How I Would Learn to Make Pizza If I Could Start Over

I've made probably over 10,000 pizzas at this point, a few thousand of those at my pizzeria in Cleveland, Ohio, but the first few years I spent making pizza at home were honestly kind of a waste. I mean, I made a lot of pizzas in those years, and some of it was pretty good, at least by my standards at the time. But I couldn't really have told you why it was good, and I definitely couldn't make it again the next time. So this is something that I've been thinking a lot about lately, because I've seen comments and messages rolling in from people just getting started making pizza, but that are struggling to achieve that consistency. Honestly, if I had to start all over knowing what I know now, I could have saved myself years of trial and error. The thing is, though, almost none of what I would change about my approach has anything to do with the recipe I would use or the equipment that I would buy. It's all about what I would focus on, and honestly, mostly about what I would ignore. And I actually just documented my whole pizza-making philosophy from start to finish, and turned it into something called the Home Pizza Playbook, but I'll tell you more about that in a bit. The first thing I would stop doing, though, is trying to buy my way into better pizza, because when I started out, every single time a pizza didn't come out the way I wanted, my first instinct was that I must be missing something. So I'd look to buy a different pizza stone or more expensive flours or cheeses, or even a pizza oven. And every time, the pizza basically came out the same as the last one, because I've learned that fancy equipment and high-end ingredients don't make you a better pizza maker. They just raise the ceiling on how good your pizza can be, meaning after you already have everything else dialed in. Because as I'm sure many of you have experienced before, and I know I certainly have, a pizza oven in the hands of somebody who doesn't understand their dough isn't gonna automatically make great pizza. If anything, it's just gonna make a bad pizza in 90 seconds instead of six minutes. So if I started over, the only things I would probably buy would be a digital kitchen scale, a baking steel if I could afford it, and maybe a wooden pizza peel to help with launching. And that's pretty much it. I mean, everything else can wait until you're consistently making solid pizza that's actually worth improving upon. Which leads me into the second thing that I would completely ignore. And this is probably a controversial one, but it's the recipe itself. Now I'm not saying that the recipe doesn't matter because obviously it does to a certain extent. But the mistake I made, which I think is the single most common mistake in home pizza making, is that if something went wrong with my pizza, it was always the recipe's fault. So because of this, I basically made a completely different recipe every single time I made pizza. One weekend it would be a low hydration New York dough, the next it would be a poolish or sourdough pizza, and then a Neapolitan inspired pie with double zero flour. So after two years of that, I had made over 100 pizzas, but I hadn't really learned much. I mean, it's kind of like trying to learn guitar by playing a different song every time you pick it up. You might get a little better at reading music, but you'd never actually get good at playing any particular song. The truth is that a great pizza maker can make an incredible pizza with pretty much any dough. It's really just a matter of understanding how. So the best way to learn is just to pick one recipe. And honestly, almost any basic recipe will do. I have lots on my channel depending on what style of pizza you wanna make. But I also created one exclusively for my pizza playbook that's sort of designed for this sort of practice and beginner friendliness. So you can learn more about that via the link below. Basically, it's just my entire system geared towards beginners of how you can make one incredible pizza right now. It'll also give you the knowledge to make that pizza over and over again so that you can finally achieve that consistency you've been looking for. Like I said, the link will be in the description below. But anyways, that's exactly my next point, because once you have that recipe, you just wanna make it over and over and over again. Because each time you make it, you'll start noticing things and you'll actually start understanding your dough so that before long, you'll be able to make the exact same pizza every single time. From there is when you can really start experimenting and trying different things to take it to the next level, because you'll actually know what's going on behind the scenes and what impact your tweaks and changes to your dough will actually have. So again, your recipe is really just your starting point. It's probably the least important part of the whole process. So if that's the case, then you're probably asking, well, what does matter then? Well, let me explain. But before I do, I wanna talk about the sponsor of today's video, Quince. Quince makes high-end essentials like clothing and home goods and sells it for a fraction of what you'd normally pay. They're able to do that because they basically cut out the middleman and work directly with the same manufacturers that the more expensive brands use. 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So if you wanna upgrade your wardrobe, your home, and more with high-end essentials from Quince, go to the link in my description or scan the QR code onscreen, and you'll get free shipping and 365-day return. So thanks a lot to Quince for sponsoring this video, and thank you for your support. Now, let's get back to the pizza. All right, so you've made your recipe a few times. At some point, you're gonna make that same recipe for maybe the fourth or fifth time, and something won't be quite right. Last weekend, it might've turned out great, and you feel like you did everything the same, but for some reason, it just didn't come out right. The dough might've been too tight, maybe it tore or got a hole in it while it was baking, or maybe the bottom came out too pale. And again, your first instinct is probably gonna be to change your recipe. But like I said, that's exactly a thing that cost me two years. Because of course, at my pizzeria, we make the same dough every single day. Same flour, same baker's percentages, everything is documented. But it can still come out differently from time to time, depending on who mixed it or balled it, how long it sat out for, how cold our water was, and so on. There are a million different factors to it. So a recipe can tell you to use a certain flour, a certain hydration level, or even to mix for a certain amount of time, but it won't tell you what your dough actually looks and feels like when it's perfectly mixed. And it won't tell you how to know when your dough is properly fermented. Those are the things that actually make the difference, and they can only be achieved by learning and experimenting, not by constantly changing your recipe. So what I've started to do is to see the pizza making process as five different levers that you can control. And this is really the whole point that I'm trying to get across. The recipe is just lever number one, but we also have mixing, fermentation, handling, and baking, each of which have an equal or even larger impact on the final result. So every problem you're ever gonna have with your pizza traces back to one of these five levers. So let's take probably the most common one. Your dough tears when you try to stretch it. Almost everybody blames the recipe, but it's almost never that. It's probably either mixing, meaning you didn't develop enough gluten, or you developed too much that your dough is fighting you when you try to stretch it. Or maybe it's fermentation, meaning that you left the dough to rise too long and the structure broke down. Those are two completely different problems with two completely different fixes. And if you go change your flour or anything about your recipe, you haven't fixed either of the actual problems. And in fact, you probably made your pizza worse. So that's why I say that the recipe is the least important lever. It does set the ceiling for how good your pizza can be, but everything you do after you put those ingredients in the bowl basically is what decides whether you actually reach that ceiling. Which brings me to my next tip, which is how I'd go about actually fixing a problem you have with your pizza. So let's use that same example. Your dough tears when you try to stretch it. What I used to do when I encountered a problem like this was to completely switch things up. I'd use a different recipe, maybe lower the hydration and change the mixing time. And sometimes it did fix the problem, but I had no idea what actually led to that fix. It wasn't until I realized that in order to truly become a great pizza maker, I needed to just be patient and to change one variable at a time. It might not lead to a vastly improved pizza overnight, but with every single batch, I'd be guaranteed to learn something new. So that little by little, I can improve my pizza using what I learned and all those little earnings really compound over time. And this is the exact process that I followed at my pizzeria too. We've adjusted our dough procedure probably 50 to 100 times since we've opened, just one tiny change at a time. We might mix slightly longer one day, increase the hydration by a percent or even a half percent, reduce the yeast, let the dough sit longer at room temp, ball it slightly differently, the list goes on and on. And this process has allowed me to develop a much better understanding of what's going on with my dough and what impact each change actually has. And the result is that we're putting out a product that's 10 times better than when we first opened in my opinion. And I know this process sounds boring compared to trying something completely new every weekend, but it's what'll allow you to understand more about pizza in just a couple months than most people do in years. So if I could start over, that's exactly what I would do. Don't get distracted by the fancy equipment and recipes, just focus on mastering one solid recipe and developing that intuition for your dough. Because if you do that, it makes everything else so much easier, which again is exactly why I put together the home pizza playbook. It consists of nine short lessons about 75 minutes of content total, and it walks you through mastering one great recipe following that five level framework so that you can actually understand your pizza instead of guessing and finally achieve that consistency you've been looking for. So to learn more, click the link in the description below. And in the meantime, if you wanna see how I've applied what I've learned at my restaurant, you can click to watch this video right here where I walk through our full dough process. So thanks a lot for watching and I'll talk to you in the next one.