Ask most people about Chicago pizza and they’ll picture deep dish — a casserole-like pie you eat with a knife and fork. But ask a Chicagoan what they actually eat on a Friday night, and you’ll hear about tavern style…
Grandma pizza is the style that tastes like someone’s childhood — because for a lot of people, it literally is. Born in Long Island kitchens, where Italian-American grandmothers pressed dough into olive-oiled sheet pans and baked it in home ovens,…
Almost every disappointing homemade pizza traces back to the same culprit: the toppings. Not the dough, not the oven — the toppings. Certain ingredients look great in the raw state but turn against you in a hot oven, releasing floods…
There is a special kind of disappointment that comes from pulling a beautiful vegetable pizza out of the oven only to find a puddle of liquid pooling in the center. Learning how to keep pizza from getting soggy is mostly…
Every great pizza is a combination — and the difference between a random pile of toppings and a truly memorable pie is intention. The best pizza topping combinations balance flavors (salty, sweet, acidic, rich), textures (crisp, creamy, chewy), and moisture…
Open a can of certified San Marzano tomatoes and taste one straight, and you’ll understand the obsession immediately. For san marzano tomatoes pizza — pies where the tomato is the star — they’re the single biggest ingredient upgrade you can…
The best pizza sauce you’ll ever make takes five minutes, five simple ingredients, and zero cooking. That surprises people — we’re trained to think sauce means simmering a pot for an hour. But pizza sauce isn’t pasta sauce. It cooks…
Walk into the cheese section and you’ll find two mozzarellas that look related but behave like different ingredients: the soft white balls floating in water, and the firm blocks in vacuum-sealed plastic. On pizza, fresh vs low-moisture mozzarella is one…
Ask what the best cheese for pizza is and most people say “mozzarella” without thinking twice. They’re not wrong — mozzarella earned its throne. But it’s only the very beginning. The difference between a good homemade pizza and a great…
St. Louis style pizza is the most polarizing pie in America — and its fiercely loyal hometown fans wouldn’t have it any other way. The crust is a cracker: unleavened, rolled paper-thin, baked until it shatters. The cheese is Provel,…
In Rome, pizza isn’t round. It’s rectangular, sold from towering glass cases in bakeries and tiny storefronts called pizzerie al taglio, cut to whatever size you point at, weighed, priced by the etto (100 grams), reheated until the bottom crackles,…
Sicilian pizza is the original thick square pie — a slab of airy, olive-oil-rich dough with a golden fried bottom, a thin layer of cheese tucked underneath a bright, oregano-heavy tomato sauce. Its ancestor, sfincione, has been sold as street…
Detroit style pizza is the square pie with the caramelized cheese crown. Baked in a deep rectangular steel pan, it has a thick, airy, focaccia-like crust with a fried, golden bottom, a wall of cheese baked right against the pan…
Chicago deep dish pizza is less a pizza and more an event. Where most pizzas are flatbreads with toppings, a real Chicago deep dish is a tall, buttery pie with a crisp, biscuit-like crust, a pound or more of low-moisture…
New York style pizza is the world’s most imitated pizza and, to millions of people, simply what “pizza” means in its purest, most iconic form: a large, thin, hand-tossed round with a crisp-yet-pliable crust, a tangy tomato sauce, a blanket…
Neapolitan pizza is the ancestor of every pizza you have ever eaten — and in many ways, still the pinnacle. Born in Naples, Italy, it is defined by a soft, pillowy crust with a puffy, leopard-spotted rim, a thin soupy…
