A great recipe for homemade pizza is just a road map--you still have to deal with bumps along the way.

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.

Just as I had finished writing the rough draft of this cautionary little love note, I received an urgent note from a fan.
 
She had read Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. She says, “The first week, I made the pizza of my dreams! My kids did too." She even included a photo...

ABOVE: A newbie pizza maker's excellent first pizza. (I feel almost like a proud father.)


​She continues, "But then the following three weeks they’ve gotten worse and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” 
 
I understand exactly how she feels. I’ve previously spoken of this reality: we all have toi make mistakes. But it’s never been more clear and close to home than when I began working on my own recipe for a style of pizza I’ve never seen anyone talking about.
 
 
I’ve been working on a short book about how to make an easy style of pizza. There are plenty of people who want to make pizza at home, but don’t want to be bothered with the equipment and skills that go along with making what could be called a “traditional” pizza—namely, a pizza dough that is kneaded (by hand or in a stand mixer), fermented for a couple of days, stretched by hand, launched from a peel onto a baking stone or steel, and manipulated inside the oven with another peel.
 
So many moving parts!
 
For some, it’s just too much work. And as one accomplished home baker said to me about her lack of interest in making pizza, “I’m too impatient.” (Her cookies are fantastic.)
 
That’s why I’m working on this project that solves a problem for the wannabe pizzamaker who doesn’t want all the stuff and the learning curve that comes along with it.
 
And since I’ve never found a tribe of devotees making this style of pan pizza—and I’ve never seen it mentioned in any of the 50-ish pizza books I own, not even the one boasting “900 recipes”—I’ve had to make it up as I go along.
 
 
And guess what: I’m making mistakes!
 
Yesterday, I made an excellent version of this pizza. It solves so many of the challenges I’d been having. The pizza was crispy, crunchy, the crust was just thick enough, the cheeses were perfect. It was a breakthrough in my understanding of this form.

ABOVE: The crispy, crunchy, cheesy, punchy, easy-to-make pan pizza that's at the core of a book in progress...


I made another pizza today, and it wasn’t nearly as good. Using yesterday’s notes as a guide, I made some slight alterations—and it was a very different pizza.
 
Why? There are several small reasons.
 
 
Looking at my notes, it’s clear that a series of minor alterations cascaded into one major disappointment in the result.

• I stretched the dough in a slightly different manner. That resulted in a crust that was thinner.

 

• After taking the dough from the fridge, I didn’t let it rise at room temp as long before baking. That resulted in a crust that was more dense and not as airy.

 

• I reduced the amount of olive oil in the pan, which meant the pizza didn’t have as much flavor.

 

• I used a different brand of mozzarella that seemed to be identical to yesterday’s—but in the final result, it clearly was not. The cheese was less flavorful, and it was very runny, just oozing off of the slices.

 
 
What’s ironic about all this is that such minor differences wouldn’t have impacted my regular pizza much at all.
 
But when making a pan pizza style that is new and untried and requires development, these small changes seem to result in an overall reduced quality of the finished product.
 
Pan pizza is not my strong suit. In five years, I’ve made a lot of them, but we’re still talking less than a hundred.
 
As for traditional, artisan-style pizzas launched off a peel? In 20 years, I’ve made over a thousand.
 
 
What’s interesting about this is that the more “challenging” pizza with more moving parts is more forgiving than the "easier" one contained in a steel pan.
 
Yes, the pizza that newbies are often scared to make is the one that’s more resistant to screw ups.
 
But to the point of mistakes, as the recipe for that pizza goes, yesterday’s followed the recipe that works really well yesterday.
 
Today, with minor tweaks, it fell flat.
 

But you know what we did? We ate it.
 
It was tasty. We agreed yesterday’s was better. We moved on.
 
Just like the woman who emailed me about her fall from pizza fabulousness, we were crushing it—and now we’re not.
 
 
This is part of the fun of pizza. The difference between her challenge and mine is, I know exactly what I’ve done wrong.
 
For her, as a total newbie, the troubleshooting is a little more difficult. I need to ask questions and get some answers before I can find out what really is happening.
 
(We’ll see, but I'm wondering if her dough might have been in the fridge a bit too long and the crust isn’t browning. That can happen when all of those rapacious little yeasties eat up all the sugars in the flour, leaving no fuel for the Maillard Reaction. That, or maybe it's something that requires adjusting the baking time and use of the broiler. We shall see.)
 

Her first pizza was like a dream. The subsequent pizzas fell flat. My second to last pan pizza was like a dream. The last one fell flat. Recipes don’t have all the answers for two reasons.
 
One reason is that pizza dough is alive. Sometimes, microorganisms have their own agenda. I’ve brewed beer. I’ve made bread. I've harvested wild yeast for sourdough. I’ve made pizza. None of them always go as planned 100% of the time.  
 
The other reason is that the secret ingredient in any pizza is always you. There’s no accounting for how you or I might impact a pizza recipe. It can be one simple mistake as I suspect is going on with my fan. Or it can be subtle. It can be a series of tiny, cascading mistakes like I made with my last pizza.
 

Either way, at the end of the day, pizza is practice. Like the old joke goes, practice is how you get to Carnegie Hall. The good news is, a killer pizza is much closer than that. It’s as close as your kitchen. You just have to keep at it.
 
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Want to practice your own way to pizza greatness? You'll find all the simple steps to homemade pizza magic right inside my weird and award-winning pizzamaker’s manual, Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. If you’re just beginning your pizza-making journey, this book is a convenient place to start because it doesn’t force you to make any decisions beyond making a pizza. It’s a simple, step-by-step guide for getting from zero to pizza and amazing your friends and family. Learn more right here. ​ ​