Pining for a perfect pizza

The pizza cops
The quest for pizza nirvana can take on curious forms.  An controversial Italian group known as Verace Pizza Napoletana was formed in 1984 (with an American branch founded in 1998) to mandate certain pizza-making standards: no pie diameter larger than 30 cm, no rolling pins used to punch down dough. At least 10 pizzerias in the United States are members, paying an annual fee and pledging to follow the rules, though none of the renowned New York or New Haven joints are VPN members.

VPN's standards are rigid, which has dissuaded many devoted pizzaioli from adopting them. Even in Naples, some pizzerias scoff at the concept of officially sanctioned pizza.

VPN, for example, requires a wood-fired oven at a minimum temperature of 750 degrees F. A good benchmark, certainly, but some legendary pizzerias (Pepe's, for one) insist on coal ovens; others (DiFara's in Brooklyn and Nick's Pizza in Queens) dare to use gas ovens.

The real trick is getting the right heat in the right spots. Leonardi's oven, built by Wood Stone Corp. of Bellingham, Wash., can provide a hearth temperature of 520 degrees F and a searing internal temperature of 800 degrees or more. Spangler's brick oven produces a dome temperature up to 750 degrees. Bianco prefers slightly lower temperatures. All can produce a pizza in under four minutes, slightly longer than the 90-second standard in Naples.

'Pizza cognition theory'
Perfection is great, but Levine isn't an absolutist. He hesitates to dis anyone's favorite pie, since even a bad pizza is still better than many foods. (Unless it's one of those cardboardy chain pizzas, for which he has no mercy. He finds Pizza Hut's stuffed pie “unspeakably awful.”)

Why the sensitivity? Levine endorses what his pizza-loving pal Sam Sifton of the New York Times calls “pizza cognition theory” — that the first pies we eat become our lifelong template for pizza perfection. If you were raised on Chicago pizza, or New Jersey tomato pies, that becomes your idée fixe.

“If you try to disabuse somebody of the notion that the pizza they grew up with is somehow lacking,” Levine astutely notes, “They'll cut you off at the knees.”

Most pizza perfectionists embrace a sort of pizza terroir — the notion that any pizza should authentically represent its own roots. New York pizza should stand for New York, Chicago pizza should wear Chicago pride, and Naples' own virtues should be enjoyed on home turf, not copied by well-meaning pizza hounds on these shores.

“There's two kinds of perfect pizza,” says Reinhart, “the paradigmatically perfect pizza ... and then there's what I call contextually perfect pizza: a pizza or pizzeria that's perfect because of a time and place in your life. Every once in a while, the two come together.”

In other words, the great pizzas of the world can be perfect — or just amazingly good. I'll take either.

MSNBC.com lifestyle editor Jon Bonné is finally happy — sort of — with his pizza recipe.