 I’m riding up in the hotel elevator with a woman who’s carrying a flat, white box that says, “Stoner’s Pizza Joint.” I ask her if the pizza was any good. She smiles. “I don’t know. I haven’t tried it yet. I just had it delivered.” I mistakenly assumed she was coming from dinner with her leftovers. And I say, “Well, it might be pretty good. Who knows pizza better than a stoner?” She laughs. “Exactly what I thought!” What I don’t say is that Stoner’s is a franchise operation with about 50 outlets nationwide, mainly in the east. I’m guessing the pizza is probably good but not great. It's been steaming inside that box for a while, so it's probably soggy. I don’t eat much delivery pizza. I have a simple system and can make a far better pizza at home with minimal hassle. But...why would I piss on her pizza? It’s so antisocial--and so social normal.
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 You are here at Free The Pizza because you buck trends and fly in the face of convention. And from the reviews and emails I receive, it’s clear that you are on board with the whole low-level kitchen iconoclast thing that goes on here. You are a special human being. How does one not love this homemade pizza thing? All kinds of pizza lovers gravitate here. Male and female, working pros and retirees, hippies and military officers, artists and musicians, airline pilots and architects. From New Hampshire to Hawaii and uncountable places in between, there is one common denominator: You are a Pizza Independent.  Leftover dough. It happens. For whatever reason, you decide to not freeze it. Or maybe it is frozen, and it’s in there with the pot pies and the tots, not getting any younger. What to do? (We won’t ask why you’re not just making dozens of random pizzas as happens in this house.) The one word solution: Panuozzo. Spellcheck doesn’t like it. You’re wondering how to pronounce it. Ready? “Panu-oˈdzːzo.” But really, let’s just call it “sandwich sorcery” and move on. This glorious sandwich bread is a simple trick that can turn you into King Earl Of Sandwich. It’s quick. It’s easy. It makes you look like a magician. You want this.  [RANDOM SLICE WEDNESDAYS appears whenever I feel like it--as long as it's a Wednesday. I realize this is two Wednesdays in a row now. Please don't get used to it.]
I was reading something this morning, and it seemed like a good idea for Random Slice Wednesday. It’s from a book I’m writing. I’d planned on publishing the book about 8 weeks ago because hey—it would be such a quick and easy one. (Still writing it.) The book is about an easy and controversial way of making pizza. The passage regards a controversy with sauce, as my own method is controversial in Pizza World. I am one of those heretics known to [GASP!] cook my sauce. Pizza snobs regard me with disdain. I don’t care. You don’t have to care, either. You also don’t have to follow their rules.  AI can't make this pizza. But you can. It's simple, you're essential, and it costs under three bucks. Welcome back to Cheap The Pizza! Yes, finally! This is for you, my pizza-newbie friend. (Or maybe for you, you forever-curious experienced pizzamaker.) All this madness began because there are people who insist eating out is cheaper than cooking at home. To that, I say, “Poppycock, codswallop and claptrap!” I say you can make a pizza with an ingredients cost of under three bucks—and I’ll show you how. In the "Cheap The Pizza" intro two weeks ago, I described the ignition point: my ire was piqued by the ridiculousness of some claims around eating-out economics. Last week in How To Part I, we talked about the recipe for the dough. Today, we’re going to tweak that recipe, make a sauce, and bake a pizza. But first, we’re going to ask the age-old question: Why are we even doing this?  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.)" 
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.  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.” |
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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