Hello fellow pizza enthusiasts!

I wanted to share my pizza making journey with you all, in hopes that it might inspire or help someone who’s just starting out or looking to improve their own pizza game.

I started out making pan pizzas using pizza flour, which is high in yeast and allows for a quick, one-hour dough. The result was a pizza that was pretty tough, not at all the soft, fluffy texture that I like.

After some research and experimentation, I switched to a flour with a higher protein content and reduced the amount of yeast I was using. I also started a 48-hour cold fermentation process. The difference was night and day! My pizzas became much softer and fluffier, a huge improvement over my initial attempts.

I tried my hand at Neapolitan style pizza using a pizza oven, but I found sourcing the right ingredients locally to be a challenge. Plus, the pizza would char if I took my eyes off it for even a second. So, I ended up gravitating towards New York style pizza, which I found to be more forgiving and easier to manage.

One thing that has remained constant throughout my pizza making journey is my sauce. I prefer a cooked sauce over the often-recommended raw tomato sauce. I cook mine with garlic, olive oil, dried oregano, dried basil, powdered onion, and bicarbonate. The canned tomatoes that I use contain salt and citric acid, which is why I use sodium bicarbonate instead of salt, to counter the acid. The result is a rich, flavorful sauce that really elevates the pizza.

There are a few resources that have been instrumental in my pizza making journey:

• Pizza: Neapolitan vs. New York style - Enzo Coccia and Tony Gemignani — Italia Squisita
• Pizza napoletana fatta in casa: la ricetta di Davide Civitiello — Italia Squisita
• Impasto pizza a lunga maturazione. ALLE PIZZA — Alessandro Coluccino
• The Pizza Bible: The World’s Favorite Pizza Styles, from Neapolitan, Deep-Dish, Wood-Fired, Sicilian, Calzones and Focaccia to New York, New Haven, Detroit, and More Hardcover by Tony Gemignani

I hope my journey and these resources can help you on your own pizza making journey. Happy baking!

Brian Lagerstrom’s videos helped me quite a bit, in that he has so many different styles, techniques to use to make various kinds of pizza, from a bar pizza, new York style, Chicago deep dish, Detroit style or sheet pan pizza. He also revisits styles over time as he adjusts his technique or learns new tricks to share to improve the recipes.

He even has a hack to make pizza dough in the food processor without needing to let it rest overnight, which I’ve used multiple times when I’ve wanted pizza but didn’t know it until it was almost dinner time (purports to be a 1 hour pizza and it’s pretty darn close). The secret there being to use part of a can of beer in the dough instead of water in order to get that yeasty flavor like you would if you did a longer ferment. It’s not as light and fluffy as say a 24+hour new York, but it’s great in a pinch or when you’re too lazy to prep ahead.

A couple years ago we got an outdoor oven that can get much hotter than the one in our kitchen. It has made more of a difference to my crust than any tweaks to my dough recipe has.

That said I don’t think I’m as far along in my experimentation as you are. I appreciate your notes and will consider them as I continue to perfect my pizza game.