 [WARNING: PG-RATED BLOODY BUTCHER MADNESS AHEAD...]
I feel your pain. You’re there, perched upon pins and needles, enduring the desperation to know how it all went down last Saturday at the Bayou Blowout Pizza Free-for-All with Chef Ernie at the Suis Generis Tiki Food Lab in the NASA Stennis Space Center Buffer Zone. Was there Bloody Butcher in the dough and the pizza on the walls? Yes and no, respectively. Nobody hurled their food back at us. People are asking if there will be another such event. And the Bloody Butcher went so well, it’s part of today’s conversation about what is my favorite freak-show pizza in forever: New Clam City!
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 I’m prepping for a crazy dinner tonight at a place called the Tiki Food Lab. (And no, it does not have a tiki bar. Just a regular bar, fully armed and loaded for bears with pizza.) I’m working with New Orleans chef Ernie of Suis Generis who owns the joint, and I’m making three fairly straightforward pizzas that each contain a little bit of surprise action. Alternately, he’s going to be pulling out the cheffy madness handbook for three additional pizzas, including dessert. As a result, my week has been a little upside down: making dough, doing R&D, provisioning, and eating way too much of my own pizza experimentation. (I’ve gained weight. Color me like a Bosc pear.)  Time to address some unfinished business. There is no doubt you’ve had a nagging question on your mind that is following right behind, “Who killed J.R.?” Like the rest of us, you’ve been wanting to know: Who was the winning poet in the pizza haiku competition? The time to announce the winner is now. EVERYBODY WINS! That’s right, everybody who entered their haiku is a winner. You are going to be in the book. (SIDEBAR: If you're still wondering about the free-for-all pizza blowout in the bayou on October 3 with Chef Ernie Foundas at SG Tiki Food Lab in Pearlington, seating is limited and more intel is right here.) When Big, Juicy Pizzas Attack: A Lazy Way Pizza recipe to make you drop your pantry staples9/17/2026  [DANGER: NOVEL PIZZA RECIPE AHEAD...] Pizza Margherita is on my mind today for several reasons—all of them challenging. One reason is that I’m preparing to do a live and in-person pizza event at the Tiki Food Lab in Pearlington, Mississippi. (We're talking close to New Orleans and even closer to NASA Stennis Space Center.) It’s a Pizza Free-For-All Rumble in the Bayou, and it’s going to be crazy good fun. Chef Ernie of Suis Generis in New Orleans is the host, and he’s going to be doing outlandish things. But before Ernie's extravagant, foodie fermentations are presented upon pizza (and he does some interesting stuff, lemmetellya), I’m going to be making a Pizza Margherita. Why?  Oh, it has been a bad week at Pizza Bayou. The R&D Team at the Free The Pizza Fermentation Fortress has been off their game. Perhaps you can learn from my mistakes, though that seems an unlikely outcome. More probable, you’re here for the opportunities in rubbernecking, pointing, and laughing at my expense. As the saying goes at Free The Pizza, I do these things so you don’t have to. This week has surpassed the standard spectacle of my pizza-mistakes paradigm into a vast failure of time invested and resources wasted. If this havoc has a sunny side, it's that this supercritical event is the result of cascading successes culminating in an epic failure that rivals the 1945 Demon Core Incident at Los Alamos–except we have no plutonium, nobody died (yet), and the only bomb here is an 8-inch pizza nobody was hoping for. 
I admit, I’ve been reading a lot about haiku lately. And in a moment I laughed aloud because of Haiku as pizza See what I did there? If so, you’ve been paying attention. We love that! BTW, the pizza haiku contest post is here should you need to reference it.  You’ve done it now: You played pizza haiku, and you created a monster. As a result, Monster Pizza Haiku is coming. There will be prizes and a pizza haiku book. To say I did not expect y’all to embrace last week’s haiku challenge like this is an understatement of syllabic proportions.  We’re doing something weird today, and maybe inadvisable—especially for a site dedicated to all things pizza. I started something last week, and I’ve found it addictive. And it might be regarded as irrelevant to pizzamaking. I say it couldn’t be more relevant to pizzamaking because, like pizza eating, it’s addictive. It’s fun. When you do it right, there’s a little dopamine rush. If we get enough participation in this, I’ll even turn it into a contest with actual, valuable prizes. Ready? Two words: Pizza haiku.  Today we have a kind of refrigerator pizza. That’s what happens when you have a fridge full of stuff that’s crying, “Use me!” and in that mix of stuff there happens to be pizza dough. For The Fabulous Honey Parker and I, this pizza was inspired by a simple combo we learned to love in Los Angeles. We were in our local dive bar. It happened that we could see the cook at the end of the bar, eating a pizza that wasn’t on the menu: pepperoni and jalapeño. We asked the bartender if the guy would make that pizza for us, and she said, “Sure!”  As Dorothy Parker used to say whenever her doorbell rang, “What fresh hell can this be?” Of course, she never had pizza delivery. The fresh hell here is a pile o' pizzas my friends never saw coming. Adjusting expectations is important. It’s part of adapting and surviving for a life filled with better flavors. Last night, I made pizza for friends who were expecting my usual--a kind of NeoNeapolitan style that might be referred to as New York 2.0. It's arguably a pretty traditional style of pizza. What they got last night was not that.  Today we’re going Greek. I’ve seen Chirstopher Nolan's The Odyssey. I’ve been struggling with the same question as everyone else who’s not busy falling for the manufactured scandals about the film: Where’s the pizza?
In fact, to borrow from famed Odyssey translator Emily Wilson, who wrote a review of the film for the London Review of Books, “The food looks horrible.” (Addressing other issues of thematic import, she also asks where’s the sex? She says nothing of pizza. You and I may be alone in this question.) How to do pizza improvisation if you hate following a recipe--when to do it for no-fail fun.7/25/2026  Let’s assume love to improvise in the kitchen. Pizza dough doesn’t allow improvisation, right? I’d say that depends: How thoughtful is your improvisation? Of course, if you’re talking about pizza toppings, improv can be king—and sometimes it’s even comedy.  It has been a crazy week for Free The Pizza. With any luck, fans of FTP will consider themselves the eventual winners of the pizza media madness that’s been embroiling the brand over the last few days. We’re making a movie, selling the new book which reached #1 on Amazon in Pizza Baking, and we had a big event at a local venue, including free pizza, sold-out books and cooking hilarity involving the Fabulous Honey Parker. This lonely, leftover pizza dough turned into the best hotdog bun ever--and how you can do it, too.7/11/2026  Blech! The dreaded summertime cold. It ruins everything—especially your Independence Day celebrations when you’re supposed drive your Chevy to the levee to get hot dogs and apple pie. (And if you understand that wacked-out nonsense mashup, you’re either the correct generation, an astute youngster, or both.) On July 3, when it was clear I was coming down with a raging cold, I had no plans. The Fabulous Honey Parker was with her father in the Garden State. And since I felt myself circling the drain, I cancelled all plans for being social. Then I spoke to Honey. “We’re going to have hot dogs!” And suddenly, I was jealous.  It’s Independence Day. I was going to give you a long and rambling and vaguely contentious screed on the state of independence in this great nation of ours as it pertains to pizza, the universe and everything.
And then I realized there’s a heat wave and my friends are all draped across rattan furniture, clutching sweaty glasses of fruit- and alcohol-infused coolants with perhaps a sprig of mint, and they have zero interest in reading anything of the sort that I'd planned. All they wanna do is sweat and perhaps die blissfully. With maybe a hotdog in between. So instead, I just made you a pizza that, on the face of it, sounds really wrong: Tomato, goat cheese, and blueberries.  Yesterday, I made a fresh tomato pie using the basic recipe from Lazy Way to Pizza. I did everything by the book. It was easy. I served a slice to the Fabulous Honey Parker. She sat there, eating her wedge of crunchy pan pizza adorned with marinated fresh tomatoes. She said, “I almost wish you’d never made this pizza.” "Really?" I asked her why. “Because I think I might like it better than your traditional pizza, and I don’t want that to happen.” Well, there ya go. No-knead, all crunch: a simple, astonishing pan pizza anyone can master with The Lazy Way to Pizza…6/20/2026  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.  I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted from the last four weeks and all the tomatoes. There is also no such thing as cheese pizza in a can. But Dole UK did once make "Hawaiian Pizza in a Can" for April Fool’s Day. And pizza has been available in US Army rations as an MRE. I guess that makes it cheese pizza in a pouch. Whatever.  You know you need the tomatoes upon pizza. You can feel it. You’ve been reading about it for a month. During this spontaneous time of unofficial tomato celebration, what if you’re lusting for the Fresh Tomato Pie—but you don’t make pizza yet? Or you do, but you don’t have the time to make pizza? Or you are utterly uninterested in making a really good, artisan-style dough that ferments for 72 hours because you just want that pizza right now? Welcome to Free The Pizza. Hear me now and believe me later: You may rue the day you arrived here.  Does it seem unfair that people who don’t make pizza at home do not get to enjoy the tomato madness that we are embracing here? Here we are on the third episode of tomato mania. This was never supposed to be a series. But what began as Tomato Ridiculous Part I and then accidental Part II has given way to accidental Total Tomato Madness because the Tomato On Pizza Lovers are coming out of the woodwork. |
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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