Want to make better pizza at home? The simple secret is all about owning it. (Welcome to the kitchen confessional…)

​Nobody wants to read a pizza story that talks about The Red Beans And Rice Epiphany. Feel free to leave now. Reading this one is seven minutes you’ll never get back.
 
It’s easy for me to say you start making better pizza when you make a conscious decision to own it. But…what does that even mean?
 
Welcome back to the purpose and intent paradigm.
 
You don’t have to be a professional or some kind of high-level cook. All you require is to engage in the process—something that so many people fail to do with their cooking.
 
Here now, I confess some of my sins.
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The trip to Margherita was a frustrating journey through naked simplicity.
 
The Pizza Margherita, like so many favorite and beloved foods, is so basic that it offers the cook nowhere to hide. Your skills are laid bare. It’s so simple that solving it is a challenge. Make it badly, and it laughs in your face.
 
Make it well and own it, and it laughs along with you.
 
I’ve been making pizza for over 20 years, and cooking for slightly longer. And while I’ve been chanting the mantra of purpose and intent since I began writing seriously about pizza in 2022, I’ve had a recent and vivid experience of purpose and intent in a very simple, traditional dish for Louisiana housewives: red beans and rice.
 
Before anyone gets all up in my business about calling it a “housewives''” dish, you need to understand the apocryphal truth: the legend of red beans and rice says it was traditionally made on Monday, which was also laundry day in New Orleans.
 
While the lady of the house was tackling the beast of 19th century laundry technology like washboards, washtubs, hand-cranked wringers and mangles, the only spin cycle was inside her head. Red beans was the favored meal because she could set it on the stove and largely forget about it.
 
Modern laundry equipment has eliminated the weekly day of drudgery. But the tradition remains. Red beans and Monday still go together in the south like loneliness and the Maytag Repairman.
 
I used to make red beans and rice occasionally. But the result was never anything that made me say, “Wow.”
 
I was able to get a "wow" with other Louisiana dishes. Gumbo, jambalaya, étouffée—I was doing a pretty decent job with all of them. Natives were kind enough to praise them to my face--and eat seconds and thirds. 
 
 
But in a way, red beans and rice was like pizza Margherita: simple but not easy.
 
I would look at different recipes from various southern cookbooks. I’d wonder what it was I was missing.
 
I’d make a version of red beans and rice that was edible. But it never called you back for more. It’s not like you were going to wake up the next morning thinking about it. (That has happened to me, and I know my cooking has done that for other people. Yes, in a god way.)
 
Finally, I threw away the recipes. They were just too simple to continue consulting them. I wondered why I was worrying about what everyone else is doing.
 
Why didn’t I just do what I needed to do, namely: bring the flavors that I knew would make it mine?
 
So I tried that.
 
And I suddenly owned red beans and rice.
 
 
My wife has a killer palate.
 
When I’m cooking, I’ll say, “Taste this.”

She’ll take a taste. “More acid.” Or whatever.
 
It’s really useful having someone like that around your kitchen. It’s also ironic because she doesn’t cook. Yet she is responsible for elevating much of what I do.
 
Anyway, I liberated myself from the recipes and just brought the mojo of spicing and seasoning the pot in a way I knew would make me happy.
 
Then I served it to The Fabulous Honey Parker. She looked at it, and I knew: she’s disappointed.
 
But then she took a bite. She smiled.
 
It had worked.
 
It was a Life Cereal moment with Mikey.
 
I’d been making the dish at the level of simple sustenance where the recipes lived. I wanted to raise it to the level of desirable.
 
 
Here’s where I borrow a delightfully idiotic Cheech and Chong throwaway joke.
 
I’d like to see those leftovers in the fridge and say, “Those beans were good. Let’s fry them up again!”*
 
Many people, when they’re cooking, stand outside the dish and walk through the recipe as if it were a paint-by-numbers exercise.
 
It’s never paint by numbers. And sometimes, it’s a coloring book image where you’re required to color outside the lines.
 
If you’ve ever watched the cooking competition show Chopped on the Food Network, you know: it’s an education in possibilities.
 
The show’s competition framework is irrelevant. What matters is its true nature: the show is about transformation.
 
And transformation is fascinating.
 
Four competing chefs are each given the same four ingredients. They race head-to-head against the clock to deliver a dish incorporating all four ingredients.
 
What you get to witness is skilled pros in an ongoing lesson about creative decision making on the fly under pressure.
 
It’s one of the most honest cooking competitions on TV. There’s very little contrivance or artifice. You see what works, what fails, and why.
 
 
Pairing chocolate with bacon is a no-brainer. But pairing chocolate with lobster? Eegad.
 
And don’t forget, after these chefs are done cooking with weirdness on the edge of the cliff, they get to be judged by three celebrity chefs.
 
Watching three celebrity chefs taste the results of a lobster and chocolate pairing and say, “I was afraid, but this is amazing” makes you realize how much there is to learn even after you’ve learned it all.
 
And when a competing chef makes something wacky and owns it, and the judges taste it and love it, it makes you realize there are no rules.
 
And no, I have not paired red beans and rice with chocolate. (You’re welcome.)
 
 
For my red beans and rice, I decided I’d been standing outside them for too long.
 
Living inside my head, I have successful recipes for lentil soup, black beans and rice, Tuscan white beans, black bean soup, pinto bean soup, split pea soup, frijoles refritos, even cassoulet. Why was red beans a fail?
 
I wasn’t owning it.
 
So I brought my own flavors to red beans and rice, made it mine, and the result is I’m ready to “fry them up again.”
 
 
The problem with the flavor rule and pizza is that the challenge is bigger than just a pot of beans.
 
Pizza has more moving parts. And when you begin making a pizza, at least one of those ingredients is still alive. (Remember, pizza dough is your friend—and that’s partly because it’s loaded with tiny creatures that go by the name Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Better known by the nickname Yeast, they make pizza possible.)
 
Despite the added complexity of pizza, the simple principle of ownership holds true. And like the lowly bean, pizza Margherita is so simple, you’ve got nowhere to hide.
 
I wish I could say my Margherita epiphany was planned. It was not that thoughtful. I was just standing there in the kitchen and thought, Hey! And I made the decision.
 
When I suddenly decided to own Margherita, it became a series of choices.
 
Which flour for the dough?
 
Which tomato?
 
Which basil?
 
Which cheese?
 
What olive oil?
 
 
All simple ingredients. All simply prepared.
 
The tomatoes were an easy choice. Bianco Di Napoli tomatoes are American grown from heritage seed. They’re both sweet and acidic, with a deep, ripe flavor.
 
There aren’t many choices for fresh mozzarella around here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. And since I wasn’t going to make my own mozzarella (I’ve done it, and it’s simple yet complex but I possess only so much bandwidth), I opted for Galbani product from the only local provider: Walmart.
 
The basil came straight from my own garden. The basil was still wondering what was happening as it went onto the pizza.
 
The olive oil? As my everyday, I use an affordable, organic olive oil blend.
 
But this pizza is so basic, it requires an olive oil that tastes like a ray of Amalfi coast sunshine. Partanna Sicilian olive oil is fruity and herbaceous with a peppery finish. It’s complex. It’s the one I want to use.
 
 
And the flour. What about the flour? The crust is the lynchpin.
 
I have a lot of King Arthur “00” Pizza Flour in my pantry, and I figured that would be the smart choice.
 
Also, the dough recipe is going to be key. I don’t have a wood-fired oven. I could just make my normal dough and make my normal pizza crust, which is a crowd pleaser.
 
But that doesn’t feel right. And when I’ve used the KA 00 in my standard recipe, it always yields a firm, crisp pizza—which is not what we’re going for here.
 
As much as I enjoy a pizza with structure, this one need to be a little less crisp. More tender.
 
So I decided to use a higher hydration, no-knead dough recipe. I hoped to attain a crust resembling authentic Neapolitan flavor with a little of the crisp bottom and some crunch around the edge. (Not your typical Neapolitan pizza, but remember: I own it.)
 
Traditional Neapolitan-style pizza calls for a relatively low-hydration dough baked in a 900-degree oven.
 
And since I don’t have a 900-degree oven, I wonder if it’s possible to compensate for a lower temperature oven with a higher-hydration dough.
 
It’s just a guess, but heat-to-hydration ratios seem to make sense. If you have to bake the pizza for longer at a lower temp, give it more water so it doesn’t dry out.
 
 
At 900 degrees, you’re baking the pizza for only a minute and a half.
 
But regardless of oven temp, the water inside pizza dough still boils at 212 degrees just like it does everywhere else at sea level on the planet Earth.
 
If the oven temperature is only 550 degrees, getting the kind of color and texture I want on a pizza means baking it for about four minutes.
 
But with moisture evaporating for four minutes instead of just one and a half, there needs to be more water in the dough or I’m gonna be making a giant cheese and tomato cracker.
 
I don’t want my pizza wet and floppy. But I also don’t want it stiff and brittle.
 
So this was the post-baking thought process long after I stood there, eating my accidental Margherita and wondering how I did it.
 
Purpose and intent don’t always happen in an orderly fashion. Frequently, there are forensics involved.
 
Informed hindsight allows me to justify some of the choices I made (like flour and olive oil) and retrofit others (like hydration and baking time).
 
 
But the one, single important decision that made the magical Margherita disappearing down my pizza hole possible was saying these two words: Own it.
 
Like Tribecca Allie's Dutch Van Oostendorp says on film in our movie about pizza Margherita: It’s simple, but it’s not easy.
 
I’m presently in New Jersey. Our house sitter in Mississippi just sent me a text: “Oh, my God. Your pizza is so good! I just heated it up.”
 
I left her half of a Lazy Way pan pizza.
 
It’s a very simple pizza that relies on a few simple tricks related to flavor development for making magic happen.
 
It’s not a Margherita. The Lazy Way pizza is much easier to make, and it’s easy to love.
 
It’s a worthy pizza and easy to own.
 
But Margherita is the Queen of Pizza. She has demands. And you can own her only if you are worthy. Fortunately, such worth is attainable. And even when it doesn’t succeed at first, the pursuit is always delicious.
 
Crust, cheese, tomato, salt and fat. It’s always a dopamine rush on a plate.


* If you care, that silly joke is from the Cheech & Chong movie called Cheech & Chong's Next Movie. I remember it because I happened to be working in a movie theater that was running it. I heard it a lot. (Ironically, so-called refried beans are never fried until the very end. It's a grammatical translation inconsistency.)
 
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I live in a house full of pizza. There is so much pizza coming from my home oven that we finally had to enact a moratorium while we catch our breaths and eat a few carrots. Would you like to be so prolific with pizza? My weird little award-winning book is one way to make it so. It's less a cookbook than an entertaining guidebook 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. ​