Last week, I made some of the best pizza ever by screwing up my dough, and you can do it, too.

​I was fresh off a cross-country flight. I’d arrived at our host's house and started making dough so it would have time to ferment properly. And in the process, I made a mistake. A small one. And I decided to live with it just to see what would happen.
 
It ended up being some of my best pizza ever. 
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A lot of pizza newbies get caught in a trap of believing that great pizza is about great dough recipes. But really, great pizza is more about what you do with those recipes and how.​

As you know, the core pizza dough is water, flour, salt and yeast.

The ratios change depending on the person who has formulated the recipe. Sometimes there’s oil and/or sugar. Occasionally, there are add-ins.

But without those four main ingredients—water, flour, salt and yeast—pizza does not happen.
 
So as I was combining my water, flour, salt and yeast, then going through my stages of kneading and resting, I realized the dough was not quite as hydrated as I usually prefer.

If you pay attention when you make pizza dough, it doesn't take many sessions to become intimately familiar with the qualities of an optimal dough.

This is one of the reasons I encourage newbies to always mix and knead dough by hand. A stand mixer stands in the way. It gets between you and an understanding of the dough.

Using your hands, you can feel the transformation from an unformed pile of disparate, raw ingredients into what suddenly becomes a smooth, supple and vaguely sexy mass that represents the world-changing potential of fresh pizza dough.

And that's where I was. Almost. 

I had my hands on it. It was smooth and supple and vaguely sexy. While I could stretch it into a windowpane, it wasn't quite as hydrated as usual. 
 
I could have added more water to get the dough feeling as it usually does when I’m making this particular dough.
 
But I didn’t.
 
Instead, I said, “Let’s see what happens.”  
 
I suddenly had a very specific plan.
 
I was feeding a group of seven, and had upscaled my recipe by 25%. Instead of four pizzas, which was my original plan. I decided it would yield three 16-inch pizzas with a crust slightly thicker than usual.
 
I also knew that the gas oven I was using had a 16-inch baking steel, and the broiler inside it is fierce. So I thought, Let’s push that regular “artisan-style” pizza (the kind that we make in the Free The Pizza book) to a slightly different place.
 
Let’s see what happens if we aim to make a chewier pizza with more char. Let’s turn this pizza night into a night of apizza!
 
(If you missed the discussion of New Haven pizza a few weeks ago, apizza is a Neapolitan pronunciation of the word “pizza,” phonetically spelled “ah-beetz.” In Connecticut, New Haven apizza is the product of a very specific, early 20th-century Neapolitan migration through New York to Connecticut. The pizza that resulted in New Haven has become famous, is always baked to well done—some would argue burned—and exhibits a chewy crust.)
 
Anyway, I had an error on my hands. Instead of fixing it, I embraced it with a new plan for apizza. I figured, How bad could it be? It’s pizza!
 
Well, it went better than I could’ve imagined.

I went in with a very specific image of the intended result. And the product lived up to the promise of the vision. (“Creative visualization” is a term that sports psychologists throw around in trying to improve an athlete’s performance. It also works in pizza making. Because, you know, pizza is so athletic.)
 
Our guests lost their minds. The pizzas were all a charred and chewy delight. There was almost nothing left over. And it was a raging success.  
 
If you make pizza long enough, you’re eventually going reach a fork in the road. You'll be met with a situation that has you asking, “What happens if…”
 
And the only answer is, “Let’s try it and see.”
 
And if you go in with purpose and intent and a vision of the result, you often get more than you expected. 

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If you’re still thinking about screwing up--er, starting your pizza journey, one good place to do so is inside Free The Pizza. Really, it’s A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. It’s a manual that takes you from zero to pizza with a few laughs along the way. Also, if you buy a hard copy, I'll send you an autographed book plate. If you buy the Kindle edition, know that there are printable cheat sheets on this website so you can take them into the kitchen and spill red sauce all over them. ​