About pizza.guide
pizza.guide is an independent, practical reference for anyone who wants to make, order, understand, or simply enjoy better pizza. It is built for curious beginners learning what hydration means, busy home cooks choosing an oven, experienced bakers tuning fermentation, and pizza lovers comparing regional styles. We bring recipes, equipment guidance, food-safety basics, and clear explainers together without assuming that every reader owns a restaurant oven or a lifetime of dough experience. The goal is useful confidence: enough context to make a good decision, enough detail to repeat a good result, and enough honesty to explain where the variables still matter most.
Rick Kennerknecht, Founder & Editor
Rick Kennerknecht is a lifelong pizza enthusiast who is happiest around a hot oven, a properly fermented dough ball, or a table full of regional slices. He built pizza.guide after finding that pizza advice was often either too vague to use or too technical for a home kitchen. Rick wanted one welcoming place where readers could learn the fundamentals, compare styles on their own terms, and get practical answers that hold up beyond a single recipe. As founder and editor, he sets the site's testing standards, reviews new guides, and keeps the writing focused on what cooks and pizza lovers can actually do next.
How we test
Our recipes begin with dough by gram weights, not loosely packed cups or guesswork. We weigh flour, water, salt, yeast, and preferments, then record hydration, dough temperature, fermentation time, ball weight, and bake conditions. That makes a recipe easier to scale and gives readers a useful baseline when their flour, room temperature, or oven behaves differently.
When we evaluate ovens, steels, stones, or other equipment, we bake side by side whenever the setup allows it. We use the same dough, comparable toppings, and repeatable temperatures so the differences we report are about the equipment rather than a lucky batch. We pay attention to preheating, recovery, edge-to-center consistency, handling, cleanup, and the results a normal home cook can reasonably expect.
Food-safety guidance is checked against USDA sources, especially for storage, leftovers, cooking temperatures, and handling advice. Every guide carries a last verified date so readers can see when its recommendations and product details were most recently reviewed. If a detail changes, we would rather update it plainly than let an old instruction quietly linger.
Editorial independence
Some pages may contain affiliate links that help support the work, but affiliate relationships never determine rankings, test results, or recommendations. We choose what to examine based on reader usefulness, not on which brands offer a commission. Brands cannot pay for coverage, a favorable conclusion, a higher ranking, or a place in a guide.
Our editorial promise is simple: explain what we tested, distinguish firsthand observations from general guidance, disclose relationships, and keep the final judgment ours. A product can be popular and still not suit every kitchen, and an inexpensive tool can sometimes outperform a premium one. We aim to give you enough evidence to make the choice that fits your space, budget, and style of cooking.
What you'll find here
The site covers regional pizza styles, dough recipes, topping and sauce choices, oven comparisons, reheating methods, storage rules, and a dough calculator for home cooks and parties. Some readers arrive looking for a quick answer, while others want to understand why a thin tavern crust behaves differently from a puffy Neapolitan rim. Both are welcome. We write guides to be useful at the counter, beside the mixer, and while dinner is already in the oven.
Contact
Have a correction, testing question, or pizza tip to share? Contact us at hello@pizza.guide. We read every thoughtful note and use reader feedback to improve the guides.