Sho Spaeth is the lead writer and editor at ChefSteps.com. He is also the author of Homemade Ramen, a James Beard Award–nominated cookbook.

Sho Spaeth

Pizza is large, it contains multitudes.Whether you’re mangia-ing a puffy Neapolitan cornicione, hoovering up a crispy tavern pie between rounds of brews and Malört (Go Bears!), or scarfing down a fresh-from-the-deck rewarmed slice of pepperoni before schlepping into Brooklyn, you’re eating pizza. You call it pizza, you think of it as pizza, and you love it as pizza, even if a slice of Sicilian is obviously distinct from a Greek pie in New England or a thick, frico-crusted square in Detroit.At its most basic, pizza is a combination of dough, cheese, sauce, and toppings. However, the many different varieties of pizzas out there, the manifold pizza styles, are far from being merely basic; they’re master classes in specificity. Certain cheeses are picked for their flavor profiles and melting capabilities; codified methods for turning tomatoes into a sauce-like form are called for; and, above all, dough processes with painstaking attention paid to the details of mixing, proofing, shaping, and cooking are required. Which makes pizza a prime candidate for our signature parametric analysis!As with our previous parametric analyses, we developed a bunch of our own recipes, carefully selected others from reputable sources, and prepared them side-by-side to fully understand the differences between some of our favorite styles. We then converted the ingredients to baker’s percentages, noting any discrepancies in methods and any outlier ingredients, like milk and diastatic malt powder. We plugged all those values into a chart, organizing the pies by the style of baking (direct deck-baked pies or pan pizzas) and hydration levels.To make the pizzas, we enlisted our team of chefs to make each recipe exactly as written*, and we ate great pizza for weeks. (It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it!) *Most of the recipes are calibrated for home ovens, which are smaller and can’t reach the high temperatures of professional ovens. This is why some of the pizzas, like the New York, are smaller than what you would typically find in a shop.