​The secret to making great pizza is not something you can see, touch or buy on Amazon...

We had the microphones out and were recording an interview with a well-known ad man about his business. At some point, the topic of pizza came up (as it often does). The ad man says, “My friends who make pizza tell me that the secret to making great pizza is getting the dough right. Is that true?”
 
I tried to answer, but I hesitated. I started answering again—and hesitated. Finally, I said, “Yes. Sort of.” My mind was racing through all the things that can screw up pizza, and bad dough was far from the only one.
 
It took me a couple of years to realize the reason for my hesitation. After 20 years and easily a thousand pizzas, it finally dawned on me. And it has nothing to do with dough. It has nothing to do with equipment. It has nothing to do with going to Amazon and buying a crappy, $900 outdoor pizza oven and bags of overpriced flour imported from Italy which was probably ground from wheat grown in the United States to begin with. 

The secret to making great pizza is something you cannot see, touch, smell or buy on Amazon. The secret to making great pizza is in your relationship with the process.
 
“OK, Deepak Pizza. What have you been snorting?” I know, it sounds like this is where I start laying out The Pizza Secret to demonstrate the "Law Of Pizza Attraction" and how your every pizza desire can be satisfied by believing in the outcome of the perfect pizza and maintaining positive emotional pizza states and thinking about it over and over and over and over until “BAM!” you disappear in a burst of light and everyone nearby is left behind, covered with a splatter of tomato sauce and cheese.
 
This is not that. But I am serious about the relationship. Here’s why.
 
For years, I’d been making pizza at home in a regular home oven. It was going great. Eventually, I moved up to a big, wood-fired dome oven like you might see in a small restaurant. It became very much about the oven, which was a huge project. All that wood! All that time!
 
Stoking that oven and getting it to temperature took two to three hours. And yes, it did raise my pizza game in terms of the final product. Baking a pizza at 900 degrees is transformative! Mother of pearl!
 
But my regular home oven still got a lot of pizza use. You can’t spend three hours heating an oven to make one pizza for dinner by yourself. The economics of that are stupid. 
 
Then came the portable, wood-pellet pizza oven. I’d read the reviews. I’d heard the songs of praise. I was ready for a $300, 10-minute alternative to the $7,000, half-ton beast parked in my kitchen.
 
I hate that $300 oven. I’ve used it several times. It’s unreliable. It’s too small. It’s dirty. The construction is flimsy. It’s nothing but a weak and feeble pile of compromises. Once in a while I pull it back out and think, Let’s try again! This shouldn’t be so bad!
 
It is so bad. It sucks out loud on a leftover pizza crust. It is the emperor's new clothes covered in hardwood pellet soot and spilt pizza sauce.
 
But we’re getting sidetracked here. It’s not about the oven. It’s about the relationship. And here’s when my pizza began to really improve: when my stand mixer was in storage, and I was living in a condo with a crappy little kitchen, and I wanted to make pizza.
 
I was pulled out of my groove and thrust into less than ideal circumstances. I had to rely on myself, my hands, and an as yet unproven oven that was less than promising.
 
The real test here was going into a bowl of flour, water, salt and yeast with my bare hands--something I had literally not done in 20 years of making pizza. I’d been using a food processor and then a stand mixer. It was so convenient!
 
Now, I was forced to get in there with my hands and knead it like a neanderthal and feel good about it. And that last part was the kicker: Feeling good about it.
 
There’s a lot of resistance in novice pizza making. Resistance is pain. People resist and get freaked out by the high heat. “I have to turn my oven all the way up to 550 degrees?! OH MY GOD!”

People are put off by kneading dough. “I have to do that WITH MY HANDS?! For whole minutes?! OH! MY! GOD!”

People blow a gasket about letting dough ferment in the fridge for three days. “Three days!? It has to SIT while I do NOTHING!? Oh my God! I WANT PIZZA TONIGHT!”
 
Of course, there’s very little actual yelling. That voice is the id. It’s sitting back in there somewhere around the unsophisticated reptile brain, hating and loathing and fearing and acting like a two-year old whenever it’s confronted with anything outside its “me first” comfort zone, and it uses the tiny word it has learned to love: “NO!”
 
So, this was the epic battle I faced: Kneading dough by hand. Dealing with it took, oh, several seconds. I mean, there was no stand mixer. I thought, I haven’t mixed pizza dough by hand for…well, ever, really. Not since actually learning how to make pizza. Let’s give this a try.
 
And you get in there and you realize: Oh, that’s right. This process has a life cycle of its own.
 
Your hands feel how the dough progresses from a conflicted mess of raw flour and invading water. You feel how it eventually becomes a shaggy, gloppy mass of wet gunge. It soon evolves into a ball of sticky, elastic paste.
 
And somewhere along the line, it turns smooth and supple and kinda sexy. You never notice these things when the dough is down there in the steel bowl of that KitchenAid stand mixer that’s groaning away at it and torquing it around with a steel hook so you can stand nearby, not mixing while you're doom scrolling through your phone.
 
So, I’ve gotten my hands into this flour and water and salt and yeast and turned it into this living creature called pizza dough. And don’t be fooled, it IS living. There’s enzymatic activity and respiration going on. Those yeast are in there, feeding on the sugars being released in the dough.

Those yeast are farting up a storm of carbon dioxide and ethanol to give your pizza dough efficacy. The yeast are doing the hard work. Me? I just have to push it around for a while and then divide it up into smaller balls of dough and refrigerate it for a couple of days without losing my shit because IT HAS TO FERMENT FOR THREE DAYS!? OH! MY! GOD!
 
What’s the rush? Have we all been so infected by our culture of immediacy that if we can’t get a ball of pizza dough ready for dinner in the time it takes to search for the cheapest flight to Newark on Kayak we’re going to have an embolism?
 
Relax! It’s just pizza and it’s gonna be great.
 
After more than 15 years of making pizza, that day that I put my hands into the dough was when my relationship to the process began to change. Not having access to the equipment meant tearing down a barrier standing between me and the organic process of making a living, breathing pizza dough.

You can smell the dough on your hands. You can caress it. You can coax it into different positions. You can spank it. It’s fantastic.
 
But mostly, you have to respect it. If you don’t do that, it’s not going to work out well.
 
And the relationship began evolving in different directions. Shaping pizza began getting better. Pizza newbies get bummed out because “I can’t MAKE IT ROUND!” Yeah, you can. You just have to understand the dough better. Be more patient. You have to help it be round. And the day you figure that out is the day you think, Wait a minute. This isn’t so hard. Why was I losing my shit?
 
Other aspects to pizza evolve. The prep improves. So does the mis en place. Composing the pizza toppings. The launching. The retrieving. As soon as you slow things down and take a personal, hands-on approach the your pizza, it all gets better. It becomes more satisfying.
 
And it becomes a joy. You realize you know The Pizza Secret. It has always been right there, waiting for you to use it. Free The Pizza!

If you or a friend need a copy of Free The Pizza! (A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have), you can find it here.