What pizza taught me about life

I’ve been making pizzas every now and then at home. I like cooking.

But how do you get a good pizza with a home oven, no pizza stone, cheap high moisture mozzarella and cheap tomatoes?

For a long time I though you couldn’t. I’d keep making pizzas every now and then and they would be round, wouldn’t airy, wouldn’t really taste like pizza.

Every time I improved it was because I saw someone make actually good pizza and copied one thing about how they handled the dough, be it waiting in between kneading (no one’s doing 15 minutes by hand for a single pie, much better to do 4x 1 min), forming round balls or pressing the air to the edge.

But I didn’t get the a good pizza until I pre baked the dough for 4 min until I put on the sauce and cheese. And then it was perfect, as good as an actual restaurant pizza.

Now that I think back on it it’s actually incredibly simple. Getting a round dough might be hard but everything else you could’ve explained to me in 1 minute the first time I made a pizza. It would’ve been just as good as the one I make now. Yet that didn’t happen. People have been making pizzas like this for a hundred years and millions of people have made it their job to make pizzas or to entertain people with content about pizzas.

So what is it? What does this mean about the world?

I think there’s three things to take away:

1: be humble. There’s 8 billion people in the world and someone’s already figured it out so just copy them

2: be confident. There’s tons of bad information out there. Use your intelligence to tell what’s good

3: theres tons of optimizations left in the world. Most people make bad pizza. What else is like his? Everything.

It’s funny to think about how this mirrors life in everything. Everything is easy when you know how to do it, what’s hard is learning how you do

Dough 70% hydration, 4 min at 250, put on sauce made out of tomatoes, salt, acid and sugar (cheap canned tomatoes so too watery on its own), cheese (can’t get low moisture mozzarella), bake another 3 minutes. Crust makes up a large part of the pizza because I assemble it on a cutting board

I’ve been making pizzas every now and then at home. I like cooking.

But how do you get a good pizza with a home oven, no pizza stone, cheap high moisture mozzarella and cheap tomatoes?

For a long time I though you couldn’t. I’d keep making pizzas every now and then and they would be round, wouldn’t airy, wouldn’t really taste like pizza.

Every time I improved it was because I saw someone make actually good pizza and copied one thing about how they handled the dough, be it waiting in between kneading (no one’s doing 15 minutes by hand for a single pie, much better to do 4x 1 min), forming round balls or pressing the air to the edge.

But I didn’t get the a good pizza until I pre baked the dough for 4 min until I put on the sauce and cheese. And then it was perfect, as good as an actual restaurant pizza.

Now that I think back on it it’s actually incredibly simple. Getting a round dough might be hard but everything else you could’ve explained to me in 1 minute the first time I made a pizza. It would’ve been just as good as the one I make now. Yet that didn’t happen. People have been making pizzas like this for a hundred years and millions of people have made it their job to make pizzas or to entertain people with content about pizzas.

So what is it? What does this mean about the world?

I think there’s three things to take away:

1: be humble. There’s 8 billion people in the world and someone’s already figured it out so just copy them

2: be confident. There’s tons of bad information out there. Use your intelligence to tell what’s good

3: theres tons of optimizations left in the world. Most people make bad pizza. What else is like his? Everything.

It’s funny to think about how this mirrors life in everything. Everything is easy when you know how to do it, what’s hard is learning how you do

Dough 70% hydration, 4 min at 250, put on sauce made out of tomatoes, salt, acid and sugar (cheap canned tomatoes so too watery on its own), cheese (can’t get low moisture mozzarella), bake another 3 minutes. Crust makes up a large part of the pizza because I assemble it on a cutting board