Why Pizza Was Exactly What My New Marriage Needed

I tell my husband, “Every success and every failure brought me to you.” This story starts with a failure that brought us closer together.

A few months after my husband Tyson and I said our ‘I dos,’ I barely missed out on winning a job creating content for the high-end pizza oven brand Ooni. I was excited about the prospect of getting paid to write about oven-baked delicacies all day. As a southern Connecticut native, I grew up steeped in the pizza cultures of both New York and New Haven. Eating and evaluating pizza has been one of my favorite hobbies since I've had teeth. In the end, the company hired someone who lived closer to its Austin-based headquarters.

Sensing my disappointment, Tyson went to Walmart and bought a charcoal-fired pizza oven for $99, a small fraction of what the average Ooni oven costs. We immediately mixed our first batch of dough. Thanks to a couple of jobs at pizzerias after high school, Tyson rolled the dough into balls so round that they looked like they could bounce and expertly tossed them into 16-inch pizzas as if he’d never left the restaurant industry.

Tyson often gets a bug for kitchen projects. During one phase, he baked layer cakes in delicate flavors like pistachio, rose, and saffron. He then purchased a triangular bamboo steamer and metal pot to make Thai mango sticky rice the traditional way. Usually, I just help with ideas (and eating), but making pizza would prove to be a project for two.

Crafting pizza wasn’t easy. The comparatively cheap oven was difficult to use. Our first pizzas were blonde on the bottom and burnt on top no matter how long we heated the oven before baking. We eventually learned to take the burning charcoal out of the oven while each pizza cooked, but our bakes were still high-maintenance and disappointing.

So, I emailed Andy Brown of the Washington, DC-area chain Andy’s Pizza. Brown had gone from a home pizza maker to winning the World Pizza Championships in 2021 for his New York-style pies. He shared his recipe with me, which revealed that the dough I’d been using was too wet, but his most important advice was that “there are absolutely no shortcuts to great pizza.”

Thanks to his help, we stopped putting too many toppings on our pies. A ladleful of Cento tomato purée with a few pinches of salt became our sauce. We grated blocks of mozzarella because the potato starch on pre-grated cheese prevents an even brown.

Meanwhile, our new marriage grew like our proofing pizza dough. Everything about the process is a model for what it takes to succeed in our life together. The dough, like any thriving relationship, requires patience, and the process requires careful planning and communication from start to finish. We’ve learned to delegate based on our complementary strengths: I mix the dough because the precision of it stressed him out; he forms the dough balls and tosses the crusts (I’m a klutz); I top the pizzas because I have an eye for creating the perfect bite with just the right amount of toppings; and we bake and eat them together.

Just before our belated honeymoon, Tyson gave me the Ooni oven we’d been dreaming of. Having excellent equipment sent our pizza-making into hyperdrive. Our pizzas went from pitiful to pizzeria-quality. The bottoms of the pies were leopard-spotted, and the edges bubbled up with élan.

We are more in love than ever with each other and with the pizza we make together. We’re constantly innovating with new-to-us methods, like brushing ghee on our crusts to achieve those coveted tiny bubbles. Leftovers often find their way into our toppings, with Tyson’s favorite pepperoni replaced by Indo-Chinese chicken 65, which was one of our favorite pizzas ever.

With pizza and our marriage, we’re in it for the long haul, which means having traditions in place but also making room for a little bit of novelty. Through every success and every failure, we’ll always have pizza—and each other.

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