Welcome to Pizza Lab
or: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating and Start Writing
Pizza is one of those things you can obsess over in many different ways. For some, it’s a quest for that perfect bite, what Steve Dolinsky calls OBR: Optimal Bite Ratio.
For others, it’s the pursuit of baking that perfect pie: dialing in hydration, blending flours, sourcing the best toppings and honing techniques over months and years, all leading to that perfect bake.
And others see pizza as a community, where bakers and eaters and bemused family members get to know and support one another.
As for me, it’s all of the above. I’m Brian Erst, a software developer by day, pizza obsessive by night. Pizza Lab is where I get to share that obsession with you.
Pizza has always been part of my life. My earliest food memories are of birthdays at Shakey’s Pizza, when, as a member of the Birthday Club, I could get my very own pizza my way (cheese and Canadian bacon - don’t judge me, I was 4!) and eat it myself. And baking homemade sheet pan pizzas with my mom using Pastorelli’s Pizza Sauce and hand-grated Chellino scamorza. And yes, crust from a box - again, I was 4!
About 20 years ago, I started reading Slice, the pizza blog started by Adam Kuban and part of the Serious Eats family. Slice was a special little community. This was back when the blogosphere was a thing and comment sections were lively and nurtured.
The posts on various pizzerias and pizza news brought out us commenters, but the seminal event was the launch of My Pie Mondays. This was an opportunity to show off your own pizza-making skills - a page full of pictures sent in by the Slice community with little blurbs about each. We’d ask each other about recipes and techniques down in the comments and ooh and ahh over various delicious-looking pizzas.
I started sending pictures of my own pizzas - originally Detroit-style. These days, Detroit-style is everywhere, but in 2009 it was very much still a Detroit thing, so as a guy in Chicago, if I wanted to try it I had to make it myself. I got the pans (blue steel - honestly, terrible pans and I soon upgraded to Lloyd Pans) and invented a recipe out of not much more than some hints and some basic bread baking knowledge. The very first pies (after I got rid of the disastrous blue steel pans) came out amazing. I’m not sure if it was serendipity or just the luck of being somewhat obsessed with Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread technique but I stumbled my way into a recipe that worked right off the bat.
And I wasn’t the only one. You may recognize some of the other commenters - pizzeria owners Paulie Gee in Brooklyn and Derrick Tung in the Chicago area, Dennis Lee (a staff writer there) of The Party Cut and Food is Stupid newsletters. Some you will only know if you were as into pizza as we were - Norma Knepp, who won the Caputo Cup for best pizza and competed on Chopped, Anthony Falco - then Tonycalzone, now a world traveling pizza consultant - PizzaHacker and more.
Once I lock onto a hobby, I get a little nutty (just wait til you see what else is coming to Pizza Lab). I backed the first Baking Steel and Uuni (now Ooni) Kickstarters, bought a Breville Pizzaiolo, chased every style I could figure out, switched to natural starter when things got too easy, and eventually bought a MockMill so I could start milling my own flour. I own so many pans.
Along the way, as I got to know folks who now owned pizzerias, I became interested in that side of the story - not to become a pizzeria owner myself but to understand that business and in my own way help support these small business people. It really started with Derrick Tung, owner of Paulie Gee’s Logan Square and Wicker Park and the new Alley Cat bar, Dennis Lee who was working at Derrick’s to supplement his writing income and Anthony Scardino, aka Professor Pizza, who was a member of the opening staff there. We started doing little pizza crawls, checking out the other pizzerias around Chicago to see what they were doing.
Through these crawls, I got to know a whole bunch of pizzeria owners and makers. And I would strike up conversations wherever I went. I’m a curious guy and as I met new pizzeria owners, I started to see patterns of early struggles - sometimes it was issues with vendors, sometimes with staffing, occasionally with the pizzas themselves. By this point, I knew just enough to be helpful - if I knew that another pizzeria owner had had a similar issue, I would try to connect them so they could help each other out.
And that’s pretty much how my role as “Chicago’s Pizza Mascot” was born (although Tony Troiano of J.B. Alberto’s in Rogers Park recently christened me Chicago’s Pizza Ambassador while we were at Pizza Expo in Las Vegas, so maybe I’ll use that). I’m trying to build a welcoming pizza community in Chicago and beyond.
I’ve been most active on Instagram - posting regularly about pizzerias I’ve visited or pizzas I’m making (I try to leave the recipe in the comments). Not a huge following, but a high-quality one: pizzeria owners from across the world and people who just like to see some guy from Chicago try his hand at making a Philly-style tomato pie. Which are amazing, by the way.
That Instagram has also led me into some fun projects - Flout Pizza, a pizzeria in Belfast, Ireland, reached out to me to help them with learning how to make a cold-cured tavern-style pizza. A few back-and-forth sessions and I see them post pictures of their first pies on their Instagram - and calling me out in the caption! I’ve since gone on to help a number of pizzerias with recipe ideas or tweaks and I’m always available to give advice and honest feedback.
For many years, my friends have been telling me to do more real writing - Instagram posts are fine but a few thousand characters isn’t a lot to work with. I dipped my toes in the water by guest writing three parts of a promised five-part series on Chicago pizza styles for Dennis Lee’s The Party Cut newsletter (sorry, Dennis) and writing a recipe-slash-essay called “Lazy Squares” for John Carruthers’ Pizza for Everyone community cookbook.
That’s why I’m launching Pizza Lab. It’s starting as a newsletter but will grow into something more. In the newsletter, I will be writing a few different kinds of pieces:
Reviews of new and established pizzerias
Recipes and recipe development
Deep dives into pizza styles, history and science
Interviews and stories from people in pizza
In terms of reviews, these will be a little different than my Instagram reviews. I go into a pizzeria with hope in my heart and generosity of spirit, but I will be evaluating fairly and giving my real opinions. I will go into the details of crust, sauce, cheese, toppings, baking technique and execution, flavor, ambiance and whatever details I know about how they make their pizza. When possible, I will talk to the pizzeria owner or maker and learn about their process and story. My hope is to highlight the positive and give constructive feedback when needed.
There will be no arbitrary numbering scale or strict rankings. What you will get is some insight on how to assess a pizza, if you want that, but also a sense of just how enjoyable it is - and, hopefully, tell a good story along the way.
I’m also looking forward to sharing how to make lots of different styles of pizzas and the process of developing recipes. I am constantly inspired by the pizzas I eat and the ones I see on Instagram or YouTube - there is a wide world of pizza out there and you can make it yourself. You can expect to see “Lazy Squares” make an appearance soon.
The most fun pieces for me will be the ones exploring the science and history of pizza in all its different styles. My series on Chicago’s indigenous pizza styles (there are five of them) will make an appearance (and be finished - sorry again, Dennis) as well as stories about how pizza has evolved in Chicago and the world over time.
Finally, what really motivates me are the stories. Chicago has so many amazing pizza makers and their stories deserve to be heard. Sometimes those stories will be woven into a review while at other times I will just let you Meet the Pizza Makers.
The current plan is to publish biweekly and rotate between reviews, recipes, deep dives and interviews. This first issue is the outlier: a little bit about me, so future issues can let the pizza and the stories shine.
And we won't wait long. Later this week, we head down to southwest suburban Blue Island to meet a pizza maker doing sheet-pan pies in an old hardware store.
See you soon.