I love pizza. Who doesn't?*

While I will order delivery and go out to pizza restaurants occasionally, there just isn't anything much better than homemade. 

Over the years as my exposure to different styles of pizza increased, so did the desire to recreate those variations at home. I realize much of this comes from my love of cooking. If homemade pasta is better than the local Italian restaurant, the same can be said for pizza.

It's not always attainable however given the heat of ovens necessary to attain perfection. The typical residential oven will only reach 550° at best. A commercial gas pizza oven is in the 600+ range. Some ambitious home pizzaiolos have modified their ovens to cook in the self clean heat range to attain temps upwards of 900° although this is far from ideal from both a safety and temperature control perspective.

Most aspiring pizza chefs start out with a standard residential oven, usually starting with the first crucial accessory: the stone. Designed to provide even radiant heat on the bottom of the pizza, the stone is a required component from the home chef all the way up to commercial gas to wood fired ovens. Well, unless we get into deep dish or any of the pan styles like Roman, Sicilian, and Detroit. I will dive into that in another post.

Now, this evolution really describes my own personal experience more than anything. I started off with store-bought dough or ready-made Boboli crusts. Then ventured into sourdough starters and making my own dough. Dabbled with deep dish and pan style and then hit a plateau. Deep dish was satisfying but I kind of lost interest for a while.

In 2011 I had an epiphany. I was on a trip to Italy with my family and we had rented a villa on the Amalfi coast. The house had a wood pizza oven on the terrace and we hired a pizza chef to do a pizza night. As he prepared for the bake, he explained what he was doing. After starting the fire and getting it stoked good and hot he explained that it wouldn't be ready until the bricks were glowing white. He and our property manager disappeared then until the oven was ready - we found out later they went to the bar to get in the right festive mood.

When he returned, he started laying out ingredients explaining the key was to use simple and fresh and not to load the pizza up like us Americans normally did. Little did I know beforehand, we were all going to have the opportunity to make a pizza. After I selected a couple ingredients and topped the pizza, he described the launch motion. I launched the pizza into the hot oven and and less than a minute later was turning the pizza according to his instruction. A minute after that, I gently slid the peel under the cooked pizza ("quick, quick" he said) and removed it from the oven. It was a great night with family and memorable. It also set me off on a new course. I knew as soon as I held the pizza peel and leaned in towards the 1000° oven suddenly wondering if pizzaiolos all had their eyebrows intact, that this was the begiining of something.

Once home, I tried to achieve creating the pizza from that night and fell far short. Before long I was studying the Neapolitan style and what I needed to create it. The short answer: 1000° and well-hydrated dough. 

And thus started a journey that is far from over but I'm getting closer to recreating that pizza from that night in Torca, Italy. The people, experience, and those few hours on a warm night on the edge of the Mediterranean is a memory I will never forget and will never be duplicated. The pizza, however, I'm sure I can.

*Blanket statements are a bad thing, so let me say that there are some people that don’t like pizza. I just don’t trust them.