Stripping it all away: meet pizza in the nude. It’s a winner and it’s so simple to make.

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.

Above, the Tokyo Neapolitan-style Pizza Marinara at Pizzeria Sei in Los Angeles. It was better tasting than the soft focus on this image might suggest. We have fired the photographer. 


Make a no-cheese pizza and see God.
 
Or at the very least, see Pomona. She’s the Roman goddess of fruitful abundance.
 
(Who else would you expect to appear before you whilst experiencing the revelatory throes of tomato-pizza ecstasy?)
 
I’ve made pizza marinara before. But this experience at Sei was resonant enough that it makes me want to once again strip away the adornments of pepperoni thinking and focus on what really matters: the tomato. 

My own rendition of a Pizza Marinara, made at home in the little oven that could, an effort inspired by our visit to Pizzeria Sei.


When the tomato debuted on pizza in the 1700s, it was the star of the show. It’s worth understanding why.
 
Yes, in this exercise, I’m using a 550-degree home oven with a steel. It’s not a 900-degree wood-fired dome. I’m also not a rockstar pizzaiolo and neither are you.
 
And therein lies the simple beauty of this exercise: this is all about you and me, the tomato, and what we can accomplish with the tools we have. It's a simple pizza, though not easy. It requires thought and finesse. 
 
On Sei’s menu, the red pizza is listed simply as, “Marinara.”
 
The toppings are listed as: “Tomato, garlic, basil, oregano, extra virgin olive oil, Sicilian sea salt.”

There is something about this simple combination that elicits pure joy.
 
I’ve had friends who can’t cook ask me what to make for a date. I always say, “Easy. Spaghetti with tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and basil. It's magic and you can't screw it up.”
 
It’s so simple to make and the result is a playful punch in the kisser. Pasta pomodoro can make anyone look like a culinary genius even when they don’t know their way around the kitchen.

Above, cross section of my Pizza Marinara: flavor you can see, baby. 


​You just unleash the ingredients and let them dance.
 
You get a celebration of the tomato. Its sweet, acidic and umami character is highlighted by the grassy, peppery fruitiness of good olive oil, the sharp, pungent pop of garlic, and the sweet, herby delight of fresh basil.
 
In the same way as that glorious and simple pasta dish, the Pizza Marinara at Sei dances a tantalizing tarantella on your tongue. It makes you want to get naked and just roll up in that pizza.
 
(The tarantella is, after all, a courtship dance with occasional overtones of madness. But that’s another conversation. Or maybe it’s just me. You may excuse yourself if you wish.)
 
On top of all this, there is one detail about the Sei Marinara that has puzzled me: how is the garlic so good? I use the best organic garlic I can get locally, yet the garlic on the Sei pizza is a delight bordering on culinary debauchery.
 
When you add the alluring, fruity ripeness of the olive oil? It’s lust on a crust. (Mr. Brohner was more polite in his description. He called it “heavenly.” Maybe we go to different churches.)
 
After making our escape from Los Angeles and sitting back down here in the Magnolia State, I was pondering what to do about the visceral magnetism of the simplest pizza.
 
And I thought, Well, duh. Make one. Then I could use it to exhort you to make one of your own.
 
So that’s what’s happening here. Let's make it so.
 
There are very few ingredients, and each of them matter. The best ingredients used well result in the best tasting product. 

Above, the ingredient lineup for this pizza: First Field crushed tomatoes from New Jersey, organic garlic, Real Salt from Utah, Partanna organic imported extra virgin olive oil, and basil from my garden. 


The tomatoes.
 
In my pantry, I have legit DOP San Marzanos and Bianco DiNapoli along with some generic organic product from a big-box store.
 
But today, I’m choosing Jersey’s finest: First Field, a husband & wife operation in Princeton. 
 
Aside from the convenience of tomatoes that are already crushed, they are the most robust canned tomatoes I’ve ever tasted.
 
As a loyal reader of Free The Pizza knows, I lean toward a New York-style sauce, bringing a heavy hand to the herb and spice implementation program.
 
Not today.
 
Olive oil, fresh garlic, and salt.

Some marinaras use a lot of herbs. I’ve decided I'm going minimalist on this and see how we do. This is, after all, an exercise in getting out of the tomato’s way.
 
 
The olive oil.
 
I’m using Partanna organic extra virgin olive oil here. Easy to find. Costs less than a new car. Smooth, rich and buttery with a mildly peppery finish. This is the oil I hide from house guests.
 
 
The garlic.
 
Simple: organic fresh garlic. The best product I can find here. I bet that Sei is using an arcane cultivar sourced from some botanical-wizardry conjurer in a pointy hat hiding in a damp cave outside Gilroy, 
 
 
The salt.
 
Salt is salt in cooking—or so they say. The conventional wisdom is that you can’t taste the difference between expensive salt and cheap salt that gets cooked. So I typically use a basic fine sea salt for cooking. I save fancy salts for finishing.
 
But just for grins, even if it’s a placebo, today let’s use my stupidly expensive fancy salt of choice: Real Salt from Heber City, Utah. Maybe the clean-living sober synergy juju of the Beehive State will bring an extra increment of delish and delight to the proceedings. 
 
 
The basil.
 
It’s spring, so basil is straight from the garden. Tell me I'm wrong. 

The dough.
 
The doughball is a 365-gram Neapolitan-style product made with King Arthur all-purpose flour as per the single recipe found inside my book. 72-hour cold fermentation.
 
The dough has been in the freezer for two weeks and was taken out to thaw this morning. As I write this, it is in the fridge resting comfortably, unaware of its fate.

Above: the raw pizza, edges of the dough pinched, heavily sauced, fresh garlic in place, prepared for launch.


The secret.
 
One of the secrets to making this pizza having a crust robust enough to support a greater-than-usual amount of sauce. I’m almost always a less-is-more guy. But...
 
The sauce is the star here, and you’re going to use more than you would with a pizza that has cheese on it.
 
For me, the 365-gram doughball normally makes a 14- to 15-inch pizza.
 
Today, we’re making a 12-inch pizza.
 
And I’m using 140 grams of sauce, almost double what I normally use on a 14-inch pizza with cheese.
 
(In retrospect, after eating this pizza, I could’ve used even more sauce.)
 
 
I also recommend more olive oil and salt than might seem wise.
 
The sauce already contains olive oil and salt.
 
Before baking, I drizzled the raw pizza with more oil.
 
After baking, I drizzled it with oil again and then salted it.
 
And it was good.
 
Also, I slid a slice over to The Fabulous Honey Parker (who’s busily tapping away on the next vampire novel).
 
She said, “Really yummy!”
 
Honey has a more sensitive palate than I, she is also more finicky (said not as a pejorative but more as self-effacement), and she was at Pizzeria Sei for their marinara, so I take her comments as a win.
 
 
The time.
 
My normal bake in this oven on a 14-inch cheese pizza is 6 minutes using the broiler method, rotating it 180 degrees halfway through the baking cycle.
 
This pizza marinara baked for 9 full minutes, a 50% increase.
 
I may have let it get a little more crisp than anticipated. I’ll chalk that up to a predilection for crunch. We can just pretend this is a wannabe New Haven-style pizza marinara.
 
 
The other things.
 
Treatment of the basil. The pizza from Sei in the photo has fresh basil that was baked on the pizza for probably 90 seconds. It was good. 
 
Baking fresh basil on a pizza in a home oven for 8 minutes does cruel and unusual things to the basil.
 
Instead, I added my basil after the bake, first bruising it and then putting it on the hot pizza.
 
The Tokyo pinch. Sounds like a dance or the nickname for a controlled substance or a tactic from The Fast And The Furious XIII. But it's none of those. I just invented it to describe a Tokyo thing they’re doing at Sei. It happens after shaping the pizza. It involves pinching the cornicione. The result is a delightfully baked rim that gets more done in some places and has crunchy spots. My 9-minute bake resulted in a crunchy cornicione and spots that were even crunchier.
 
Olive Oil Control. Sounds vaguely militaristic. Anyway, this pizza involves a lot of drizzling of olive oil. After years of experimenting with the drizzle (read: screwing it up), I’ve found that controlling the flow is much easier using a squirt bottle. I now have some 4-oz twist-nozzle bottles labeled with blue masking tape and Sharpie markers. (That way, I can tell the good stuff from the less good stuff without having to first suck on the bottle.)
 
Anyway, recipe follows…

RECIPE 
 
Ingredients
 
Simple Marinara (or as the Italians might say, marinara semplice)
 
1 x 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes, high quality (I used First Field crushed Jersey Fresh tomatoes, but any high-quality canned tomato will do)
 
20 grams / 2 TBSP extra virgin olive oil, high quality (I used Partanna organic)
 
10 grams fresh garlic (about 4 small cloves), chopped fine
 
4 grams / .5 tsp fine sea salt
 
 
The Pizza
 
1 x 365 gram doughball (mine is a Neapolitan-style dough made with King Arthur all-purpose flour, cold fermented for 72 hours)
 
140 grams / .5 cup marinara sauce (recipe above)
 
6 cloves fresh garlic, smashed and peeled
 
6 fresh basil leaves for garnish
 
Extra virgin olive oil for drizzling
 
Salt for finishing
 
All-purpose flour for stretching the dough
 
Semolina for dusting the peel
 

 
Instructions
 
90 minutes before baking, remove the dough from the fridge and leave it on the counter, where it will begin anticipating doom while the oven heats.
 
Place a baking steel in the upper third of the oven, about 6 to 8 inches below the broiler element. (More for gas broilers.)

Preheat the oven to the highest setting. (With my oven, that’s 550F. On others, it’s usually 525 or 500.) Once the oven reaches temp, heat the steel for an hour.
 
 
Making the marinara
 
Heat olive oil in a saucepan. Sauté the garlic gently for about a minute, making sure not to let it brown lest it develop a bitter taste.
 
Add the tomatoes to the pan and stir together with the garlic.
 
Stir in the salt.
 
Simmer for a few minutes until the “canned” taste cooks out. Taste and adjust the salt if necessary.
 
Turn off the heat. Allow sauce to cool to room temperature. (You can put aside the portion you plan to use, and it will cool more speedily.)
 
 
Making the pizza
 
Set up your mise en place. (I harp on this. If you don’t know it, you will enjoy learning it. It’s the one single pizza tool--aside from patience--that is both free and freeing.)
 
Stretch the dough ball, being sure to make it an even thickness. (One easy way to accomplish this is by stretching it by resting it on your forearms.) Reminder: my doughball is low hydration, weighs 365 grams, and I normally stretch it to 14 inches. For this pizza, I'm stretching to 12 inches. Your mileage may vary depending on your dough, its weight, and the cheeriness of your demeanor. 
 
Place the stretched dough on the semolina-dusted peel.
 
Sauce the dough evenly.
 
Place the smashed garlic cloves around the pizza.
 
Drizzle the good olive oil around the pizza. (TIP: I find it easiest to use the small squirt bottle mentioned above, and start drizzling from the outer edge in an inward spiral towards the pizza's center.)
 
Launch the pizza, turn on the broiler to high, and set your timer for 4 minutes. (This is my version of “the broiler method.” If you have another method that you know works in your oven, go nuts.)
 
After 4 minutes, rotate the pizza 180 degrees. Restart the timer for an additional 4 minutes.
 
Periodically peek at the progress of your pizza. If it appears to be baking very quickly, feel free to remove it before time. If it appears to need more time, go for it.
 
If the broiler isn’t coming on as expected, open the oven door. Listen closely for the relay to click, which shouldn't take long. The broiler should then begin coming on, and you can close the door.
 
Again, monitor progress of the pizza.
 
You may consider the pizza done when you feel the cornicione has browned enough with sufficient char accents to make you feel like a pro. 
 
NOTE: If you don’t have a broiler in the top of the oven, you can still make this pizza. It will just take longer to bake and won’t have as much char on the top.
 
Remove the pizza from the oven and place it on a cooling rack.
 
Add another drizzle of olive oil around the pizza. 

IMPORTANT: This above tip is part of the secret. We want enough oil to bring a degree of, say, "lusciousness." 
 
Sprinkle the pizza with salt.
 
Slice and serve.

Meet your pizza in the nude. 
 
OPTIONAL: Stand back and admire your latest act of pizza badassery. If it feels less than badass, maybe you need more olive oil. Or tomatoes. Or salt. See? This is why Pizza Marinara is so simple yet creates a struggle. Where's your marinara zen at, man? 

Special thanks to Noel Brohner for being so useful and supportive in the Los Angeles intel leading up to this silly exercise. Were it not for his recommendation, Pizzeria Sei would probably not have happened for us. If you’re interested in actual pizza classes on video by an actual pizza professional (i.e., him), visit Slow Rise Pizza Company for more intel. (Mr. Brohner also consults and develops recipes and does other stuff.)
 
Additional thanks to Mr. Pizza Quest himself, the great Peter Reinhart for suggesting I reach out to Noel Brohner. If you’d like to hear Mr. Brohner on Mr. Reinhart’s Pizza Quest podcast discussing instant sourdough starter (!), click here.

This has been a Rank Amateur Production. Free The Pizza is a division of Slow Burn Marketing LLC and is solely responsible for this content. Despite that, the pizza is still life-altering. 
 
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A lot of big-time professional artisan pizza makers once made their first pizza in a home oven just like yours. You can do it, too. My weird little award-winning book is one way to make it so. The book is about how to get from zero to pizza using the oven you already have. 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 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. ​​

​Above: snacks while writing a blog post are required.