Italian-Style Pizzas -- Terry's Table and the Sauce That Carries the Season

August's first days. The cicadas are constant now, the whir from sunrise to sundown, the kind of insect noise that becomes part of the air itself, not heard so much as inhabited. The garden is in mid-August: tomatoes at peak, peppers at peak, cucumbers slowing, beans slowing, squash still going.

Tuesday I canned twelve quarts of tomato sauce. The big slow-cook in the kitchen — onions and garlic and the rough-chopped tomatoes simmered down for three hours, run through the food mill, jarred, water-bath canned. The sauce will be the foundation of winter cooking. Soups, stews, pasta, the occasional pizza we make on the porch in the wood-fired oven I built two years ago and which is one of my favorite projects.

The pizza oven, by the way, gets less use than I had expected. We've made maybe twelve pizzas in two years. The bigger thing the oven does is bread — sourdough loaves at a high heat, roasted vegetables in the residual heat after the bread comes out, slow-cooked beans in the cooling oven the next morning. I built the oven for pizza and it's become a bread-and-bean oven. The thing you build is not always the thing you use.

Wednesday I drove to Turley to spend the day with Terry. Three days in a row of doctor visits and pre-op stuff and I needed to sit at her kitchen table for a while. She's seventy-eight. She made me a sandwich. Bologna and cheese on white bread, the way she's made it for fifty years. She said: you're thin. I said: I'm not. She said: you are. Eat. I ate. She told me three stories I hadn't heard before — about Danny's mother, who died before I was born; about a fight she'd had with Danny in 1980 about which kind of beans to plant; about a recipe Rosa had refused to share with anyone but Terry. Terry's memory is sharp and the stories are coming faster these days, the way old people give the stories before the body finishes giving up. I sat. I ate the sandwich. I asked questions. I drove home with a feeling I couldn't name except that it was old and thick and like grief but not grief.

Caleb Saturday. Last Saturday before the surgery. We didn't do much heavy work — I wasn't supposed to be doing heavy work. We sat on the porch. He said: I'll come every day if you need it. I said: I won't need it every day. He said: I'll come anyway some days. I said: come anyway. Hannah was gone for the afternoon. He stayed until five. We talked, mostly. He talked about Miriam. I talked about the surgery. We didn't talk about Danny but Danny was in the room. Danny is always in the room when Caleb and I sit on a porch. He always will be.

I canned twelve quarts of sauce this week, and it struck me after I drove home from Terry’s that the oven I built for pizza has mostly made bread — but the sauce I made on Tuesday was always meant for something like this. The wood-fired oven is there. The sauce is there. Caleb sat on the porch with me last Saturday and didn’t ask for much, and I think what I want to do with that afternoon, in some small way, is carry it forward into a meal worth making. Italian-style pizza, built on the tomatoes I grew and slow-cooked myself, felt like the right way to close out August.

Italian-Style Pizzas

Prep Time: 25 min | Cook Time: 15 min | Total Time: 40 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

• 1 lb pizza dough (homemade or store-bought), divided into 2 balls
• 1 cup tomato sauce (slow-cooked, strained)
• 1 1/2 cups shredded low-moisture mozzarella
• 1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan
• 2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for drizzling
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• Fresh basil leaves, for finishing
• Kosher salt and black pepper to taste
• Cornmeal or flour for dusting

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven. Set oven (or wood-fired oven) to 500°F (or as hot as it will go). If using a conventional oven, place a baking stone or inverted sheet pan on the top rack and let it heat for at least 30 minutes.
2. Prepare the sauce. Stir minced garlic into the tomato sauce along with oregano, red pepper flakes, and a pinch of salt. Taste and adjust seasoning. The sauce should be thick enough to spread without running.
3. Shape the dough. On a lightly floured surface, press and stretch each dough ball by hand into a roughly 10–12 inch round. Don’t use a rolling pin — let the dough relax between stretches if it springs back. Transfer to a sheet of parchment dusted with cornmeal.
4. Build the pizzas. Drizzle each round lightly with olive oil. Spread 1/2 cup of sauce over each, leaving a 1-inch border. Distribute mozzarella evenly, then finish with Parmesan. Season with black pepper.
5. Bake. Slide the pizzas (on parchment) onto the hot stone or pan. Bake 10–15 minutes, until the crust is charred at the edges and the cheese is bubbling and lightly browned in spots.
6. Finish and serve. Remove from oven and immediately drizzle with a little olive oil. Scatter fresh basil over the top. Let rest 2 minutes before slicing.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 420 | Protein: 18g | Fat: 16g | Carbs: 52g | Fiber: 3g | Sodium: 680mg