speaking out of my pizza hole. So be it. I will publish any required corrections to my non-scientific blather, and I thank you in advance for your participation. |
AuthorBlaine Parker is the award-winning author of the bestselling, unusual and amusing how-to pizza book, Free The Pizza. Also known as The Pizza Geek and "Hey, Pizza Man!", Blaine is fanatical about the idea that true, pro-quality pizza can be made at home. His home. Your home. Anyone's home. After 20 years of honing his craft and making pizza in standard consumer ovens across the nation, he's sharing what he's learned with home cooks like you. Are you ready to pizza? Archives
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