Pizza 101... an idea in the making... of pizza

The meet up to buy ingredients

Recently a friend had asked me to teach him and his girlfriend how to make pizza. Of course I had to do this, not because he was a friend but because I love to teach people anything that I know how to do. I've professionally taught AutoCAD at Wentworth Institute of Technology between 1998 and 2005 and briefly between 2009 & 2010 at both Wentworth and Whittier Vocational High School.  For many years of my career I've held the position of being the guy who knows all of the answers about AutoCAD and how to use it to do (enter any task here) as it relates to what we did at the myriad companies where I've worked.

Prep work

Also during our run of owning a Tea House, I hosted many educational events around making and drinking tea. And of course I have several years of parenting under my belt which often includes teaching my children random things that I know. There's joy in this kind of work because it's not work... it's purposeful socializing and the reward is never the money that I might get paid but the look in a person's eye when they feel a moment of success or perhaps because they just took a bite of some food that they made and didn't believe they could, as was the case with my friend and his girlfriend.

The socializing during the making of and the eating of the pizza included a conversation about teaching people to make pizza. And I'm sure this sounds a bit conceded but I don't mean for it to, the thing is, I've yet to find a pizza at any pizza shop or restaurant that's as good as the pizza I make. And while that might sound conceded, I know in fact that its part and parcel to the success in the pizzas that I make.

More prep

See... I heard myself saying to my students "the most important ingredient in making any good food is confidence." And that was the first time I ever made such a statement. Now confidence alone doesn't make a good pizza, but without it you're relying on pure luck to give you the thing you desire and if you get that once in three times that you try, that would be pretty impressive. But knowing the end result will be great if you apply yourself at this moment will greatly increase the odds that every time you make a pizza it will be at least decent.

Of course I told them the second ingredient was love, or actually they told me because I really said, "Do you know what the second most important ingredient is?" and they all answered including my daughter who was standing by watching and the one thing I know I've taught her is that when I cook for her the first ingredient is always love.

Getting started

So back to teaching people how to make pizza... I think this could be a brilliant idea. I just don't know if there would be any takers. So if you're local to me, want to know how to make a great pizza, and are willing to pay for the ingredients (I'll take care of the confidence but you'll need to meet me half way on the love) let me know. I need to try this a couple of times before I can decide if it's worth making a greater effort to make it an actual thing.

By the way... no one ever taught me to make pizza... I learned through several years of trial and error. My first pizza was made for my girlfriend Sandra when I was 18 years old as a means to not only feed us, but to impress her. It was made with a Pillsbury dough, jarred sauce, pre-grated cheese and some pepperoni. I've come a long way... and you'd be a fool to not take me up on this. To quote one of my students from the other night... "Oh my god, how come this tastes so good?" I told her it was the love.

Unfortunately, we were so busy eating that pizza, we forgot to take pictures of the finished product. If the students share theirs I'll update. (UPDATE: These next five pictures are courtesy of Kyle's GF Erika.)




A little dough tossing



Finishing the margherita pizza



Building the veggie pizza, the organized part



Building the veggie pizza, the sloppy part



The finished margherita pizza



The Students

Assembling ingredients

Pizza 101 with Annie about 8 years ago