How did you start making pizza?
I've been obsessed with pizza since I was a kid. I ate it for breakfast and lunch every day. As an adult the obsession expanded beyond eating into making, and I cringe to think about the pizzas I used to make with Trader Joe's dough on tinfoil. I started making dough from scratch, and eventually worked on developing my own recipe that I am still refining to this day. I graduated from a stone, to a steel, to a proper 900 degree pizza oven. Now I do everything from scratch, including hand milling the tomatoes and hand grating the cheese. Pizza became not just an obsession and a passion but my craft.
How/why did you start Mo's Dough?
I was a software engineer at Amazon for 4 years. I was very unhappy in the job, but my wife was in school, so I had to hold down the fort financially. Once she graduated she found an incredible job, and that gave me the chance to quit and pursue my dream of making pizza for a living. It was one of those things that you say is the dream but then also tell yourself "oh but I could never actually do that." One day I thought, "but what if I did"? And the rest is history. It's been a true dream come true!
What is Neapolitan pizza?
Pizza the way Naples makes it: a thin middle, a puffy rim, San Marzano tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and an oven so hot the pie is done in about 90 seconds. Ours bakes at 900°.
What's the difference between Neapolitan and contemporary Neapolitan?
Neapolitan pizza is a protected name. An association in Naples, the AVPN, has strict rules about the techniques and ingredients you have to use for a pizza to be considered Neapolitan. Unless every ingredient and the oven itself are AVPN approved, your pizza can't technically be called Neapolitan.
Contemporary Neapolitan is what pizzaioli in and around Naples started doing in the 2010s when they stopped following the rigid rulebook and chased a better pizza. The end result has the same soul, a thin center and a blistered rim, but the process changes wherever the pizzaiolo believes the change makes a better pizza: a longer, colder ferment for more flavor, a wetter dough for a lighter, airier rim, a slightly longer bake so the crust is soft and crunchy instead of fully soft and floppy the way traditional Neapolitan is.
Ours is not AVPN Neapolitan because I like the taste a cold 48 hour ferment gives the dough.
Why is my crust burnt?
One man's burnt cornicione is another man's treasure. (The cornicione is the puffy rim. Most people call it the crust, but the crust is the whole thing.) That leopard char is exactly what we're going for. Here's what's happening: 48 hours of fermentation fill the rim with tiny gas bubbles and leave behind natural sugars. In a 900° oven the thin skin over each bubble hits full heat first and goes dark in seconds, while the dough around it browns slowly. That's spots, not scorch. A dough that hasn't fermented enough doesn't spot at all; it bakes pale or browns evenly. If the whole rim were black and bitter, that would be burnt. Ours is spotted, and the spots are the best part. Eat the crust.
Why does your logo say Est. 2023 when you obviously didn't open until 2026?
Becca, my wife, made the logo and an apron as a birthday gift in 2023. To this day it's one of my favorite gifts I've ever received. 2023 is when I got very serious about pizza, and it was fun to wear the apron whenever we had friends over for pizza. Once we decided I was going to try to do this for a living, I figured, why not keep the name and the logo?