The ultimate holiday gift for the pizza geek in your life: It inspires awe.

This holiday, do you want to give a pizza gift that inspires genuine awe?
 
This is my annual holiday harangue to demonstrate the over-the-top, pizza-gift supremacy of a thick, heavy, red steel-encased book of all things pizza for the pizza geek in your life.
 
It dashes myths! It confirms beliefs! It opens new doors!
 
And in a very small but significant way, for the price of a tiny, cruel oven, this book affirms that the home oven is a proper tool for making the kind of pizza many of us want to make.

Despite what the advertising copy would make you believe, the secret to pizza has never been about a portable outdoor pizza oven.
 
 
The secret to pizza is, has been, and always will be inside the pizza maker.
 
And for someone who already has some flour under their fingernails; who understands pizza basics; who is a person pursuing pizza with relish (as in “enjoyment” rather than “condiment,” though the latter is not out of the question); for whom a pizza roadtrip is as possible as a museum visit or dinner at a notable restaurant (or both), my recommendation is the most stupefyingly expensive book you can imagine.
 
I’ve also written a most stupefyingly long review of it.
 
(50,000 words. You can see it here, though I don’t recommend it. You have better things to do with the week it would take to read the entire review, and I’m about to summarize the value here in just a few sentences.)
 
 
Is the pizza person in your life already 1) a successful maker of pizza and 2) a reader?
 
Then the ultimate holiday pizza gift is the wide world of bready, cheesy comestibles contained within that Pandora’s box of pizza books, Moderinist Pizza.

ABOVE: Modernist Pizza in its glorious red steel case, along with cover shots of each volume (including the wire-bound kitchen manual printed on water-resistant paper). 
 

The person for whom this book is right is someone who’s mature enough to not blubber in despair when presented with historical facts about Pizza Margherita. (If that sort of disillusionment is a problem, there’s gong to be hell to pay when my Margherita movie comes out next year.)
 
 
So, what is actually BAD about this book, if anything?
 
Let’s start with the obvious drawback: it’s big and it’s heavy. And the list price is $425. (The affiliate links in this screed take you to a discounted Amazon price, about $380 at this writing.)
 
That being said, it does come inside a red steel case, making it suitable for use as a doorstop while protecting the contained volumes from physical harm.
 
It’s also not for beginners in the same way that a Harley hog is not for a beginning motorcycle rider. That said, there’s always that beginner who’s going to ride that hog anyway and make it look easy.
 
Also, some small parts of it will eventually be dated. A tiny percentage of the book is about the Modernistas’ favorite pizzerias. At some point, those places will evolve or die. So it goes.
 
The book is also relentless. It is the kind of over-the-top effort you would expect from a man who helped give the world Microsoft. As Microsoft’s former CTO—not to mention a working scientist, an award-winning photographer, and a trained chef with a diploma from École de Cuisine La Varenne in France—Nathan Mhyrvold didn’t just author a book. He built an empire called The Cooking Lab. He’s the co-author of the five-volume book Modernist Cuisine ($625 list) and the five-volume Modernist Bread (also $625 list) among others.
 
There is the editorial attitude. Mr. Mhyrvold holds opinions and he’s not afraid to share them—even if they’re unpopular. See also: why New Haven pizza is superior (it’s not) or how the Italians have a fixation on bread “digestability” (for which there is no science), just to name two. (I have differing opinions, but that’s not important.)
 
 
That’s the bad, none of which comes close to outweighing the magic that is Modernist Pizza.
 
At a mere three volumes, Modernist Pizza is nonetheless an extensive and never-ending journey through pizza. From Naples to New Haven, New York to California, Buenos Aires to São Paolo, and deep into the Modernist test kitchen for making all the world’s pizza, and into the machine shop for understanding what happens when you deconstruct a pizza oven and watch it bake a pizza, to the photo studio for the visual art, tech and whimsy in lavish full color, and ultimately to the recipe files for making all the pizzas you could ever desire. (There is a vast array of both topping combinations and pizza styles from around the globe, as well as original recipes they’ve developed themselves.)
 
 
By the way, lest we forget, Modernist Pizza is also a cookbook.
 
But nobody wants to schlep a giant and expensive, 7-pound art book volume into their kitchen.
 
That’s why there’s also a wire-bound Kitchen Manual that weighs almost three pounds and is printed on water-resistant paper.
 
I own about 50 cookbooks just for pizza (over 20 physical books on the shelf and another 30 books or so on Kindle—with several books in both formats). The Modernist Pizza Kitchen Manual is the most extreme and recipe-laden book among them.
 
 
At the end of Christmas Day and beyond, Modernist Pizza explains why things work the way they do, and all the context is invaluable.
 
It has made me experience awe.
 
The first time I experienced awe with regard to pizzamaking was when I produced my first actual, legitimate, “Wow, let’s do that again!” pizza in my home oven.
 
Proving that a pizza oven was unnecessary, I made that happen 22 years ago in a 1950s Wedgewood stove. The book that gave me the tools to make that happen was Peter Reinhart’s American Pie, which I still recommend to the beginner as an excellent primer on the anthropology and execution of pizza. (I also recommend my book. But I digress.)
 
The second time I experienced awe with regard to making pizza was when I had a 1,200-pound professional wood-fired oven installed in my kitchen. (I don’t recommend it for the casual pizza maker. There’s nothing casual about it, especially the price tag.)
 
The third and most recent experience of awe was when I opened a 35-pound box from Amazon. In intimidating block letters on the side of the box it said, “HEAVY”.

ABOVE: The shipping box that arrived at my house when I ordered this bad boy. 


More than just a warning, it’s like a 1960s-esque characterization of the knowledge contained within the red steel box housing the three volumes of Nathan Mhyrvold’s magnum opus to the art, craft and commerce of “bread with something on it” (as Peter Reinhart likes to say is the definition of pizza.)
 
Standing there, in the kitchen, and slicing open that box was an experience infused with trepidation, responsibility, possibilities, and an epic and mythological sense of potential.
 
Modernist Pizza is a special gift for anyone who loves pizza and knows (or wishes to discover) that it’s not about the oven. It’s about what you can do with the oven you’ve got.
 
Whatever your holiday, happy happy. Cheers to a rip roaring 2026!

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IS BUYING A PIZZA OVEN FOR THE HOLIDAYS THE BEST IDEA YOU EVER HAD? It’s possible. But a much more affordable gift, which is filled with enlightenment, joy and almost immediate great-pizza results is a copy of Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. There are all kinds of good reasons to get a pizza oven. But when you’re just starting out, it’s much easier and more productive to learn about pizza. And Free The Pizza demystifies how to make everybody’s favorite food—including the belief that great pizza is possible only with a special oven. Speaking as a guy who has two portable pizza ovens sitting in a shed, and who used to have a 1,200-pound wood-fired oven in the kitchen, the best oven on which to learn pizza is a regular home oven with a few simple tools. And the Free The Pizza book is designed specifically to take a newbie from zero to pizza in as short a time is possible. It’s also a lot more fun than the heartbreak of a tiny, cruel oven in the yard. Want to make a pizza at home? Homemade pizza success happens with Free The Pizza at Amazon. ​​