DIY Pizza Pie is the greatest home pizza making tool since the advent of the pizza stone. No less should be expected of Mark Bello, the big cheese at Pizza A Casa in NYC’s Lower East Side. PAC’s pizza making workshops have become legendary for their ability to transform the dough-phobic into master pizzaioli in a matter of hours using a treasure trove of tricks and hacks developed over Bello’s years of tortured existence in the land of the deep dish. His methods are extremely simple and yield incredible results. The DIY Pizza Pie app distills the juiciest moments of a Pizza A Casa pizza making workshop into an easy-to-use app that’s perfect for beginners or pizza pros.
The app opens with a menu of selections ranging from necessary pizza gear (Tools of the Trade) to common mistakes (7 Deadly Pizza Pitfalls) to necessary dissertations on sauce, cheese and dough. Each of these categories gets you to a far more detailed list of options, such as this step-by-step process for making a Pizza Margherita.
Bello keeps it simple, but there are special features on nearly every page that will take you even deeper into pizza madness with incredibly detailed videos. These aren’t your ordinary cooking show variety where you see five seconds of work and the thing is magically done. One video demonstrates how to repair a punctured dough skin by using a light box to illustrate thin sections. Another shows two simultaneous angles of a dough stretching technique that would be difficult to describe in text alone or with a single video shot. It’s brilliant in its deep understanding of what processes concern most home pizza chefs, a skill the crew at Pizza A Casa developed by instructing thousands of people in the ways of the DIY pie.
For those who have taken the class, DIY Pizza Pie is a perfect way to take Bello and his bag of tricks with you. For those who aren’t planning a trip to New York anytime soon, it’s a valuable tool for attaining independence from low-quality take-out pizza wherever you live.
DIY Pizza Pie is currently available for iPad at the App Store. Live-action public workshops run weekends from noon to 4PM at Pizza A Casa in NYC’s Lower East Side.
