The food-science flavors of billion-dollar corporations vs. big pizza flavor you can make at home. (All it takes is yeast and patience.)

One of Free The Pizza’s apparent fans is a guy named Dean. (That's not his full name, and I don’t want to assume that he’s interested in being identified for all the pizza world to see.)

I need to thank Dean for sending me a quote from a book he’s reading: The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor. The quote about skinny, food-loving Italians was interesting, so I bought the book.

The Dorito Effect is about the evolution and societal impact of the flavor industry. Let’s call them Big Flavor. (My words, not the book's.)

The book’s undeniable entertainment value belies a serious note about Big Flavor, modern food science, and how it all impacts you, me, and everyone else. 

Without getting all Michael Pollan on you here, commercial agriculture has robbed you and me of something and tried to fix it.
 
In commercial agriculture’s monumental effort to feed the planet, it has evolved breeds of animal and species of plant that grow bigger faster with more resilience at the expense of taste.
 
In an effort to counter the resulting banal flavors, Big Flavor food scientists have figured out how to synthesize "accurate" flavors from other natural sources.
 
Then, they put these flavors into our denatured food. And we’re not just talking Doritos here. We’re even talking raw beef, pork and chicken.
 
As is the way with so much of our unintentional food irony, we humans make foods “better” by taking things out, and discover it causes a problem. So then we find a way to solve the problem by putting other things in.  
 
What does all this have to do with our beloved pizza and how we make it? Simple!
 
Free The Pizza is, at its core, about you taking control of a much-loved food for the ones you love.
 
If flavor is at the core of pizza delight, making your own pizza is in some small way your personal statement about patience, purpose, intent, joy and community.
 
And it starts with yeast.
 
Now bear in mind, this is me talking now. This is not in the book. But having a) read about half the book and b) eaten far too many corporate pizza products of all kinds, from frozen to "fresh," I feel safe drawing these conclusions. 

These tiny little fungi known as yeast are very, very important. Specifically, we’re talking about a little guy known as Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
 
More commonly referred to as S. cerevisiae among scientists, that truncated name still doesn’t help us troglodytes down here in cheap seats. So we just call it “baker’s yeast” or “brewers yeast,” depending on whether we just want to eat or also get drunk.
 
If you’ve read my lightweight tome, Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have, you know that I live in the camp of 3-day dough.
 
Like so many actual experts on pizza, I propose making a dough at home using a relatively small amount of yeast. Then, you put that dough into the fridge for three days. That lets all those yeast get busy inside that mass of wet, salty flour, eating up the sugars and farting carbon dioxide.
 
It’s a kind of natural magic that results in flavor you can’t find any other way.
 
That final flavor helps make us happy as pizza pie. In short: Time is taste.
 
By taking control of that pizza dough, you get to experience a flavor far superior to any commercially available pizza product from the big corporations for whom economics is a primary driver.
 
The owner of a popular pizzeria once said to me of fermenting dough, “No way! I can’t afford to do that!”
 
But you and I can afford to ferment our dough.
 
We can afford to demand more flavor.
 
We can afford to engage in an act of commercial pizza subversion.
 
Let’s borrow the Peter Reinhart Flavor Rule. He likes to say that there’s only one rule, and it’s that flavor rules.
 
In the context of our homemade pizza journey, the flavor of fermented dough is the basis for all good things to come.
 
If you can get the crust right, which is pretty easy, the rest is even easier.
 
On top of our flavor-amped dough, we add great-tasting tomatoes. I’ve adopted the bright, bursting flavor of California-grown Bianco DiNapoli organic as my go-to tomato product. I'm pretty sure there's no corporate food science happening in there. (I hope.)
 
Cheese? Well, maybe I’m a slacker there. Perhaps I should be seeking a new flavor beyond commercial-grade low-moisture whole-milk mozzarella. There could be hope for me there.
 
But I also use true Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano Reggiano, among other flavorful, hard-aged cheese. We're talking the legit Italian product and not what passes for in the American supermarket dairy case.
 
And the first time I tried making pizza this way, it was a total shock.
 
Following simple directions, being patient, and using good, minimally processed ingredients (things that Big Flavor hasn’t had to color), the resulting pizza was a revelation.
 
I’d always recognized pizza as simple. I just didn’t understand what to do to achieve that delightful simplicity. And learning the simple processes was the key.
 
I realized I was right: Pizza really is simple. It just requires purpose and intent.
 
I’ve been making pizza at home for years.
 
And still, new guests come to my table and are shocked at what they’re experiencing.
 
Typical comments range from “Oh my god,” to “You’ve ruined me for all other pizza.” (Hyperbole is also a flavor.)
 
There are fans of Free The Pizza who’ve described similar experiences. From epiphany on the meaning and methods of home-cooked fare, to finding flavor that’s a legitimate and enduring aphrodisiac (who knew?), homemade pizza brings joy beyond commerce.
 
All this to say, Free The Pizza is many things. But one of them is emphatically this: grabbing the pizza by the handle and elevating it to a place where flavor rules, and becomes a little bit of joy.
 
And it’s all a homemade flavor you get to own. 
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If you’re still thinking about 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. ​