INTRODUCTION
EVERYBODY LOVES PIZZA
In my Philadelphia neighborhood, everyone ended up at Rizzo’s. They had the best pizza. It was your typical round American pie, and everybody in Abington loved it. Even the big, plain cheese pizza matched the restaurant’s family atmosphere perfectly. On weekend nights, all the families went to Rizzo’s for pizza. After Little League games, all the kids gathered at Rizzo’s. Sometimes, after pizza, my mom would even take me to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee! Those were the days!
I’ve always loved pizza. After cooking pizzas for more than thirty years, I’ve also learned that people get very passionate about their own love for pizza. Everyone has a particular favorite, from thin crust or thick crust to Naples style, Roman style, New York style, and Sicilian style. Some people want only the classic margherita pizza of crushed tomatoes with mozzarella and basil, while meat lovers prefer sauce, mozzarella, sausage, pepperoni, and ham. Well, this book is for everyone who loves pizza. I give you a variety of different dough recipes so you can make a variety of different pizzas with a variety of different toppings. I show you how to make better pizza in whatever oven you’re working with—from home ovens to wood ovens to grills. The recipes start with the pizza doughs and then move on to all the different pizzas you can make with them, including dozens of toppings. The doughs, shapes, and toppings are all interchangeable so you can choose any pizza style and any pizza topping to go with it. Experiment with different combinations to find your favorites.
Even though I fell in love with pizza in Philadelphia, I started baking them in California. In my twenties, I moved to Los Angeles, and sometime around 1991, I started working for Wolfgang Puck at Granita. That’s where I first learned to make pizza. A guy named Danny Farr showed me how to mix up dough, shape it, and work the wood oven. Danny got me totally hooked on making pizza. I fell in love with the whole process. L.A. celebrities would come into the restaurant and just stare at us making pizzas by hand. That’s where I learned how to handle the dough, and I got pretty good—so good that I once made a guitar-shaped pizza for Neil Young. But somehow Danny’s dough always came out better. We made the exact same recipe and mixed it the exact same way every time, but his dough looked nicer, rose better, and stretched easier. It took me a while to figure out why.
I eventually went to Italy for a few years to become a better chef, and that’s when I really dug my hands into Italian cooking. I made bread, pasta, desserts…you name it. And I tried all kinds of pizza. Those were some of the most formative years of my life, and I still return to Italy every chance I get. When I got back to the States after that first trip, I started working at Bella Blu in New York City. They had a big wood oven in the middle of the restaurant just like at Granita. New Yorkers would come in and watch us stoke the fire and make pizza for them. Being New Yorkers, they pretended not to care, but I knew they did. They kept staring at us, at the oven, at the dough, and at the bubbling pizzas. The pizza chef, Matteo Pupillo, was from Puglia, and he taught me that you must have a relationship with your pizza dough. He said, “The dough is the star of the show.” Matteo helped me understand that the person behind the dough is as important as the dough itself. It’s the relationship between you and your dough that really matters. That’s what was missing from my dough compared to Danny Farr’s dough. You have to get a feel for your dough. Anyone can follow a recipe, but observing the dough and sensing what it needs is the key to making it better. As with any relationship, sometimes—no matter how hard you try—things just don’t work out. You can always try again by making another batch, but without good dough, there isn’t a single topping in the world that will make your pizza taste any better. Great dough is what makes great pizza.
After working with Matteo, I paid more attention to the dough every time I made pizza. I also paid more attention to the people eating it. Even though Bella Blu was wildly different from either Rizzo’s or Granita, all three restaurants drew huge crowds of people for their pizzas. The pizza was just that good. After working at Bella Blu, I knew that one day I would open up my own place. I started imagining Pizzeria Vetri, and it dawned on me that a pizzeria is not only a place where people go to eat pizza but also a place where people go to experience something incredible together. The relationship that you develop with your dough is something you also share with everyone who eats your pizza. It’s the care and attention that draw people in. There’s just something special about handmade food. People travel for hours or even days to obscure little corners of the world just to marvel over a pizza that someone has created. Children get so excited when you ask them if they want pizza tonight. Neighborhood families have the times of their lives grazing on the local tomato pie made by hand. Pizza is not just a plate of delicious food. It’s meant to be shared; it’s an invitation to gather around the table for community and conviviality. Pizza brings people together. That’s why I put communal tables in my pizzeria. When people are enjoying a slice near each other, they say things like “Ooh, that looks good. What is it?” and “Here; try a slice.” I love that. It’s something you don’t see enough in restaurants.
It may sound corny, but I truly believe that is why pizza is now one of the most popular foods on the planet. Every culture around the world has been putting stuff on bread and baking it for thousands of years. But a big, flat pie, cut for everyone to share? That’s a little different. It’s hard to say who made the very first pizza. Maybe it was the ancient Etruscans or Romans. Or maybe it was some kind of focaccia made by the Genoese in Liguria. Who knows? When tomatoes came to Italy in the late 1500s, tomatoes ended up on the bread. In Naples and Rome, that combo took off and—boom!—pizza was born.
In Naples, pizza was sold mostly from street carts and folded up so you could take it with you.
When visitors went to Naples and Rome and tasted pizza, they couldn’t get enough. Later, when Italians immigrated to America, they brought pizza to cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. At that point, it was mostly an Italian thing. But then, during World War II, American soldiers in Italy couldn’t get enough pizza, and when they came back home, pizza started spreading across the entire United States—from tomato pie in New Jersey to pizza Napoletana in Connecticut. From there, it just spread everywhere and became more and more popular all over the globe.
It’s amazing to me how the whole world fell in love with pizza. But I get it. I fell in love with it, too! It’s just so adaptable. Different doughs, different shapes, different toppings. You can make it however you like. And that’s exactly what everyone around the world does. And that’s what you should do. But this book is not an exhaustive survey of every style out there. I focus on the pizzas that started it all, like round pizza Napoletana that’s soft and foldable with a big, puffy rim; round pizza Romana that has a thin, crunchy crust and almost no rim; and rectangular or square pizza al taglio that’s baked in a pan with a superthick but light and pillowy crust. Sure, I have some fun with Naples dough and Roman dough. I show you how to make a few things like calzones and rotolo—a Pizzeria Vetri original! I also show you how to make focaccia, the Italian bread that probably kicked off the whole pizza craze in the first place. Just don’t go in expecting to find edamame pizza with a fucking cauliflower crust. That is not in this book. You won’t find gluten-free pizza either. But you will find gluten-friendly pizza that is thoroughly fermented and made with wheat flour (see this page for more detail). Yes, it is possible!
You’ll find almost twenty different pizza and focaccia dough recipes and dozens of variations on those doughs. You’ll see plenty of pizza toppings, too—from classics like Marinara (this page) and Margherita (this page) to some of my new favorites like Zucchine (this page) and Carbonara (this page). There are more than forty different toppings and fillings here. Certain toppings go particularly well with certain doughs, and I’ve pointed these out in the recipes. But, really, you can mix and match the toppings however you like. For me, it’s all about nailing the crust. No matter what kind of pizza you make, your dough and your oven will always have the biggest impact on how your pizza turns out.
A lot of pizza books focus on the “one” dough recipe you’ll ever need. Or they show you the “best” method for baking pizza. The truth is, there is no “one” pizza dough to rule them all, and there is no “best” method—and acting like there is can lead you astray. It all depends on what you are trying to achieve and the tools you have at hand. Different doughs and different ovens make different pizzas! If you make pizza in a wood-fired oven at 900°F (482°C), you won’t get the same results when you bake that same dough in a home oven at 500°F (260°C). It just won’t work. My promise in this book is that I will help you make better pizza in whatever oven you have with whatever dough you want.
Like everything else in today’s world, you can get your pizza cheap and easy, or you can seek out better quality. If you’re reading this book, I assume you want to go a step above Chuck E. Cheese’s. Let’s say you’ve never made pizza before, and you want to give it a shot. You’ll find everything you need here to make great pizza from scratch in your home oven the very first time. Or, maybe you’ve been at it for a while and you’ve gotten pretty good at slinging pies. These pages offer lots of opportunity to up your game—from perfecting your dough to getting the most out of your oven, and I bet you’ll also pick up a few new toppings to try out.
Either way, the first few chapters take a deep dive into various ovens, different baking methods, types of flour, and the magic that is pizza dough. If you really want to learn about the art and science of pizza, start there. If you just want to eat something delicious, go straight to the recipes. The recipes are set up as a two-stage process. First make one of the Pizza Dough Recipes (this page), let the dough rest, then shape it and bake it into your choice of Naples Dough Pizzas (this page), Roman Dough Pizzas (this page), or Pizza Al Taglio (this page), and top them with any of the pizza toppings from any of the chapters. I show you how to make soft, chewy and foldable Neapolitan pizza in a home oven as well as in a wood oven, a cast-iron pan, a kamado-style grill, a charcoal grill, and a gas grill. There’s even a recipe for frying it in a pan. Or maybe you prefer crispy thin-crust pizza—try the Roman dough pizzas. You’ll see how to get a crunchy pizza Romana from whatever oven you have. Or, let’s say you’re a fan of square pie. Then you’ve gotta try pizza al taglio (by the slice), a dough that holds a special place in my heart. It’s ready overnight, you bake the pizza in a regular home oven, and the crust comes out superlight and fluffy. Plus, it’s open to all kinds of interpretation. You can top it with whatever, from potatoes, rosemary, and mozzarella (this page) to butternut squash, crispy sage, and Taleggio cheese (this page). My kids absolutely adore this kind of pizza. You’ll also find other fun things like Parmesan Fried Dough (this page) and Home Oven Nutella-Stuffed Pizza (this page).
Really, it doesn’t matter which pizza you make. Put together any one of them and invite some people to come enjoy it with you. You’ll make friends in an instant. There’s just something magical about hot pizza. No one can resist it. All around the world, pizza brings people together in a way that nothing else can. And that’s something we could all use a little more of.