I have been proven wrong.

The question I get asked most besides “What’s the best pizza in town?” is usually, “Dude why don’t you start making your own pizza?”  My answer has always been kind of drifty, but I usually tell them that I don’t have the tools to make good pizza, namely a hot enough oven.  I always thought that a conventional kitchen oven would only produce pizza similar to that of rising crust frozen pizza.  Thick, chewy, bread-like crust without the airy-ness and distinction between the crunchy, outer shell and the chewy, soft inside.

Well the other day I was invited to eat some home-made pizza by a friend of a friend of a friend who heard I had a pizza blog.  I accepted the offer, thinking I would be served an inelaborate, homemade pizza similar to the gluten-free one I wrote about a while ago.

Upon meeting Nathan I could tell he wasn’t your typical pizza fan.  He was like me; obsessed, angry, picky and infatuated with the food.  We discussed the pizza places in town, the lack of a truly great neapolitian pie and the abundance of “gourmet” pizza places that market themselves towards rich white people who are eager to spend too much money on a pizza that is nice to look at, but way too small and honestly not very good.  We talked about the uselessness of the VPN and the vain ingredients that are needed to qualify for such an inflated seal of approval.

Nathan was meticulous in his pizza making that night.  He takes advantage of his old oven’s broken temperature regulator, turns the dial to “broil” and waits while it achieves temperatures in the 600′s, a high heat that most household ovens may not be able to produce.  The pizza’s usually sat in there for three minutes before he pulls them out, turns them around and sets them back in there for another minute or so.  Then, Nathan will pull the pies out half-way and continue to shuffle it around while the crust burns just enough to his liking.  He’s done this enough to know exactly what the charred edges should look like and how the underside should behave when poked at.

He made six delicious pies that night.  All were absolutely delicious, even the odd-looking arugula pizza which he joked about putting Cheetos-Twists on.

arugula?, mozzarella and tomato sauce

basil, tomato, mozzarella and some kind of nut?

another basil, mozzarella and tomato sauce?

mozzarella, arugula with a little lemon juice

basil, tomato sauce, no cheese! is that garlic in there?

sans sauce!

Nathan’s pies were honestly some of the best I’ve ever had in this town.  He could easily be selling these for $8 to $10 at a little hole in the wall pizza joint with an ordinary oven.

Thanks for the hospitality Nathan!  And chime in if I got some of the ingredients wrong, I’m sure I did.

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Nathan chimed in:

the pies were just (in the order we had them)

1 sauce, parm, mozz, basil
2 mozz, cherry tomatoes, basil, garlic (a touch of balsamic too)
3 sauce, mozz, basil
4 mozz, basil, arugula, lemon juice parm
5 sauce, herbs, garlic, basil, parm
6 mozz, parm, basil

all of them had olive oil and a pinch of sea salt