A letter from a reader

We received a letter from a reader yesterday, unhappy with us that her pizza dough did not turn out.

Here is her email:

I thought your site might be helpful and it initially looked well-researched.

However, I followed your "spicy dough" recipe for the crust EXACTLY as you listed but the dough was runny and ruined. I think it actually needs more flour to come out right.

I am very disappointed in your recipes and your instruction. FYI, there is no instruction as to what temp to cook the pizzas after they are created?????

Here is our response to her email:

Hi XXX,

Thanks for taking the time to write. I am sorry to hear that an attempt at making homemade pizza did not work for you…I am sure with a little practice you will master making great homemade pizza’s.

We have spent 1000’s of hours over the years researching the information, instruction, and resources that we include on our site, besides including our knowledge and experience from more than a decade of experience in the pizza industry.

The purpose of the site is not to be like the 1000’s of other recipe sites. If you are just looking for a pizza recipe there are lots of options AND better options than homemade-pizza-made-easy.com. In fact, we purposefully remove baking instructions from our recipes so that if someone is just looking for a recipe they will be discouraged from using ours.

We consider our site an instruction or how-to site, and not a recipe database. The site is really for those of us that love pizza and want to learn how to make it for ourselves at home. For example, we have readers from all over the world…at last count we get visitors from more than 60 countries around the world. I am certain that the flour in Vietnam is different than what we might be purchasing in Safeway. Our visitors from Cost Rica have different issues to consider than those living in Sweden.

My family and I are currently living in Ecuador. We are living in a small village in the Andes at about 8,500 feet. It is a wonderful experience, and I have made lots of pizza’s in the past couple of months. It turns out that many of the indigenous Indian families have never had a pizza, so we invite them over to our house and make the kids pizza.

I have had LOTS of pizza’s “fail” since we’ve been here. I have found that there is not a consistency to the flour as we get back in the U.S., I can’t get the oven temperatures as high as I would like, and the high altitude is playing havoc on our recipes.

Our family has a simple philosophy and that is to celebrate our failures and enjoy the process. If we enjoy the process then the outcome is not important, it is simply the end result of living our life to its fullest. Our failures only get us that much closer to the end state we desire.

We would love it if you spent more time at www.homemade-pizza-made-easy.com and read more of the information we provide to learn how to make homemade pizza. But, we also understand that if you are simply looking for a recipe you can follow “exactly” our site is probably not for you. Here are a couple of recipe sites that will provide such recipes…www.cdkitchen.com and www.allrecipes.com.

My specific recommendations to “fix” the spicy dough recipe are: When mixing the dough do not add all of the water at once. Pour ˝ of the recommended amount of water into the mixer, bowl, or work surface and begin incorporating your ingredients. If the flour is absorbing the water and the dough is getting dry…add more water. Additionally, if you have added too much water and the dough is very wet…add more flour. You are looking for the dough to hold together in a nice ball.

Our family wishes you and your family a wonderful new year and we hope that you have many homemade pizza successes this year.

Take care,

Sean, Gina, Grant, and Gigi

I want to stress a couple of points...

First, the focus of our site is to provide the information and resources for our readers to LEARN how to make homemade pizza for themselves. Part of this process is to learn how to make adjustments when our ingredients, our temperatures, our altitudes change. I can bake a pizza at 300 degrees or at 500 degrees and can get a pizza that tastes great. They will be different, but they will still be good. To do so I need to adjsust the bake time. I do not need, nor want, a recipe to tell me this...I want to learn this for myself and understand the changes I need to make.

My pizza's hardly EVER turn out the way I would like. The mental picture that I have created and the reality of what I pull out of the oven are always different. I admit that there are times when I feel a little dissapointed, but then I taste the pizza, or watch the reaction of friends and family and the smiles on their faces and it is forgotten. Pizza is Fun! Food is Fun! Lets be less concerned with making the perfect pizza, and more concerned with enjoying the process...a part of which is learning for ourselves.

We welcome any questions or comments. We also encourage you to subscribe to our website to stay up to date on any changes.

Thank you...

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