How developing a few simple home pizza-making habits can turn you into an anytime pizza-producing superhero.

There are people who will never be able to make a pizza. They won't even try. Some folks will try it once, and decide it’s not for them.

​And then there are people who seem to be able to produce a fresh, hot, savory, tangy, cheesy, mind-bending home-baked pizza whenever they want—to the point where the conversation goes something like this:

​“What do you want to eat? I can grill a chicken, make linguine in white clam sauce, or bake a sausage and mushroom pizza.”
 
How do they do this?

One word: Habit. Making great pizza is all in your head.
 
Making pizza whenever you want it is based on developing a series of habits.

We’re not talking bad habits like, “What a pizza junkie. He’s got a five-pizza-a-day habit. I always see him sitting out behind Domino’s with his head in a pizza box, surrounded by empties. He even licks the cardboard.”
 
We’re talking about a series of good habits—small, important routines that become automatic.
 
They’re easy habits to pick up. In fact, once you develop them, they require very little thought.

I’ve heard people say things like, “I don’t have time to wait for dough to ferment.” Or, “All this work for just one pizza is impractical.”
 
Nobody’s asking you to watch that dough ferment for three days. Have these people never grown anything like a basil plant or an infant?

“I don’t have the time to wait nine months for that kid to gestate. Can’t we just have one delivered?”
 
And what’s impractical about turning on the oven 90 minutes before you want to eat? Assuming you’ve developed pizza habits, assembling a cheese pizza takes about five minutes or less.
 
Between prep, assembly and baking, it takes 10 to 15 minutes for me to produce a pizza that’s far better than anything I can have delivered or eat in any restaurant near me—all at a fraction of the price.
 
When you develop a series of small pizza habits, you get to a place where making pizza is almost automatic. The three most important habits we’re going to discuss here are:
 
1) the dough habit
2) the topping habit, and
3) the mise en place habit.
 
They’re easy habits to acquire, and they can make you look like a pizza genius superhero.
 
The Dough Habit
The most significant pizza habit is making dough. Without dough, there is no pizza. And without a good dough, you probably don’t want the pizza.
 
Making a good, fermented dough is fairly simple. It just requires a window of time to execute.
 
For my preferred dough, I like to give myself a two-hour window. That doesn’t mean spending two hours with my hands in the dough.
 
It means that I have a two-hour window in which I can make my dough and do a few other things as well.
 
With only 15 minutes of active kneading, and a couple of minutes stretching the dough as it rises, I use the rest of the time to do things like read, listen to a podcast, or even watch TV if I’m feeling lazy.
 
At the end of two hours, the dough is put into the fridge for 24 hours of bulk fermentation. During that 24 hours, I forget that it exists.
 
But there are people who swear they don’t have time for that 24 hours of fermentation. It’s as if they’ve been asked to sit on a stool and stare at the fridge for every single one of those 86,400 seconds--and count them down by tallying them on a notepad.
 
At the end of 24 hours, I take the bulk-fermented dough out of the fridge, and divide it up into balls of the required size. That’s 5 to 10 minutes.
 
Then, I bag them up and put them back in the fridge for another 48 hours. So far, over 26 hours, that’s about 26 minutes of active, hands-on dough making.
 
But, why all that time in the fridge?
 
It’s habit.
 
All those hours in the fridge are letting the yeast get busy. They’re eating the sugars in the flour, farting carbon dioxide, and creating a dough that has more flavor and character.
 
We’re talking about making a dough that can literally make the best pizza you’ve ever eaten. All it takes is a habit of patience.
 
When I make a double batch of that dough, and I divide it into dough balls, I’ll typically divide it into six balls (for 15-inch pizzas) or 12 balls (for 10-inch pizzas).
 
That means I have dough for as many as a dozen pizzas. A couple go back into the fridge for the next lunch or dinner, and the rest go into the freezer.
 
Now I’ve got raw dough balls for whatever pizza requirements suddenly come my way over the next few weeks. The dough can be thawed overnight in the fridge, or over several hours on the countertop.
 
It's easy. It’s a habit.
 
The Topping Habit
With toppings, we’re talking about sauce, cheese, and any other meat or vegetable that might go on top of a stretched dough.
 
Sometimes, while I’m making dough I’ll also make sauce. (It’s very easy.) The sauce then gets divided and goes into the fridge or freezer.
 
In the fridge, I almost always have blocks of low-moisture mozzarella and hard-aged cheese like Pecorino Romano. There might also be some fresh mozzarella or feta.
 
There’s probably also some dry-cured sausage like pepperoni, Soppressata, and Spanish chorizo, as well as Italian sausage and frozen shrimp.
 
There might be fresh mushrooms, bell peppers, and Serrano chilis. In the pantry is garlic and onion, probably anchovies and canned clams.
 
Almost anything that isn’t handy is easy enough to get on short notice.
 
And sometimes, I top a pizza with leftovers. I've used Thanksgiving leftovers, meatloaf, étouffée, gumbo, and clam chowder.
 
(Don’t laugh. Soup is an emulsion and can make an astonishingly good pizza topping. Thinking unconventionally about pizza toppings is another habit that can yield superhero results. My wife took one bite of that étouffée pizza and declared, "I've wasted my life.")
 
The Mise En Place Habit
If you’re not familiar with the expression mise en place, it’s pronounced "meez ahn plass." It's a French phrase that literally translates as “putting in place.”
 
The conceptual translation is “set up.” Mise en place is the organization of everything that a chef requires for that night’s service in place, easy to reach and ready to use.
 
By putting everything in place and setting up, there’s no rushing about to the fridge and the pantry. Cooking is an orderly affair that produces consistent results with efficiency.
 
Mise en place is important for making pizza, whether you’re making one pizza or 10 pizzas. Having everything prepped and ready to go helps ensure success and simplicity.
 
But here’s the thing that most people don’t tell you about mise en place: it’s also a mindset.
 
Organizing your thoughts is as important as organizing your ingredients. The absolute best, most impressive pizza parties I throw are the ones where I develop a clear picture in my mind of each pizza to be produced and how it gets there.
 
I recently made five 16-inch pizzas for a group of eight friends in a kitchen that was not mine. In advance, I decided exactly the style of pizza (nicely charred New Haven-style apizza). I knew exactly how each pizza would look right down to how they’d be sliced. The final result was extraordinary. Everyone was thrilled.
 
Habit. Instead of having pizzas that are lucky accidents, you produce great pizzas out of habit.
 
Other pizza habits can include a comprehensive shopping habit for pizza ingredients.
 
A garden-minded habit for growing fresh herbs. (I have basil, oregano, thyme and cilantro going in the garden as I write this.)
 
Routine serving habits like giving a hot pizza one minute on a cooling rack before slicing and serving make for better pizza. (The cooling rack helps prevent the bottom of the pizza from getting soggy.)
 
All of this is easy-to-create, habit-based pizzamaking that leaves little to chance—and makes recovery more likely when something bad suddenly happens. (Not every wonky bad pizza launch needs to become a calzone moment.)
 
Pizza habits are practical. You become better at pizza by developing those habits. And eventually all of your pizza turns into a habit.
 
And when that happens, instead of excuses for not making pizza, you always have pizza as one of your options whenever you want it.
 
Since I work from home, I often make pizza for lunch.
 
At 9am, I can say, “Maybe I’ll have pizza for lunch.” A frozen small doughball comes out onto the counter, along with a portion of frozen sauce. At 10:30, the oven goes on. At 12 noon, I’m grating cheese, stretching dough, topping the pizza, launching it, and at 12:15 I’m eating pizza.
 
It tastes better than delivery. It’s better than all the restaurant pizza within an hour’s drive. It’s better than most pizzas I’ve ever eaten out.
 
And it’s all because of simple habits. They’re what’s for dinner. Or lunch.
 
And when you feed your friends habit-based pizza, it changes their lives and you become a pizza genius superhero. 

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Are you new to pizza, and want to learn the basics for making great pizza--and good pizza habits? My weird little book is one way to do it. It's less about recipes and more about how to get from zero to pizza. Besides learning to make great pizza, there’s not much else you can do with it. In fact, you can’t even use it to level a table leg if you buy the Kindle edition (which is less expensive than the print editions, and has active links to instructional videos and printable kitchen worksheets). To learn more about Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have, click here. ​