It’s June. Maria says to me, “Look at this pizza oven. I’m going to get you one for your birthday. Do you think you’d like it?”

My birthday isn’t until October.

A week later, a box arrives on the front patio, and I’m unboxing the backyard pizza oven.

“I knew I shouldn’t have told you about it,” she says. “You always do this, and then I never know what to get you.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just didn’t want to wait until October.”

I spend the next year kneading dough, spreading toppings, and then watching them crash onto the oven’s stone as the pizza sticks to the peel, or burn beneath the oven’s flame.

But the dozens of failures don’t stop me.

In the years since, I’ve improved the process. I make everything from scratch: the dough, the sauce. Well, I buy the toppings, but I try to source them fresh and local.

If sharing a meal helps hold people together, then there is no better meal than a pizza. Nobody fills their own plate. There’s one pie in the middle of the table, and everyone pulls from it until it’s gone. Everything about the meal is shared.

I’m going to the Phoenix Pizza Festival next month with a friend.

She asks me, “What are you looking for in a pizza?”

“Easy,” I say. “It’s the bread.”

That’s new for me. It used to be the sauce and the toppings. But as I’ve experimented with different dough formulas and seen how small changes affect the flavor and the feel, it’s all about the bread now.

And this is why the franchise restaurants don’t cut it for me anymore. The bread is boring.

Here’s the recipe I’ve settled on. It puffs up well, forming air pockets that keep it light, while getting crisp on the bottom:

Ingredients

1000g 00 pizza flour
620g filtered water (not from the city tap)
1.5g instant yeast
10g brown sugar
20g olive oil
28g salt

Steps

• Divide your flour into two bowls, 500g each.
• Warm your water to 90°F. Mix in the yeast and brown sugar. Stir until dissolved.
• Add the water to the first bowl of flour.
• Mix until the flour is moist.
• Add the remaining 500g of flour.
• Mix and knead for 5 minutes.
• Add the olive oil and mix until distributed.
• Add the salt and mix for 5 minutes.
• Let the dough rest for 5 minutes.
• Mix for another 5 minutes.
• Cover the dough and let it rest for 20 minutes.
• Stretch the dough front to back, then side to side, 8 times.
• Cover and let it rest for 1 hour. (The dough should grow as the yeast begins fermentation.)
• Cut the dough into six 280g portions and roll them into balls.
• Place the dough balls in a proofing container. Refrigerate for 24 to 48 hours.
• Remove them about 3 to 4 hours before baking.

The rest is the fun part. Once you have warm, relaxed dough, stretch it to size, top it, and put it in your oven at 500–600°F.

I couldn’t wait four months for a birthday present. Now I wait two days for dough, and it’s absolutely worth it.