What Makes a Perfect Pizza?
By Hayden Flour Mills · October 6, 2026 · 5 min read
You have probably spent more time thinking about what goes on top of a pizza than what goes underneath it. Most of us have. Tomatoes, cheese, herbs, whether the pepperoni curls at the edges.
Maurizio Leo would like a word about the crust.
The baker and author behind The Perfect Loaf sat down with us to talk about his new book, The Perfect Pizza, the grains he keeps coming back to, how he gets to know a flour he has never baked with, and the afternoon he spent baking bread in the middle of a wheat field.
Flour, Before It Was Flour
Maurizio had just come back from the Grain Gathering at Washington State University's Breadlab, where bakers, farmers, breeders, millers, and researchers all turn up in one place because they are fascinated by the same thing.
He spent part of it baking in a mobile bakery parked in a wheat field, then walked the research plots with the farmers and breeders growing them, variety by variety.
Seeing the plants standing in the soil made something click. For Maurizio, it was a reminder that the flour he works with every day begins somewhere much more tangible: “I had this really weird connection… as I was walking through, I was like, you know, this is actually where the grain comes from. It’s not some magical pipe in the sky, right? It’s like, you have to take care of all this stuff." For a baker who spends so much time thinking about flour, seeing that beginning firsthand connected the field, the grain, and the final bake in a new way.
We think about that a lot at Hayden Flour Mills, because it is the whole reason two bags labeled "wheat flour" can taste nothing alike. Different varieties, different ground, different qualities chosen on purpose. Long before hydration and fermentation schedules enter the picture, the flavor is already being decided in the field.
How Maurizio Meets a New Flour
As a home baker and writer who has spent years experimenting with flour, Maurizio has worked with plenty of grains. But we were curious: what does he do when he encounters one he has never baked with before?
Hand him a flour he has never used and he does not build a showpiece loaf around it right away. Instead, he starts small.
What intrigued us most was where he starts: not with a loaf, but with his starter. “Usually, just doing that alone and letting it ferment for some time, I can kind of see some characteristics about it, like how much water, you know, what’s the absorption that it’s gonna have? You know, how tall is it rising in the jar?” Because he knows the rhythm of his own starter so well, those small shifts tell him a lot. He can begin to gauge how thirsty the flour is, how actively it ferments, and how it may behave once it becomes part of a full dough.
Then he smells it. Plenty of bakers taste their starter to judge fermentation. Maurizio goes by aroma, which tips him off to how quickly a flour is moving and what flavors might turn up later in the loaf.
From there, something simple: a small country-style bake, roughly half new flour and half a flour he trusts. He keeps hydration conservative at first, because not every flour wants the same amount of water. Rather than force a new grain into a familiar formula, he lets it show him what it can do.
Less about making the grain behave, more about listening to what it is telling you.
Try it yourself the next time you open a bag you have not baked with:
- Feed a little to your starter.
- Notice the aroma and how fast it moves.
- Blend it with a flour you already know.
- Keep the first dough simple.
- Add water gradually.
- Pay attention to the flavor, above everything else.
Then adjust the next bake from there. That is Maurizio's whole method.
The More He Bakes, the More Whole Grain He Wants
After more than a decade of baking and writing about bread, Maurizio has noticed his own palate shifting. “As I’ve baked more... I find myself wanting more whole grain flour, you know, more fresh flour… You want to make the most flavorful bread that you can make.”
Not every loaf needs to be one hundred percent whole grain, and he is quick to say so. Lighter flours and enriched doughs have their place. But for everyday country bread, he keeps reaching for more of the whole grain flours.
It is a progression we recognize in a lot of bakers, and maybe in you. Early on, the questions are all about process. Did it rise? Did I shape it right? Did I get an open crumb? Then one day a different question moves to the front.
What does this actually taste like?
That is the moment flour stops being structure and becomes personality. Sweetness, nuttiness, earthiness, aroma, color, tenderness, chew.
A Bread Baker Writes a Pizza Book
That curiosity runs straight through The Perfect Pizza. The book covers more than forty styles, but Maurizio wanted the pizza dough at the center of it.
The familiar regional pies are there, New York, tavern, Sicilian, Roman. But he also came at pizza the way a bread baker would, by asking what happens when you change the grain. There are doughs built with rye, whole wheat, spelt, and freshly milled flour, drawn from years of working those grains into bread.
Toppings, in other words, are only part of the story. There is a lot of room for flavor underneath them.
Put the Flavor in the Crust
Of every grain he tested in pizza, two stood out.
Spelt has been a favorite of his for years, and he thinks it is perfect for pizza. It stretches beautifully, which makes the dough easier to handle, and it brings its own flavor to the crust.
Rye caught him off guard. Instead of loading the dough up, he uses just enough whole grain rye to add earthiness and a deeper color without weighing the pizza down. Subtle enough that nobody names it. Distinctive enough that they stop chewing and wonder.
The kind of crust, as he put it, that makes someone say: "Whoa, what's in the crust?"
That might be the best argument we have heard for putting a heritage grain in your pizza dough. Add a portion of whole grain to your usual recipe and see what happens. Spelt for flavor and stretch. Whole wheat for deeper wheat flavor. Rye for earthiness, aroma, and color.
Pizza Flour Has Come a Long Way
Maurizio's history with pizza started long before this book. He spent childhood summers in his father's Albuquerque restaurant, watching his dad make pizza day after day.
His father trained as a chef in Italy, but the pizza he made in Albuquerque was shaped by the equipment and flour he could source at the time. He worked with a commercial deck oven rather than a wood-fired one, and the flour available to him was essentially commodity, high-protein “pizza flour.”
Bakers today have a very different pantry. “We’re spoiled now that we can get all these amazing grains,” Maurizio says. “Like, the flours you guys grow and mill, like, if we had that back then, I’m sure my dad would have been experimenting more.” That access changes the question a home baker gets to ask. Not just, What pizza should I make? but, What do I want the crust itself to taste like?
The Pizza That Takes Him Back
For all the experimenting in The Perfect Pizza, Maurizio’s relationship with pizza still runs straight back to childhood. And one of his clearest memories is not a particular slice or topping. It is the smell. “I just always remember going into the restaurant, and it had the same kind of smell to it. It was like… the smell of, like, flour and… when you make a bunch of pizzas over and over, you get this, like, charred, toasted flour aroma.”
That smell still takes him there. “Whenever I bake a pizza here, that’s the first thing that I get hit with. It’s, like, that aroma of the flour and the dough and everything kind of just baking in the oven. So that… that activates that flashback for me.”
The flashback is vivid: his dad at the pizza station, flour everywhere, moving between the shaping table and the oven, turning out pies during the rush.
That memory also found its way into the recipe development for the new book. Maurizio set out to recreate some of the pizzas he grew up eating and brought his dad in as a very particular kind of test baker. “I’d have him over, I’d make him, and he would give me feedback, like, ‘oh, this isn’t… it’s not chewy enough, or this isn’t right.’”
For one dough, Maurizio used durum to chase the crispness he remembered.
About The Perfect Pizza
The book walks through regional pizza traditions alongside the fermentation, dough styles, grains, and techniques behind them. It grew out of his own pizza history, from his father's pies in Albuquerque to pizzas he ate traveling the United States and Italy, plus years of experimenting as a bread baker.
One of Maurizio’s personal favorites is pizza tonda, a Roman style that is very thin, somewhere between tender and crisp, and sturdy enough to carry all kinds of toppings without feeling heavy. “It’s so hard to pinpoint it,” he says. “It’s between cracker style and a little bit softer. It’s just flaky and crackery enough to where you can hold a piece of it and it not flop all over the place.” At home, though, he returns again and again to what he calls his “go-to pizza,” an easy home-oven dough that is a little chewy, a little crisp, and flexible enough for whatever toppings are in the refrigerator.
Bake Pizza With Maurizio
Maurizio was so generous to share a recipe from the book with us.
A Touch of Rye Pizza →
Rustic with complex grain
character and added
caramelization.
So the next time you bake your Friday night pizza, pay a little more attention to what is underneath everything else. Smell the flour. Taste the grain. Notice what changes when you swap even part of your usual flour for something new.
Get Maurizio's book, The Perfect Pizza →
More to explore: Feed Your Starter Right · Flour Has Flavor
