Pining for a perfect pizza

Dough reigns supreme
We can all bicker endlessly about the right toppings, but here's the thing: What makes or breaks makes a pizza is the dough.  And most American pizza is hopelessly mediocre because the dough is just plain lousy.

In a half-decade on the West Coast, this is a sad truth that has tortured my Big Apple soul.

Pizza is first and foremost about being a great baker, which is why master bakers like Reinhart have been drawn to the humble pie. Terrific dough as difficult and elusive as a perfect loaf of sourdough.

But if great bread is a slow, deliberate process, pizza is baking on steroids: hours of preparation, yet just a few minutes of oven time to nail perfection.

Even among thin-crust aficionados, the perfect thickness and firmness can vary (tastes differ; Naples and Rome have spent decades dissing each other's pies) but the structure of great dough should be the structure of great bread: light, pliant, with irregular holes.

"That is 99 percent of the pizza," says Brian Spangler of Apizza Scholls in Portland, Ore., one of the West Coast's rising artisanal-pizza stars. "The toppings, in my opinion, are the easiest part of making pizza."

The crust — the whole crust — should be crisp outside, with a tender interior. The cornicione, or lip (which too many people call “crust,” and inexcusably allow kids to leave on their plates) should be puffy, slightly misshapen, with the occasional bubble inside. The bottom should have the occasional charred spot — a sign that the oven was adequately hot.

Fast and hot
Stuck in my pizza blues, I decided to put my pizza-tossing hands where my mouth was and make my own dough — essential if I was going to have any cred at all in the pizza bragging wars.

Jon Bonné / MSNBC.com Jordi Viladas of Cafe Lago in Seattle twirls pizza dough before it gets topped and placed in their wood-burning oven.

Without building a wood-fired pizza oven, I needed to find a way to cook pizza fast and hot. Household ovens max out around 550 degrees F, far short of the needed 600-800 degrees.  I finally settled on my trusty Weber gas grill, which puts out 36,000 BTU, enough to create an internal temperature well above 600 degrees.

I initially dropped the pizza directly on the grill — a technique, Reinhart notes, that has gained its own acclaim after being perfected by Al Forno in Providence, R.I. Grilled pizza works remarkably well, though you need to coat the dough with olive oil and the result is bit like a large, tomato-covered pita. (It's not coincidental that Levine likens great pizza crust to Armenian lavash bread.) 

Next I dropped a basic 1/2-inch pizza stone atop the grill, but my dough was still prone to tearing and distorting. Pizza can be asymmetrical, but the perfect pizza can only be so ugly.

Frustrated, I turned to Carla Leonardi, whose Cafe Lago enjoys renown among Seattle pizza cogniscenti. Leonardi and her husband Jordi Viladas turn up to 60 pizzas a night out of their applewood-fired oven.

Like most dedicated pizzaioli, she views great pizza less in terms of ratios and measures than as the product of a skilled baker's intuition. Humidity, heat, lackluster yeast and dozens of other factors can conspire to ruin dough on any given night.

All you can do is surrender to the whims of the pizza gods and hope you occasionally find the right match of texture and toppings, cooked for precisely long enough and not a moment more. “You're always trying to balance for the ideal,” she says.

Bianco, whose pizza Reinhart considers the best in the nation, concedes that perhaps six out of every 200 pies he makes on a typical night are perfect.

“I know on any given day that pizza will kick my ass,” he says. “That whole ‘pizza master’ bull---- is ridiculous. There's no figuring it out. The moment you think you've got it figured out, forget it."