It's not delivery. It's not DiGiorno

Pizza is a food group for guys. It’s the stuff of gospel for people all across the nation from New York to California. Everybody has their neighborhood place and everybody, save for a few tasteless idiots who are beyond saving, loves it. I’m rabid for the stuff myself and living in NYC, I get no shortage of terrific pies. But the fact that most folk get their pizza from a Hut or from the freezer depresses the shit out of me. This is my plea. Make your own pizza. It’s not hard, it’s delicious and people will think you’re cool. This may not be the path to pizza pie perfection, but with enough tinkering you’ll find a method that works for you.

1 cup warm water

2 tablespoons yeast

3 1/2 cups flour

5 tablespoons olive oil, divided

2 tablespoons honey

pinch of salt

1/2 cup jarred tomato sauce

8 ounces fresh mozzarella cheese, sliced thick

8 ounces pepperoni sliced thin

In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine the water and yeast and let sit for five minutes to hydrate the yeast. Add the flour, 4 tablespoons of the olive oil, honey and salt and mix on low for twenty minutes until some gluten develops. This is what makes the pizza dough stretchy and the crusty chewy. Add the remaining tablespoon of olive oil to the bowl and toss the dough ball in it. Cover the bowl with a damp kitchen towel and let sit in a warm place for up to two hours.

Preheat your oven to as high as it will go. Mine goes to 550 degrees so that’s what I set it at. In an ideal situation it would be more like 900. Put whatever pan/pizza stone you’re going to cook your pizza in/on in the oven to heat up with the oven. Whatever the dough goes onto has to be screaming hot to begin with. This produces the crisp crust that only comes with really, really good pizza. You could achieve closer to this jet engine heat on a gas or charcoal grill and you could very well cook your pizza on the grill instead of in the oven, but I live in New York City and don’t have the means for a grill…yet.

Divide the dough into two balls and wrap one of them in plastic and put it in the freezer. This way next time you make pizza you won’t have to make dough again. Punch down the other dough ball and roll out to a twelve by twelve circle. Pull the pan out of the oven and carefully lay the dough on it. Work quickly here because you don’t want the pan to lose heat. Spread the tomato sauce on the dough working in a thin, even spiral. Lay out the slices of mozzarella and pepperoni evenly. Put the pan back in the oven and bake for fifteen minutes or until the crust is brown around the edges and cheese is bubbly. Remove from the oven and let cool on a rack for five minutes before slicing and devouring.