Fight songs from movies raced through my head the morning of the competition. I was up by 6:30 am(!) and down to the kitchen to evaluate and collect all my things. 

Risin up, back on the street
Did my time, took my chances

In my head, I'm a boxer in the movies with quick feet, swinging some gloved jabs into the innocent air in front of me as I walk out to the crowd roar and cameras flashing like the fourth of july. 

Went the distance
Now I'm back on my feet
Just a man and his will to survive

The morning was long, and no roar of the crowd greeted me as I passed through the show room doors into the emptiness of early arrival. I made my way to the area of the competition after checking in. It seemed like hours before anyone even told us what was going on.

I had prepared myself for nervousness and isolation. Previous years being a convention goer, I was a dough-eyed wanderer in the belly of the beast trying to figure out what the hell I'm actually getting myself into. But it turned out to be quite the opposite once the day started moving. My companion and only supporter in this sea of newness was my friend Greg Phelps. Many people know him as the guy with the baby doll heads on his car, though he's got a new and somewhat less baby doll headed art car. You may also know him as stop #417 on the Columbus Public Art Walk coming soon! He's an event organizer by trade and has some connections at the convention center, so he pulled some strings and got into the event without having to pay the $34.95 to enter. He turned out to be my eye in the sky roving reporter, taking all the pictures in this blog post and putting them up on facebook as the situation unfolded. My wife (and probably many others) was following his posts, kept abreast by his awesomeness! It was great to know someone in the audience, rooting for me in the middle of the mayhem. He didn't have the goremade body paint, pepperoni bikini nor the air horn he said he'd bring with him, but his support was more than enough! 

After checked in, we were handed an envelope containing several papers of various officialness. One paper assigned each competitor a number that served as our identification for the event and which corresponded to one half of a 6 ft table that was our space for the competition. I was number 27 for the day.

The Pizza: Pirate's Booty
Ingredients: Dungeness Crab, Chipotle Aioli, Boursin, Truffled Olive Oil and Smoked Sea Salt.

I spent the better part of two weeks working out the best way to take those ingredients and make the best pizza I could make, practicing on 8" pizzas to save on ingredient costs. This is the first time I'd attempted to really perfect a pizza, as I'd only ever made it a couple times in the past. Everyone else in the Pizza Pizzazz competition was making a pizza that they'd made countless times in day-to-day business, where as I was flyin' by the seat of my pants. I'd never even made a 16" pizza, and found that I didn't really know how to stretch a dough that big, so I was going in this thing a bit unprepared. But I had drive and confidence and passion and readiness!

It's the eye of the tiger
It's the thrill of the fight
Risin' up to the challenge
Of our rival

Once they announced the beginning of the competition, there was a rush of unpacking and preparing around me. They had only announced the first 5 competitors and I was a little confused why so many people were getting busy. After a little investigation, I found myself to be among the very last in the list of competitors with time to kill. There was no timeframe. A simple "not for a while" was all I could get, keeping me close for most of the day.

I soon realized how cool it was to be surrounded by people with a similar passion for pizza! I walked the tables, peering into secret ingredients and techniques, honed over years of practical application. I saw shrimp, squash, corn, peppadew. Pizzas that looked more like salads. Dough paper thin and three inches thick. Knives, pans, dockers. Corn meal and flour. So many different ingredients, equipment and techniques to take in.

Among the competitors from all over the country, I was also able to meet several pizza folk from the columbus area, which was super cool! Gary from Clever Crow, Eric from Dewey's Pizza, Peter from Figlio, John from Avalanche Pizza in Athens, OH (who also has a great pizza web blog as the pizza goon!). It was nice to be able to chat with these guys and pick their brains, being able to meet the competition and start things off on a friendly note. Eric from Dewey's invited me to come hang out and play some sunday before they opened. He also said he'd lend some pizza people to help out when I start the whole mobile pizza thing! Super nice guy.

Back on the competition floor, someone forgot dusting flour, so I handed him my bag. It was like that. Anything that anyone needed was supplied by a neighbor. "Anyone have a knife?". An enthusiastic "Here you go" came in an instant. There was a sense of camaraderie that I didn't anticipate. It poured over the competition floor like a warm breeze in the dead of winter. We all were there to win, mind you. But we were all unified by the glory and the love of pizza. 

I ended up meandering in the area where they brought the left-overs that the judges didn't finish off, so there was a constant flow of deliciousness. They weren't labeled, so it was blind consumption. But there were some delicious flavor combinations and really interesting textures. Every pizza was a different kind of delicious. It made me realize how difficult it would be to compare such different pizzas and pick a winner.

After many many many minutes, the final call was given for anyone who had not yet made their pizzas to start. I was in that group, so I scuttled off to do what I truly came here to do.

You're the best, around
Nothin's gonna ever keep ya down
You're the best, around
Nothin's gonna ever keep ya doooooown

Most everyone had made their pizza by the time I was up. I couldn't decide if it was advantageous or disadvantageous to go last, but that didn't matter. It was time. The one thing my mother said to me was to remember to have fun! This was indeed the most important thing. Winning and losing are second to enjoyment. If I win after a hideous day, it would be a hollow win. A loss after a great experience is still a great experience. I made my pizza with a smile ear to ear.

I had heard some talk about past ovens being quite unsatisfying, but this year was absolutely not that. They have two ovens available for use. A conveyer oven and a deck oven. Conveyer ovens are just that. You put a pizza in a pan and send it through a conveyer that cooks it and you pick it up at the other end. A deck oven is any oven that you can cook a pizza directly on the floor. This specific oven was a Woodstone Dual Gas Fired oven, with flames on both the left and right sides of the oven. They were independently adjustable, allowing for temperature adjustments for each side. After using my mobile wood fired oven, it was like going from a 1984 Ford Fiesta to a 2012 fully equipped Cadillac XTS. It was an easy cook, and I could see the ease of cooking many pizzas at a time with it, as opposed to the tight space of my home wood fired oven and the one-at-a-time routine I've adapted. In the application, I asked for a 600º oven. When it was my time, the temp gage one inch into the floor of the oven read 480º with an assumed internal temp of 525º. Surprisingly, it worked out perfectly!

They told us the announcement for the final 6 would be announced in 15 minutes, so we waited. The MC of the event came out and there was a hush. He started listing the numbers of the contestants who made it to the finals, there being 7 instead of 6 as there was a tie. Listing them in numerical order, he began: 1, 6, 14... his skip from 26 to 33 made me sharply aware that I was not advancing to the final round. Surprisingly, I felt pretty good. I did the best I knew how to do, and that's all I could ask for. Winning $6,000 would have been a great boost in start-up capital, but the event took me to another level, which is priceless!

So many time, it happens too fast
You trade your passion for glory
Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past
You must fight just to keep them alive

Not making it to the final round left me with enough ingredients for two more 16" pizzas, so I invited Greg and his wife Danuta over to enjoy the spoils of our loss. I stuck around long enough to see the guy from Figlio make his pizza, which looked pretty amazing (Ahi tuna with all sorts of garnishes), then headed home for a bit of a rest, missing the final verdict for a nice respite and to tell the tale to my wife.

At the end of the day, I felt pretty good about things. I met so many wonderful folk and made some new pizza friends. I got shirts and business cards printed. This was something that needed to be done, but I was failing to do. I used the momentum of the event to push me over a couple humps. I also got to involve myself in a professional event, going toe to toe with the best of em! And I'll be much better prepared for next year!  I felt good about my pizza, and I felt good about my performance. It gave me something to talk about, and it's keeping me going. And every picture in this blog shows me with a grin on my face! This can't be a bad thing.

One more step in the right direction!

The Pizza Pizzazz competiton is open to anyone with a pizza menu, a tax ID number and the $100 entry fee. I soon found out that you can get a menu and a tax ID number in a matter of hours, as I was registering for the event the last day of open registration and had neither. This required a bit of internet investigation and a bunch of made up stuff. The tax ID number was fairly simple, though I was sure it would be the bane of my application. It took about 10 minutes to achieve success (who knew?) and GoreMade pizza is now the proud owner of a shiny new TAX ID NUMBER! The menu was easy enough as well, seeing as I'm a graphic designer by trade. And thanks to a slow day here at work, I was able to whip one up in an hour or so while on the clock! It was the stuff of stars aligning, I tell ya!

Along with the formalities, there's also the task of picking a pizza to enter into a competition. Knowing nothing about what has shown true in the past, I went with a slightly exotic pizza without breaching the realm of simplicity. I won't tell you the toppings (can't give away my secrets before the show), but I will tell you that the name of the pizza (which I made up on the spot when I came to the field on the application that asked for it) is Pirate's Booty. 

Since signing up for the competition, I've realized that I should have some GoreMade Pizza swag, including shirts to wear on the competition floor and business cards for all those doting over me after i take first place ;) I'm trying to do everything locally, and have found I can meet both of those needs without leaving clintonville! HURRAY FOR LOCAL!

Traxler Tees, just a few doors south of Studio 35 on Indianola, got me a great deal on a dozen shirts, and a printer a few blocks from my house got me a less than great deal on 1,000 business cards. Zach, owner/operator of Traxler Tees was a truly stand-up dude! If you need any screen printing, this is your guy, hands down. He had a plethora of information and was more than willing to share it with me. Indeed, we will do business together again some day! 

So it appears that I now have all my ducks in a row, and will try and make the competition pizza a few times between now and the 29th to get it polished. If you're at pizza sunday this weekend, you'll be able to try this lovely pizza for yourself (except for brian who can't eat seafood... sorry brian). 

I'll post about the experience once it's all said and done, so be looking for that! Wish me luck! 

(sorry no pictures this time!)

Thursday, October 13th, GoreMade Pizza made their first mobile wood fired public appearance. It was a complete success! 

The company I work for does a catered event for our department twice a year or so, with random pizza orderings in between. There's some partnership they have with Donato's Pizza and that's usually what's on the menu. The discussions were coming up for what to serve this time around instead of the same old pizza. This was about the time I found my love for wood fired pizza, and buying a wood fired oven was on my short list of things to do. After the purchase of the oven and going through the chain of approval, which is a dizzying process for anything in a corporate environment, I finally got the go-ahead. 

Since I have not yet been inspected by the health department, It is illegal for me to charge money for food. So my department paid for the ingredients and I put it all together free of charge (although I was on the clock for 5 hours on pizza day!)

Thursday mornings here at work are usually pretty slow. There's stuff to work on for the next day, but nothing really coming in for that day until 2:00. So after clocking in to work at 8:45, I proceeded to go out to the front parking lot and start setting up.

It was a little weird setting up in the front parking lot, taking up the only two handicap parking spots by the front entrance (where I was told to set up). After I got the tent up with the help of a few passing by co-workers, it was time to start the fire and get the ball rolling. It took me a while to get the fire going, but it was an eventual success. I got a lot of visitors from my department, curious as to how the whole process worked, so it was a little less lonely than the pictures suggest. 

I've been experimenting with freezing dough and have found it to be quite an efficient way of dealing with the concept of mobile pizza. The one thing I hadn't really figured out was how long it took to defrost and come to temperature. Luckily, everything defrosted just fine

Jessica showed up just as I was getting ready to make my first pizza. I've always worked solo, but with this kind of production, she was thrown right into the mix. We planned on practicing working together the previous pizza sunday, but schedules didn't allow such a rehearsal. So she was learning as we went, which made it kind of difficult at first. But she soon got the hang of it.

After the constant burning of my hand, it's decided that I'll be getting a new longer pizza peel very soon!

Pretty soon, we were knee deep in production. People were coming out to get the finished pizzas and take them into the conference room where food and a movie (Hocus Pocus) were taking place. We were spitting out pizzas every three or four minutes! So hot!

We had a few mishaps. Steve, a co-worker and friend, slipped on the steps carrying pizzas to the masses. He ended up going to the hospital and was on crutches the next day! Good thing Kroger has worker's comp or he might have sued me! We spilled a huge container of pizza sauce on the black top. There was just enough to finish the day! (I always bring too much!). I cut my finger on the broken sauce container and had to halt production until I could get cleaned up and find a band-aid. 

All in all the pizza was very well received. I had at least 5 people tell me it was the best pizza they ever had! I got 12 pizzas out of 20 done and got reports that the 40 or so people in our department were stuffed and didn't need any more pizzas, so we started sending them out to different parts of the building. Everyone was super excited to be able to try it, curious as to what I was doing out front.

This was the fourth time i fired up and cooked pizzas in the oven, so there's still some getting used to. But i must say that it all came out very well for me being in my infancy of wood fired pizza.

This was the first time I made this much pizza. We used 11 lbs of flour to make around 18 or so lbs of dough by hand! I cooked 4 different meats (forgetting about the bacon until the last pizza had cooked), prepared 3 different sauces and probably cut up 15 or 20 different toppings! So much work! But it was great to understand the larger production side of things and see how it all came together. 

In the end, we cooked all 20 pizzas, and I kept the last one for dinner that night, as I was not at all in the mood to cook anything else! We got done at 1:30, and after cleaning up, I made it back into work just in time for the 2:00 rush of work. From one set of crazy right into another! I was ready for a nap, but working out the rest of the day was what had to happen.

This was also my first time towing the oven besides the day I got it home (I never went over 30 miles/hr). I was a little nervous taking it on the highway, but after I got on the road, it got a little less scary. Homeward bound, I noticed the umbrella that came with the oven blowing around a bit too much. I thought I could make it home alright, but just as I got on the entrance ramp of 71 south, it blew off the trailer and landed in the middle of the off-ramp. I felt bad, but kept on moving. I never planned on using it anyway.

I stopped to pick it up the next day. The picture above was taken after some metal scrappers claimed the umbrella metal. 

All in all, it was a lot of work, and the logistics are gonna take some figuring out. We'll have to narrow down our topping selection and get a better understanding of how to manage the frozen dough. And we'll need another table for comfortable production. All things i didn't know before this event. Live and learn! But it was a complete success! People were asking me if i would do their department parties and what-not. Probably 60-70 people who never had GoreMade Pizza were blown away by the deliciousness. That, indeed is priceless! 

Thanks to my wife and all my coworkers who helped out! It was an awesome experience! The first of many!

My first pizza was a new experiment. I made my own sausage, seasoning and cooking it in a large patty to keep it chunky. It came out deliciously, even if it was a bit charred on one side. Improperly firing the oven left the internal air temperature and the floor of the oven at different temperatures, making the outside cook more rapidly than the bottom of the pizza. So there were some more-than-a-little dark edges. I'm sure this is something that I'll understand better with time.

One thing I realized in all this is how much wood I'm going to need each time I fire up the oven. It's a lot! Not worth it for only cooking a couple pizzas, so I'm gonna have to step my game up a bit. Also, there's all this heat once the pizzas are done cooking. I'm going to have to use it to roast stuff in the future. Slow cook a couple racks of ribs. Maybe a brisket. We'll see. I attempted to roast an apple that night, as it was all I had that made sense to roast on short notice. 

I think it was too close to the door of the oven. It barely cooked at all when I checked it out the next evening. Still crunchy for the most part.


I made a total of 8 pizzas, two of them coming out perfectly and the rest holding various bits of char around the edges (mostly when I ended up talking when I should have been rotating pizzas). All in all, they were delicious. Everyone was pleased. And while I feel several things went wrong, I'm learning (albeit very slowly) to celebrate my mistakes and use them to take me where I one day hope to be. Where would we be without a few mistakes along the way?

I knew it was coming, but we had a scheduled C-section for over a year from now. As we've recently learned with the birth of our first son, Orion, the baby comes when the baby's ready! I've been talking about the pizza business for so long, and it has always been so far in the distance that I never felt any real pressure from the idea. Buying this oven has set a whole new path into motion. 

As mentioned before, our entire savings has been sunk into this oven. My wife being off work and me making enough to barely scrape by is forcing my hobby into a money making venture more rapidly than initially planned. Surely, I'll have stretch marks after this little growth spirt. But what doesn't grow dies, so I'll take growth!

Now I have this little beast of an oven. It's not perfect, but it's mine. I don't know how to use it, but I love it like my very own. It's gonna cost me bunches of money to keep warm and fed, but I love it anyway. It will help me grow. We will grow together. We will learn how it all works, because we must!

The control of the heat, the art of the cook... it was all so amazing. Tending the fire in and of itself was such a thrill. The way the pizza cooks is so vastly different from a conventional oven! There's definitely a learning curve, and I'm sure every oven takes some getting used to, but the fact is that I need one! ASAP!!!

As you can tell by the above "maybe I shouldn't put this on the internet" excited photo, I really enjoyed myself. I may have crapped my pants a little... I don't really remember. This event single handedly convinced me that I need a wood fired oven as soon as possible. It was the biggest game changer in my journey thus far and I would stop at nothing to get one as soon as possible. The following week was a frenzy!

In january of 2007, when my pizza dreams were still just that, I met a guy named Bill Yerke (of Bono Pizza) who was operating a mobile wood fired oven at an art event at junctionview studios. I asked him where one gets an oven such as his and he told me that he was the creator of said oven, and I could purchase it for a mere $3,000! This was of course completely out of the question at the time, but he gave me his business card and told me to get in touch with him if I changed my mind. Nearly 4 1/2 years later, after this newly discovered love for the trade, I finally used that business card. For those of you who know me, you will know how ridiculous it is for me to keep a business card for 4 1/2 years. I'm lucky to keep track of a business card for 4 1/2 minutes! But when I checked my wallet for his business card, it was there, screaming to finally be used!

Bill has agreed to sell me his oven (though the price has considerably gone up in the last 4 1/2 years), and I couldn't be more excited about the venture. There is so much other than pizza that can be done with it, and I can't wait to explore every avenue of the oven's cooking capabilities! And you can be damn sure I'll be documenting the journey, both failures and successes, in this blog.

With the purchase of a wood fired oven, I have a whole new beast to tackle. There's the tool set, including brushes, peels, pokers and whatever else I don't know I need yet. I've got to get the proper tow hitch for the Subaru. Also, I've got to start adding wood to the equation. I've talked with my father-in-law who owns a wood burning furnace and he's agreed to help me harvest fallen trees for the cause. We're gonna start my own (not so) little wood pile!  

Another thing is that my entire savings (his asking price was exactly the amount I had in savings... literally to the penny!) is being invested in this, so I'm going to have to start using the oven to make some money (PIZZA CART!), which is a whole nother can of worms! There's just so much to learn and understand that it seems impossible! Thankfully, I'm passionate and determined, and I've got a plethora of help coming from all over. Bill has promised to help me understand the pizza cart game, so that's awesome! I've got an appointment with the Small Business Development Center next week to begin dealing with the dizzying task of making the whole thing legal, and they're FREE! It's going to be an interesting ride! I can't wait to see the light on the other side of the tunnel! Here's to diving in!

PIZZA!

I made a total of 8 pizzas over the two hour happy hour. We were trying to figure out how to handle the monetary situation so that brian and I weren't footing the bill for 60 or so people to eat pizza. Brian suggested having a tip jar out for everyone to pay what they want. I was interested in how it would turn out, so we tried it.

It turns out that I got almost exactly what the ingredients cost me, which was awesome. I got to spread the GoreMade name around, got some really positive feedback from practically everyone who tried it out, and I got to step up my production, making more dough at one time that had ever previously been attempted. All of which encourage growth and a better understanding of the goals I am striving for!

Being the "opening act" of Hockenfest, there were some concerns that people wouldn't show up until much later (the scheduled performances went from 9:00pm-1:30am!) and that there would be a ton of pizza lying around. Turns out it was hard to keep up!

I always have a menu made up of all the pizzas that I plan on making. It's rarely followed 100%, but it helps me keep track of all the ingredients I was planning on preparing. The above pizza was made because people scarfed the first one up so quickly.

The above pizza was made using asparagus I picked earlier this summer. I ended up picking several pounds of asparagus and freezing most of it for a special day. Enter Hockenfest! The Asparagus and Kalamata Olive pizza was among the most talked about pizzas of the evening. 

I cooked my final pizza just around the 9 o'clock hour, in time for a little clean-up then headed out to watch the fire spinners in the fire camp amaze us with their undulating flames. The rest of the evening was one awesome thing after another! I was proud to be a part of the festivities!


There's talk of a Hocktoberfest this October. If it happens, you can guarantee that GoreMade Pizza'll be slingin some pies to kick it off again! 


(Thanks to Craig for the awesome photo documentation!)