Goal Met: Make 50 Different Pizzas

This will be a cakewalk, I said to myself, I make pizza all the time how hard can it be to make 50 different pizzas? Let me tell you dear readers – it was very hard. The first few were easy as I busted out crowd favorites like Neapolitan, Pepperoni, and even a meat lovers. It was about 10 pizzas in when I started to wonder if just coming up with new toppings was a good way to accomplish this.

I did some research into topping combos and came up with a few that looked interesting but as part of my research I started seeing more regional pizzas pop up and it got me interested in how pizza can change as it travels across the world or even across the state. So I did a deep dive and became a pizzaologist. Tracking pizza as it went through all its different iterative changes.

These regional pizzas were still dough, sauce, and cheese but the way they went about it changed and I used my handy research assistant (ChatGPT) to do a deep dive into how Pizza was introduced to these regions and what the history of the style was (you can find these in the individual pizza posts) and it was some fascinating stuff.

Now there are some that argue for one style of pizza as being ‘real pizza’ and I get it. For me it’s a two way tie between a classic NY/NJ slice and true Neapolitan pizza. I get the appeal of Chicago deep dish and the buttery crust of a real good pan pizza and to be honest, I love them all. I’m not an elitist in that way (No, don’t take my NY Pizza card!) but I always come back to the classics when I’m in the mood for a good pizza that scratches that itch.

It was an educational journey and introduced a few new pies into my rotation (such as Apizza or pizza fritte) and there were a few that were just not great such as the steamed pizza. It’s like.. A bao bun with sauce and cheese. The texture was just not what I want from a pizza. The flavor was alright, but man I like steam buns and pizza but not this unholy fusion.

I’m glad I did this and I feel like I can talk about regional / international pizzas with a much more informed opinion having made and tried a lot of them.  The only drawback was I always felt like I needed to be making a new pizza even if I wanted a classic pie. Now that it’s over I expect classic margheritas are on tap for a few weeks to make things simple!