e’ve all
lost our
minds a
become a fanatical bread baker or latte
artist, or you’ve made a record number
of Instant Pot meals in a single month.
My husband’s pandemic compulsion
has been pizza making—and while this
sounds like a quarantine dream, it has
become something else entirely. Wylie
is consumed by pizza (note his gallery of
photos here). He watches pizza videos
until 3 a.m. and obsesses over the protein
content of assorted flours. He orders pizza
peels and cutters and dough-proofing
boxes on the off chance that they’re
better than the ones he ordered last
week. Our refrigerator has been given
over to dough research, a pizza steel is
permanently parked in our oven, and
we’ve had to make room for two separate,
not-so-small pizza ovens—one electric and
one propane (a wood-fired one is on the
way). The propane oven kicked flames
into Wylie’s face last weekend and burned
off both his eyebrows, but he’s keeping the
thing around because it gets up to 950 ̊,
and I guess that’s impressive enough to
forgive a little explosion here and there.
Judging from all the pizza-related traffic
on foodnetwork.com, many of you are
on a pizza journey these days, too:
Searches for pizza dough recipes spiked
more than 300 percent early in the
pandemic. Of course you don’t have
to make your own dough: For the pizza
on our cover (see page 60), Ina Garten
suggests using dough from a local
pizzeria—an ingenious shortcut.
I’m not sure I’ll get Wylie to agree
to this hack, but he did do something
shocking recently when faced with a
pizza challenge: Our daughters asked
if he could make pizzas on a Saturday
night for 10 kids and deliver them to
a park a mile from our apartment. He
thought about it for days, contemplating
the 48-hour dough resting period, the
need for pizza boxes and insulated
sleeves...it was all too much. When the day
arrived, he said what I’ve longed to hear
since last March: “Let’s just order pizza.”
editor’s letter
Maile Carpenter
Editor in Chief
@maile__fnmag
Oops!
12 FOOD NETWORK MAGAZINE ●JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021