On Pizza Alone
When COVID-19 arrived this past spring I, like many others, went into a defensive cooking crouch. All the extra time I had on my hands meant producing massive amounts of comfort food for the freezer, and my flour purchases skyrocketed. I fattened myself and my loved ones on various baked and griddled doughs, batters, and hand-cut pastas. Also, scads of pizza. With convenience and time-saving no longer a priority, I moved from my usual reliance on Whole Foods’ pizza dough balls to from-scratch versions, proofing each iteration anywhere from four to 48 hours.
The problem with making pizza at home, though, is that most ovens max out at 550 degrees or so and cannot produce the Neapolitan-style puff-and-char crust that is the highest achievement of the art. The texture of the
