 Last week, I had a vegetarian at the table. Not a pescatarian. Not a covert, bacon-loving grazer. Nope. A full-fledged, non-vegan vegetable devotee. This was daunting. I was concerned. Around town, my pizza has a reputation. Strangers find out who I am and say, “Heyyyy, I’ve heard about you!” And you know what that means: recipe for potential disappointment. Now, I had to face the double whammy of potentially disappointing a non-omnivore whose standards for vegetarian fare were higher than my own because hey--I don't have one.
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 Moneyback guarantee: this is the only online pizza screed you’ll ever read that invokes the name of Sir David John Brailsford CBE. Why must we mention a Commander Of The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in relation to our home-baked discs of cheese and tomato joy? Simple. Truth. You’re witnessing the launch of a new series called “The Free The Pizza Compendium Of Tiny Tips.”  Madness abounds. Not since the 1984 league championship game, when Ridley Scott put a muscular blonde in a track uniform to have her throw a sledgehammer into the face of Big Brother conformity, has there been so much fuss over so little. And while Free The Pizza! remains apolitical in the face of the madness, we still want to bring a pizza to the party. Once again, it's another exercise in "I do these things so you don’t have to—" and you get to join in if you want. I’ve researched the state of pizza in that magnificent and maligned stepchild of a US territory called Puerto Rico, and have devised a recipe for a simple pizza that fits the established Puerto Rican model like Bad Bunny in a dress. So that’s what we’re calling it.  Why do I write pizza books that have barely any recipes inside? That’s an easy one. And if you can be bothered to take the four minutes required to read this addled screed, there’s a big, money-saving offer at the end—but it requires the following context if you really want it to blow your sweatpants up around your head. Back in October, if you were here, I went on one of those high-minded Saturday-Afternoon screeds where I proposed that success in cooking means owning a recipe. If you read that one, you might have asked me, “Are you high?” Definitively and categorically, no. I think.  Everybody loves pizza. Right? Sure, some people can’t eat it. But I’d wager that despite whatever food allergy demon they’re suffering, they still wish they could eat pizza. But right now, in the best economy of the last century, budgets are tight and wallets are full of cobwebs. And there are probably folks who can’t afford a decent pizza. And let’s face it: a Screamin’ Sicilian might be OK for a frozen pizza, but it really isn’t the same thing as buying a decent pie made by a good local joint, much less an artisan pizzeria. So, what if the good local joint could be one’s own home, without any special training or equipment?  Today is a special day. This edition of your Saturday Afternoon Pizza Post is both mercifully short and intensely useful. So much so, in fact, that your head will spin off its carriage bolt and land squarely in a bowl of pizza sauce. Spin! Splash! Sploot! Mop! If you’re a confirmed bachelor, you’ll find this tip to be genius. If you’re an accomplished domestic engineering professional, you might wonder what’s wrong with me. Why did it take me over 20 years of making pizza to figure out this self-evident tidbit?  Nobody wants to read a pizza story that talks about The Red Beans And Rice Epiphany. Feel free to leave now. Reading this one is seven minutes you’ll never get back. It’s easy for me to say you start making better pizza when you make a conscious decision to own it. But…what does that even mean? Welcome back to the purpose and intent paradigm. You don’t have to be a professional or some kind of high-level cook. All you require is to engage in the process—something that so many people fail to do with their cooking. Here now, I confess some of my sins. If Pizza Margherita is the gold standard of pizza, is it possible to make it in your home oven?10/4/2025  What is a pizza Margherita really, and should you be making it yourself? There used to be a group in Pizza Social that I stayed with longer than I needed to. The reason I stayed for so long is simple: they were fun (mostly) and there were no trolls--with one exception. There was this one guy who would periodically come out of the woodwork to pick a fight. His favorite fight was: “All you guys who say you judge a pizzeria on their cheese pizza, that’s just BS. If their killer pie is something else with toppings on it, then that’s how you should judge it! You’re full of crap!”  I was never interested in making a Neapolitan pizza. I know: heresy. Right? When I began making pizza, I didn’t even really know what Neapolitan pizza was. I grew up on a Southern Connecticut version of New York-style pizza. And one of my favorite pizzas was from the counter for Caruso’s Pizza in the old Grand Central Station. That was before they turned Grand Central into a food court surrounded by dozens of trains rushing for the suburbs.  It’s frustrating when a foodie food trend makes me look like some kind of Gianni Come Lately trying to influence my homemade pizza friends into doing silly things. And by some measures, mortadella is silly. It’s Oscar Mayer bologna dotted with inexplicable white chunks, right? Who would ever think about putting it on a pizza? The truth: mortadella is a high-end Italian delicacy. And in some ways, imported mortadella is the Absinthe of charcuterie: banned from US import for no good reason beyond a lame excuse. There was an outbreak of African swine fever in Italy in 1967. It took almost 40 years for mortadella import normalcy to return. And now, there’s a mortadella renaissance happening in the US, fueled by celebrity chefdom. But that’s not my deal. I’m talking mortadella because it’s a good idea that you might want to try, too. Mortadella is really tasty on pizza.  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.)"  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.  Please forgive the inflammatory nature of the headline and its oblique connection to making great pizza at home. The pizza in question is closer than you know. Today, I was reading a pizza magazine called (oddly) Pizza Today. The article was about the evolution of traditional American pizza styles. It included some of the usual suspects, like Detroit pizza and Philly tomato pie. There are also some styles that you’ve never heard of—and which likely haven’t even been heard of by the people who eat them all the time. See also: Ohio Valley Pizza and New England Beach Pizza.  I pay attention to the pizza cooking questions over at the Troll Haven known as Quora. People occasionally ask about pizza, I answer, and maybe win a fan or sell a copy or two of Free The Pizza! But more important? I help prevent people from making pizza at home that's so bad they’ll quit before they’ve started. If you’ve never heard of Quora, well, it’s a social site where people ask questions and impatient know-it-alls answer them with scorn and derision. And then, there’s me. I hide my scorn and derision behind a smiling façade of self-serving servitude. (Oh, who am I kidding? I'm a total ham about this homemade pizza thing.) Last week, a six-year old question popped up in my feed, and I thought, What the heck? I’ll answer it anyway. Somebody will see it. Nope. Not just somebody. Since I answered it five days ago, 17,000 people have seen it. Over 130 have upvoted it, and a couple dozen have commented. New York Pizza Love: The bio-chemistry and immigrant history of an epic American success story11/29/2024  If you love New York pizza, and want to make a pizza you can love, it requires having more than just an oven. It helps to have chemistry and context. That’s why your Saturday Afternoon Pizza Post is a day early. It’s Black Friday, and there’s a lot of pizza oven lust going on out there. To alleviate the pain of pizza-oven big-sale FOMO, it seemed it might be useful and fun to share some of the context. I’ve always believed context helps us be better pizzamakers. Knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing is so much more satisfying than mere blind doing.  This past Thursday, we were having lunch in New Orleans. And you know what that means: Day drinking! We were in one of the town’s more famous dive bars. Inside, it’s small and dark and perpetually 9pm until you pay the tab and step out the door and go back into the sunlight which taunts you for your weekday misdeeds featuring alcohol involvement. Our bartender was an endless font of wisdom on everything, from stride piano (his professional specialty when he’s not tending bar), to the regional brewery scene, to sandwich preparation formats and techniques. I asked him if there’s any pizza in New Orleans that he likes. I asked because it's a very, very foodie town, but not really a pizza town. However, pizza is on the upswing.  What’s an anti-vampire pizza? Please allow me to answer your question with a question: Do you enjoy garlic? This is an easy-to-make pizza. (Recipe follows at the end of this post.) This pizza also sounds very minimalist--enough so that people will say, “That doesn’t sound very interesting." And that’s the beauty of it: nobody sees this pizza coming. When it arrives, they're awestruck at how crazy flavorful it is and their heads spin like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist on meth. (Is that so wrong? It's Halloween!)  Are you at all creative and experimental in the kitchen? If so, it doesn’t take long for you to start thinking about what interesting new pizzas you want to create. There’s a game to play here. I’m not sure you’ll want to play along. There is danger ahead. Have you ever considered a pizza with roast pork, or gravied ground beef, or shrimp, or fresh corn, or lobster or oysters? Do those possibilities make you wonder what the hell is wrong with me? Would you believe they’re not my ideas? (Well, not most of them.) Would understanding where these pizza ideas come from lead you to a “crazy-idea pizza” of your own that represents your own stomping grounds? You might be surprised.  What was it like the first time you made an actual pizza? We’re not talking a Thomas’s English Muffin pizza, or a Chef Boyardee pizza kit-in-a-box pizza. No Boboli-and-Ragu pizza. We’re talking a from-scratch, kneading-the-dough-yourself pizza baked in your home oven that came out and surprised you by tap dancing on your tongue. What did that pizza taste like? How did it make you feel? Did it change your world even a smidge?  What exactly is a COVID pizza? I think you’re looking at it in the photo above. As some people I know might say, “Dude, that cheese pizza is righteous!” OK, maybe so—until you see the whole thing. You’ll get to see it in just a moment. |
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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