Another good tip, ask your local pizzaria if they'll sell you a dough blank - usually they'll do this for $2-3 and then you can dress it the way you want, bake it and have great quality pizza with top choice ingredients with a 25 minute wait, which is roughly as long as it takes for delivery. Most good pizzeria's will have already let the dough sit for a day or so.
I have a dumb question: what part of the rest of the pizza-making process can you do better than the restaurant? I ask because the big issue in home pizza production is that your oven is unlikely to reach the temps commercial pizza ovens hit, and people go to all sorts of weird lengths to rectify this.
At the point where you're getting the dough from the restaurant, why not just get the pizza from the restaurant?
1) the kids love putting "their" toppings on "their" quadrant of the pizza, and wow, like a lot of things in life, when you make your own there are 0 complaints.
2) You can really put premium toppings that no pizzeria would spend on our even stock.
3) You can get it fresh out of the oven, like "burn the top of your mouth (again, you dummy) cheese napalm" fresh.
4) You can put as much or as little of any combination of cheese as you like, and it doesn't have to be the powdery pre shredded dry-frozen stuff that a lot of pizza places use.
5) Really it takes like 5 minutes to dress a pizza, heating your oven up to whatever it's highest settings is takes longer.
6) You can barbeque your pizza.
7) It's usually pretty cost effective when you consider most delivery places are charging $15+ for a large (14") pizza with a few toppings. Plus you save the tip and the emissions from a delivery driver (provided you buy a few and pick them up on the way home!
> what part of the rest of the pizza-making process can you do better than the restaurant?
A determined home pizzaiolo can make a perfectly decent pizza. But you are right about the temperature. Household ovens simply can't reach the temperatures used in a proper pizza oven, about 700F.
I have had success with heating a large cast iron pan on the stove top to ~700F, dropping the dough in that, adding toppings when it's ready and then finishing it in a broiler or well preheated oven. These guys show how it's done, without words, better than I can describe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXAW2GseICs It is pretty damn good technique. They're using 00 flour, high protein (available at Italian markets in any big city).
One thing you can do at home better than the pizza shop, however, is to use crazy good artisinal toppings, dialed in exactly how you like it.
I’ve also had good luck in the oven. Line the rack with proper fire bricks and set the oven to 500 F - and convection if you have it. Place the pizza directly on the brick using a pizza paddle.
I’d say it’s as good as the 1000 degree pizza places,
> what part of the rest of the pizza-making process can you do better than the restaurant?
Customize it to your personal liking. Tastes differ greatly re: salt, tomato variety, amount and kind of cheese, presence or absence of olive oil or basil...
Beat me to it. After many years of pizza dough failure a quick stop at my favorite pizzeria and presto - perfect dough with great flavor and soft as a baby's bottom. 8-)
I also get my sauce from them also.
Not that I wouldn't get a great satisfaction from making the perfect dough myself but there's plenty of other activities in life that once can work on for satisfactions. Dough isn't a top priority for pizza.
(Now for the perfect sourdough loaf that's another story).
Most large scale pizza places will have trays full of pizza dough already prepared and sized for a single pizza. This is what I was referring to. Some places have a large roll/ball that they cut off of to make their individual pizzas. I've not found a place that offers them already flattened into a pizza shape, they're usually in a ball.
It almost is, but the super large picture of the guy holding a pizza base might give up the game.
On a serious note, Github could be a good place for blogging because you can get CI to check your code examples, and even to lint your spelling, as well as get readers to supply PR's to fix any errors they see.
I always dream of being able to discreetly inform people of minor mistakes in their posts/comments in a way that would make it dead easy for them to accept the change. PRs sound very appealing!!
I think we need a new infrastructure for this on the internet. At least some place to say where content is stored, and where to do pull requests against.
EDIT: GIT+Blockchain+Blogs for the future (patent pending)
I was actually working on something similar for my blog. I want to abstract away github though (average visitor might not have a github account), but whatever suggestion / fix the web visitor makes gets saved and turned into a PR so that the author can easily merge.
I use it so that I can keep track of my own iterations. It's an excellent way to visualise the way for a given recipe. A person usually never makes the perfect recipe right away.
Can I ask why exactly? I happen to be a dev (non-web), but honestly most big blog sites are a pretty bad experience. Full of ads, giant media banners, and irrelevant "related-articles" sections.
Sure, Github's repo interface probably isn't optimal, but it's not much worse than a minimal personal blog/template. And if you're not concerned with the dev pieces you've at least got the actual no-frills content right there in front of you.
Thanks for sharing - lots of detail on the process and the pictures look really helpful, although honestly I have no familiarity with pizza dough making to judge by. Great read regardless.
I love the idea of Github becoming a more popular place for recipes. I translate many of the recipes I end up cooking into Markdown files[1], and love that Github renders them in a way that I can still share with my relatives.
The real win though is that with git for VC, you can update these recipes with the smallest changes and notes each time you cook it, knowing that each time you're getting closer to the perfect version of each meal. I hope this idea catches on enough that people might one day submit issues / PRs for each others recipes much like we do with open-source code.
May try this dough out myself soon since I'm still on a baking kick from all the Christmas cookies. Will open a PR / issue if I have any suggestions from the experience!
I've been storing recipes in git for years, also in markdown so I can edit/view on pretty much any device with a markdown viewer/editor. This post has made me interested in using a markdown rendered to display them on my personal site!
Is there an open recipe format? There really should be, if you think about it, a recipe is basically a program: pragmatic, universally interpretable and should produce identical output (provided similar input and execution...)
I would be satisfied with any recipe format that doesn't include several paragraphs of text about how the author feels about the food, what they did the last time they made it, why they are writing about it, etc. Ingredients, steps, period.
He. That's one of the things I love most about seriouseats. They separate in different pages the recipe, as terse as it can be, and the "how it works", that includes all the other fluff, and I read if I'm in the mood.
Another great tip I wanted to share is to use a pizza stone. Even better than a stone is a pizza steel. The steel releases the heat faster to the dough than the stone. If you had a stone brick oven at 450°C you would not need this. At a regular oven at home, a steel does wonders. I got my pizza from 80% Neapolitan style to 95%.
I got a cast iron Lodge pizza pan (iron, not steel), admittedly in large part because I have a cast iron fetish. It was cheap, has served excellently for making pizzas, and doubles as an extraordinarily large griddle for making bulk pancakes or broiling steaks.
Have you experimented with placing a pizza steel on a rack above the pizza? I'm wondering if this would trap the heat more. Maybe my intuition is wrong.
I'd go for the broiler instead, but two baking steels must be the best I've read, one at the bottom and one on the top below the broiler... then go from putting the pizza on the top steel and broiler on to the bottom steel for another minute or so
The < 3 minutes is from Neapolitan style pizza, which is in a 900F+ oven. Home ovens won't get anywhere near that unless you modify their cleaning cycle, but almost nobody does that. You can get to 900F pretty easily with some inexpensive outdoor ovens.
The steel releases the heat faster than the stone. Yes, heat it up as much as possible. Still you will not manage to have the same air circulation as in a stone brick oven. Thus you can not reach the same result. But it can get close to a 95% version. I sometimes use a blow torch to sizzle my pizza further.
Quoting the article "There is no need for performing any sort of kneading.", this is wrong, nearly every pizzaiolo (the person who makes pizza in a restaurant) will tell you that you need to kneed for at least 25 minutes, this is to reach what is called "punto pasta" and by kneading you will help the dough to form gluten structure that will give elasticity and will preserve the air inside.
A little tip, if you want to make Neapolitan pizza, and you don't have an oven that can reach 460 Celsius, you should add extra virgin olive oil, this will raise the amount of time in the oven before the pizza becomes biscottata (crunchy and hard), in a professional oven the Neapolitan pizza cooks for around 2 minutes, and if the oven is not in the right temperature and so you need to cook it more the pizza becomes crunchy.
The repeated stretching/folding/waiting process develops the gluten like kneading does. You can tell that his gluten development is fine from the windowpane effect in first picture.
A great source to learn about pizza is reddit. I also frequently post my results over there and receive valuable feedback: https://reddit.com/r/pizza.
Regardless you have to be careful, since people are very opinionated and might not know all the variables of your pizza. An experienced baker understands the dough and can react with changing variables.
Somehow I always end up with to stringy dough after it has risen and it would tear to easy when handling. I might give it another try with these instructions, thx.
Pro tip for making pizza at home: Use a food processor to knead the dough; it will come together quicker and prevent oxidization, resulting in much better flavor in the finished pie. Restaurants make large batches, exposing only a small surface area of the dough.
You should use a stand mixer with a dough attachment if possible. Food processors are very rough on the dough, especially if you use a metal blade. They also can't handle a lot of dough at once without burning out the motor.
Interesting. Maybe that advice only applies to pizza, but America's Test Kitchen, at least for making dough for bread recommends against using a food processor. I usually make dough in fairly large batches, so I don't know if the effect Kenji talks about would have changed anything for me. I've probably made several hundred pizzas at home, and it definitely took a while to perfect the crust.
Haha :) I think I originally found it somewhere on this site. I didn't try to hack my oven but I did buy a blackstone pizza oven a few years ago after reading about people using it on the pizzamaking.com forums.
Oh boy, a couple years ago a took the deep dive in to neapolitan pizza. Like any niche people are passionate about, there's tons of different and sometimes conflicting ideas about how to do it best. Along those lines, I love the disclaimer on this post.
It's generally more reproducible to measure out ingredients that could vary in density (flour being one of them, for a number of reasons) by weight. You can still be a global elitist and put it in grams.
Better than pretty much any book out there on pizza, is reading through the pizzamaking.com forums. They have people that have been on there for over a decade, making thousands of pizzas, and know every last detail of what does and doesn't work. They're also very helpful if you post pictures, and if you get really into it, there's a whole subforum for wood-fired ovens (WFO).
I have not found a better site than pizzamaking.com if you want to dive into pizza styles and methods. The gluten free forum was a great resource for me.
If you are patient, you can do your bulk fermentation for 72 for additional flavor. Bonus if you also add some "discard" sourdough starter at the beginning for a more sourdough tang.
Oh yes, this is a great tip. In fact you can also use sourdough right away for the pizza, it creates a different flavor. Can't say it is better, it is different. With the sourdough you have to be careful with not having a too acidy dough. At some point the acid will attack your gluten matrix and result in your dough becoming super sticky.
I adore Neopolitan pizza and have always considered it better than anything else. However, judging by the ratio of "regular" pizza places vs Neopolitan pizzerias it would seem i'm in a minority.
I was never quite sure if the relative lacking number of Neopolitan pizzarias in the US is due to different taste preferences of the consumer, it simple hasn't caught on yet or it maybe more difficult/expensive and therefore prohibitive?
In my book the alternative to Neopolitan isn't 'regular' but a good sourdough base that has far more in common with a baguette than a piece of naan.
There's a fetishization of Neopolitan technique that, while natural, has diminishing returns in terms of variety and innovation. Small brewers don't all slavishly recreate age-old European beer recipes...
The main difference is the sugar he adds which will generate a lot more gas to puff up the base.
If you knead your rested dough balls just before rolling it reactivates the yeast without needing to add sugar to the mix. Just make them a little thicker and they will puff up the same.
Napolitano pizza is really hard to replicate in a home oven so why try? However, NY-ish pizza is possible. I use this recipe, which uses ordinary AP flour and calls for a rise of several hours or overnight so you can make it without a big production. It's in metric, which makes it much easier to produce a consistent dough.
Low-moisture, full-fat cheese is essential. Again, you could drain mozzarella di bufala, but that is one more step. Finally, sauce is what you can really play around with. I've gotten good results using just a tablespoon of tomato paste from a tube, or premade "pizza sauce" or cooked down marinara pasta sauce.
I make the pizza on a pan, stick it in there to start, then pull the pan as soon as I can shake the pie free. Depending on how it cooks I'll use the broiler as well. Turns out great.
Is there someone out there who is familiar with business listings and could tell me which city has the most pizzerias per capita? I lived in Hoboken, New Jersey for 8 years. There are so many pizzerias there and the city is home to about 50,000 people. I suspect Hoboken has the #1 slot but require confirmation.
If you really wanted all the listings I know the national-restaurant-association (NRA) has all of this data. You can also find the full data set on yelp as well. https://www.yelp.com/dataset/documentation/main. the json data set indicates a category value you can use too. Zomato didn't have the data source, kaggle's datasets were limited, didn't find anything on data.gov worthwhile. You can also find number of people living per zipcode from public datasets on data.gov
Source? I've lived here for years and only know one. USPS.gov seems to agree :)
Anyway, re: your first link, the data source sounds very questionable:
> Scoring of the Top Ten U.S. ‘Pizza Hoods’ in 2016 was determined by internal data on number
> of pizza restaurant redemptions through Welcomemat Services as well as the number and
> strength of pizza restaurants and businesses in each zip code covered by the brand
Welcomemat seems to be a company that sends mailers to people upon moving to a new address. In the NYC metro area, those new-address mailers rarely include restaurants. Margins are already tight for restaurants here, and many restaurants can rely on foot traffic without any need for this type of advertising.
I too question the source of "pizza hoods". I found no other better sources online though compiling the information though. Going through yelp's dataset would probably yield the best results, since its not as biased.
The two zipcodes, google (itself) stated there were 2 zipcodes, 07030 and 07086 . That has a lot of merit to it to me at least
In addition I can only recommend The Pizza Bible from Tony Gemignani. He even recommends letting it rise in the refrigerator for 36 to 48 hours and it's great (very cold around 3 degrees and probably don't add the amount of yeast Tony recommends). I'd say about 4g per 1000g flour when you also add poolish. He also recommends using warm water mixing the yeast in but ice cold water when mixing the water with the flour. And around 2% baking malt if your oven doesn't go beyond 350°. It gives a better browning effect in my opinion than olive oil and has some kind of sugar molecules in it.
I've had best results with a 8mm thick backing steel and the broiler method in a home oven, but some day I want a wood fired oven :-)
Oh and for the toppings I'd go for mozzarella di buffalo, some parmegiano and for instance Mutti tomatoes for the sauce. I'd also sometimes add Burrata after around two minutes in the oven :-)
Oh yes, and make the tomatoe sauce in the morning when you eat in the evening, adding extra virgin olive oil, pepper, salt, oregano, whatever you like, but I think the flavors are getting better with more time, just like the dough. That said some pizzaiolos from Napoli seem to make the dough at room temperature or 18° with around 8 to 12 hours rise, which is not that much. I've had great problems last summer, even with 2g fresh yest per 1000g flour it was crazy how fast it has risen... way too fast at around 24 degrees room temp... then in the basement at around 19, but still
For me the refrigerator works way better with a constant temperature :)
Try to use a pizza stone. That's already good. If possible, go for a pizza steel. However, in a traditional Neapolitan oven you also have a particular air circulation that is very hard to reproduce.
Forum with far too much information on Pizza dough and preparation + Experimentation on how to imitate famous Pizza e.g. reverse engineering Papa Johns
Make sure you add all the toppings on top of the cheese. You want to achieve a good crispy salami. That happens because of the Maillard reaction if there is enough heat available in the oven. Plus it looks more beautiful in my opinion if the toppings are visually viewable.
Another pro tip is to make your own homemade mozzarella. It really ups the game (takes 1 hour).
Regardless for the Mozzarella, stretch it into really small pieces and wrap it in kitchen paper for at least an hour. That way you don't create a watery mess on the pizza.
In terms of watery mess, I have personally never had any problems with just putting it in the fridge (Or freezer, for a shorter amount of time) until it dries a bit and firms up. Easier to grate too
Don't know about ditching altogether, but I had a pizza with a lot of Gorgonzola in Italy (Among other cheese): 'twas very good
The whole joy of making Pizza at home, is that it's pretty easy so you can really just yeet any old ingredients available on and just see what sticks (Or more realistically, smells right)
Timely! I've just been working on pizza! Compared to restaurants and especially to carryout or delivery or frozen I have some good results.
Due to the yeast and eating the pizza just after cooking, the star of the show is the dough. Making the dough is fast, fun, easy, and shockingly, astoundingly essentially just dirt cheap! With the dough and sauce ready, making a pizza is faster than delivery, carryout, or even frozen.
So, I've wanted a pizza for one, one pizza for a whole lunch or dinner. I end up with a pizza about 6 1/2" in diameter with sauce, Mozzarella cheese, and pepperoni. It's darned good. It's a filling meal, about 600 C (food calories).
Shock #1: The cost of the flour is, in the US, shopping at Sam's Club not counting the cost of the club membership, via 25 pound bags, sit down for this, 9 US cents per pizza. Shopping at usual US grocery stores, the cost is about double that, 18 cents per pizza.
Shock #2: The 9 cents was so surprising that last night just out of curiosity I added up the cost of the ingredients for one pizza, just under 40 cents.
Shock #3: With the ingredients ready, can have a hot pizza ready to eat in 20 minutes with less than 15 minutes of being busy with the work and the other 5 minutes, say, reading Hacker News!
Shock #4: Don't need or want to use an oven! Still get the coveted crisp bottom crust from a high temperature oven with a pizza stone, but are done with the pizza even before an oven could get hot!
Yesterday I typed in some extensive notes as part of what software developers know well -- now that I'm making these pizzas, only myself and God understand how I'm going it, and without my notes in six months only God will still understand. So, I have the notes.
Here I will give a brief version.
The ingredients are:
For the dough, flour, water, yeast, and salt.
For the sauce, canned crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, some of the usual seasonings, and a little olive oil.
The cheese is just common shredded, part-skim Mozzarella.
The pepperoni is, well, just four slices of pepperoni widely available sliced.
The three most important tools are a common microwave oven, a restaurant style stamped steel saute pan with a bottom round and 7" in diameter and with a LONG handle, and a small burner on a common electric stove with power level set on medium.
Briefly here's what to do:
First make a batch of dough
and divide it into 8 pieces, one piece
per pizza. And make a batch of tomato
sauce.
For the dough, use 1 Kg of flour. Likely by a little should prefer "bread and pizza" flour, e.g., at Sam's Club. To a bowl of about 5 quarts, add 1 T (tablespoon) of active dry yeast (either the standard stuff or "quick-rising" intended for bread machines). Can get the yeast in little paper envelopes -- the contents of one envelope, about 8 grams, works fine. Or can buy yeast in jars of about 4 ounces -- for that just use a tablespoon. Then add 700 ml of water at 110 F. Mix. Add 1 1/2 T table salt. Mix. Quickly before the salt kills the yeast, add the flour in roughly (can be VERY rough) 1/3rds. After each 1/3rd, mix with a kitchen cooking spoon. Will end with a lot of moist, sticky dough with little pieces not yet stuck to the main mass. No need to use fingers.
The proportion of flour to water, e.g.,
the 700 ml of water for the 1 Kg of dough for the flour I have, is critical. Should measure carefully. Since the water content of your flour may vary from mine, or may vary from one source of flour to another or just with the humidity where you store your flour, you may have to adjust the proportions a little. The flour I'm using may have relatively high water content; if so, you may have to use a little more water.
Put about 1/4 C (cup) of flour on a pastry board, spread the flour roughly to a rough circle roughly 1' in diameter. Scrape and or roll the dough out of the bowl and on top of the flour. Sprinkle about 1/4 C flour on the top and sides of the dough.
Now knead the dough for 8 minutes; the kneading completes the mixing of the flour, water, yeast and salt; 8 minutes can make a nice pizza; more than 8 can result in a pizza a little tough to chew.
To knead,(A) Using hands and fingers, press the dough to roughly (can be very rough here) twice its area on the board. (B) Pick up the far edge of the dough and pull it to you to fold the dough in half. (C) Now the dough is likely wider than long; if so, then rotate it 90 degrees. Repeat (A)-(C) for 8 minutes.
The first few steps of all of (A)-(C) will get the dough into one relatively smooth mass. About this time fingers and hands may be coated with dough; in this case rub hands and fingers to let the dough fall to the main mass. From now on will have little or no problem with a lot of the dough sticking to hands or fingers.
BIG, HUGE, point: When you start, think of the outside surface of the dough. Well that is ALL you EVER touch!!! The inside of the dough is sticky, but you NEVER touch it! See, as you fold the dough, you are making the outside surface that was next to the board ALL the surface. As you keep doing (A)-(C) for 8 minutes, the outside surface from the board will get stretched enough to start to become sticky. Okay, then add a few T of flour but ONLY to the board and UNDER the dough, NOT to the top of the dough!
After 8 minutes, the dough will feel elastic and start to spring back. The usual test is to press the dough with a finger and get some spring back. You are DONE. Put the dough back in the bowl (don't have to bother to clean the bowl), cover the bowl to keep kitchen air away from the dough (the kitchen air could dry the surface of the dough too much), and let the dough rise, that is, let the yeast grow and generate CO2. The dough will rise well at any temperature from a refrigerator to 100 F or so. But at 115 F, the yeast will start to die. Let the dough rise until roughly (can be very rough) double in volume.
Now divide the dough into the 8 pieces. Flour the pastry board again, use fingers to separate the dough from the surface of the bowl, and roll the dough onto the flour. Dust the surface of the dough with 1-4 T of flour. Form the dough to a long log, say, the length of the diagonal of the board. Cut the log in half; cut each piece in half; cut each piece in half. Now have 8 pieces, hopefully all about equal in weight. For the cut surfaces, touch them to the board to lightly flour them. Put each piece in its own covered bowl, e.g., the 24 ounce, covered, plastic bowls from ZipLoc (mine are years old -- maybe they are still for sale). Apply, snap on, the covers, let the dough rise, say, each piece to half fill its bowl, and refrigerate until ready for a pizza. Note: Pressure from the CO2 can pop off the lids; so occasionally snap the lids back on, again, to keep kitchen air from the dough.
For the tomato sauce, in a 3 quart pot, add 3 T of olive oil and lightly cook however much garlic you like. Add two cans of crushed tomatoes, 28 ounces net weight per can. Add 12 ounces of tomato paste. Add whatever seasonings might like, salt, pepper, oregano, basil, parsley. Mix. Heat slowly with occasional stirring to sterilize the mixture, say, to 180 F, cover, let cool, and refrigerate.
For a pizza, take a microwave proof plate about 7" in diameter, with fingers gently separate the dough from its bowl, place the dough in the center of the plate, and spread the dough to a disk about 7" in diameter (larger if you prefer a thinner pizza and have a larger plate) with a rim. Microwave on high for 1 minute; for even heating, rotate 180 degrees and microwave on high for 1 more minute. The dough will puff a LOT. Using a fork, gently separate the dough from the plate and place the dough in the saute pan with the flat side of the dough, the side that was next to the plate, down. Maybe press down some on some of the larger puffy parts of the dough.
Add and spread about 2-4 T of the tomato sauce. Add and spread about 1 ounce of the shredded Mozzarella, in volume of the loose shredded cheese maybe a little less than half a cup. Put on four slices of pepperoni. Put a lid on the pan; put the pan on the burner; wait about 13 minutes.
So the steel pan yields the desired crust on the bottom. The lid creates a small oven that cooks the rest of the dough and heats the sauce and pepperoni and melts the cheese.
Want the bottom of the pizza to be crisp but not burned. Want the rim of the pizza puffed and cooked enough not to be raw but also not too tough to chew; want the sauce hot and the cheese melted. I get these results, but with your equipment, not exactly the same as mine, you will likely need some trials (I did a lot of trials with my equipment).
Use a spatula to move the pizza to a cutting board and cut it into 4 slices, each with a piece of pepperoni. Slide to a luncheon plate, call your significant other to share this, and start a second one!
For the plate I use in the microwave, that is from a very old collection of from some frozen dinners. The plates are essentially paper with some plastic. They are about the right size and are microwave proof, and the dough, once heated in the microwave, does not stick strongly. A glass pie plate might be a good alternative.
The pizza, once cooked, won't stick strongly to a well seasoned saute pan.
Making the batch of dough takes only about 20 minutes and is fun.
Most of the time for making the sauce is just opening the 3-4 cans.
Each pizza is ready in a little less than 20 minutes. Eaten just after cooking it's GOOD.
From my notes from yesterday, here are the costs for the main ingredients and the total cost (US cents) per pizza:
It turns out to be remarkably easy to make a good pizza, as long as you let the water soak into the flour for at least 40 minutes before you start to work it. If you don't, nothing else you do can save it.
In a pinch (in Waipio Valley, Hawaii) I made 30 little pizzas of Pillsbury flour (scooping runny dough, almost batter, from a bowl), cheddar cheese, and Wesson oil on parchment on a stone perched atop a big, inverted soup pot under a broiler. It came out great! I wouldn't do it that way again, but most details matter less than you would expect.
> It turns out to be remarkably easy to make a good pizza, as long as you let the water soak into the flour for at least 40 minutes before you start to work it. If you don't, nothing else you do can save it.
As in my post just above, I have good news for you and everyone else: By actual experience, for about a dozen recent trials, done need to let the water "soak" into the flour at all. Instead, just as I documented, just add the flour to the water in 1/3rds, mix after each 1/3rd, and then proceed with the kneading, rising, dividing into 8ths, let rise again, and get on with making pizzas. The dough in the pizzas is terrific, puffy, fragrant, etc.
I've done a LOT of computing for a LONG time. The code for my startup runs fine. I Want to do a few, easy late tweaks before going live.
I have the first server running and am doing a few last little things.
The code is 100,000 lines of typing, 24,000 programming language statements, nearly all in Microsoft's Visual Basic .NET.
The next major step is to gather a lot of data for my database, much more than the data I have for testing now.
I taught computing at Georgetown and Ohio State, published in artificial intelligence and more in computer science and applied math at IBM's Watson lab, and cooked up some maybe new algorithms for my startup.
But I've never needed to use GitHub! I'm not against it, but so far the computing unique to my project has been fast, fun, and easy for me. The main bottleneck has been poor documentation. Then my development computer got sick, then I got sick, but now both I and my computers are all healthy!
The times I tried GitHub, it said that my Web browser is out of date! I have the latest from Firefox and was using my HP laptop with Windows 10 64 bit Home Edition -- what came with the laptop I got just to have something to order parts and gather information for my first server after my development computer quit -- some motherboard data corruption problem.
My server is an Asus old BIOS style motherboard with an AMD FX-8350 processor, 8 cores with standard clock at 4.0 GHz, 16 GB of DDR3 ECC main memory, 7 TB of hard disk, and Windows 7 64 bit Professional. If my startup gets traffic enough to keep that server busy, then I'll have a nice step up!
Especially since I'm using Microsoft,
I'll likely use GitHub eventually.
Hopefully you're using some form of version control today. Git is the de facto winner of the version control ecosystem, so it's a valuable tool to know how to use at least at a basic level (branching, merging).
Yes, I have a simple version control system. I have some simple tools based on macros for my favorite editor KEdit and some scripts based on Rexx. So far they have been fine.
The biggest problem I had was documentation for .NET. I found, read, downloaded, and abstracted 4000+ Web pages from Microsoft's MSDN and have about another 1000 Web pages from elsewhere. These are in four batches -- the languages, especially Visual Basic .NET, for SQL Server, for communications including TCP/IP and ASP.NET (for the Web pages), and the rest for Windows in general. I also have documentation of my own, mostly just text but some with the math from Knuth's TeX.
So, in the code and other documentation, I put links to relevant documentation. The links in the code look to the compiler like comments. I insert and use the links with editor macros. In the end, I can display a page of documentation with one keystroke to my editor. Works well enough.
For help with versions, I have a very heavily used editor macro that inserts a time-date stamp or two of them delimited with BEGIN and END as comment blocks with time-date stamps.
Sure, if I hire some people, I'll have to have something better. But in our AI project at IBM's Watson lab, we did quite a lot of software development, including shipping some IBM Program Product code, with less in versioning tools than I'm using.
Right along I've been thinking that if my startup works, then one of the first steps up will be some audio-video facilities, a lecture hall, good audio and video recording and then editing, etc. Then we will call in experts on various topics, have them lecture, maybe sell their book or some such, record it all, and have it on-line for everyone as documentation. So, we'll have people who worked out good means of versioning, backup and recovery, archiving, data security, disaster protection, network security, server monitoring, server construction and software installation, SQL Server performance, LAN performance, code testing and reviews, developer training, the servers, racks, LAN, electric power, backup power, HVAC, real estate for floor space, telephones, e-mail, etc. Yup, I'll need a COO!
All these topics have been done well lots of times in the Fortune 100 and more, and lots of people have been there, done that, and still have the T-shirt. Likely don't necessarily have to hire them but can fly them in for 1-3 days and capture what they have to say. Later in the growth may have to do some things that are original, but can have a lot of growth before that.
You're rolling your own version control for a 100k LOC project? You could easily pick up git in a day or two. Why not just use git? It represents your project as a tree; you can work on different branches of your project simultaneously, save progress on branches, merge them, etc.
So far, the candle is not worth the match. I can and do easily accomplish plenty well enough the functionality you mention now for just one user, me -- I'm a sole, solo founder. And there is the intellectual property security issue, for a code repository or the cloud, and so far I don't use or really need either. I have lots of good uses for my time and have to allocate carefully.
Similarly, while I'm developing on Windows with no use of Linux at all, I make no use of Visual Studio; I greatly prefer my favorite text editor KEdit and its macro language Kexx, essentially Rexx.
I'm not saying that others should do what I'm doing. By far my favorite tools are KEdit and Rexx. Next comes D. Knuth's TeX.
I accept that if I had 50+ software developers then they would likely be heavy users of Visual Studio and GitHub. But for me, for now, they aren't worth the botheration.
Botheration, mud wrestling with software, has, after poor documentation, been my biggest obstacle.
ALL the work unique to my project has been fast, fun, and easy, the idea, applied math, code, etc. Thus I have a real sore spot about new, external tools -- my experience with such external things has been botheration I call mud wrestling. The time wasted has not been hours, days, or weeks but far beyond that.
IMHO the biggest bottleneck now in the future of computing is poor documentation. Second is mud wrestling with new products including tools.
The code is 100 K lines of typing but about 25,000 programming language statements, that is, 25 KLOC. That is, there are a LOT of comments and links to documentation in the code.
Some people at Battelle, etc. worked in information retrieval decades ago. A friend of my father's was involved. Those people concluded that key words could cover only part of search. My rough guess is 1/3rd. I'm going for the other 2/3rds.
The computing is pretty simple and fast. Given enough documentation, the code was easy to write.
The crucial core of the work is some applied math I derived based on some advanced pure math prerequisites. I got most of the prerequisites in my applied math Ph.D. So, to me, the project is mostly applied math with some cute data manipulations and a simple Web site user interface.
Maybe for a computer science audience, my work should do well giving people content with the meaning they have in mind. I know; I know: Writing code for much of anything having to do with meaning has been a challenge. Well, I derived some math.
Tonight the work is not very exciting: I'm writing some Rexx code making crucial use of some cute Rexx functions to correct the time-date stamps on the directories written by Microsoft's XCOPY. The time-date stamps written are usually not those of the source directories and, instead, are just the time, date when XCOPY created the copy. The files XCOPY writes DO retain the time-date stamps of the source.
For the correction, my idea is to set the time-date stamps of each directory to the newest time-date stamp of the files/directories in that directory.
Important is how the Windows NTFS file system does time-date inheritance: If create or change a file or create a directory, then the time-date stamp on the parent directory will within a few seconds be changed to time-date stamp on the new or changed file or the new directory. If the new directory has a file created in it, then, sure, that directory will have it's time-date stamp changed, BUT, surprising or not, the parent we mentioned will not have its time-date changed. I'm typing quickly; if this is unclear, complain and I'll be more clear.
This information is important: If the time-date inheritance kept feeding up the directory tree to the root, then the corrections I want would have to work essentially from the leaves of the directory tree up and in a 'breath first' way, with some tricky accumulation at each 'level' (distance from the roof) of some maximum time-date values, to the root. But with the way the inheritance actually does work, I can correct the time-date stamps as I mentioned on the directories in any order.
It sounds pretty clear to me, albeit your explanation is long winded. You're saying that, in the FS you're using, the time-stamp changes are "local" in the sense that they don't bubble up the tree after N = 1 levels.
In elevator-pitch terms, you're working on a search engine that takes into account user intent more accurately? Is that more or less correct?
Thinking a little more, if the time-stamp changes did bubble up, then just start making changes at the leaves of the tree; at each leaf, work back to the root on the unique path to the root; and at each directory make a change in the time-stamp of that directory if and only if the new time-date stamp would be more recent than the old one; and, if don't make a change at that directory, then are DONE on that path. Revision, to make this work, first set all the directory time-date stamps to, say, year 1776. This solves the problem that the directories closer to the root may be on the path of several leaves and get changed several times. To identify the leaves, that is, directories with no subdirectories, get the directory tree names and just sort them into ascending order. Then a leaf directory and all the directories on the path from that leaf back to the root will sort together with the leaf directory the last one of those that sort together. That is, a directory is a leaf if and only if it is not on the path to the root (not an initial substring, using whole directory names) of the next directory in the sort. In particular, the last directory in the sort is necessarily a leaf. Ah, an algorithm!
I don't want now to further characterize or change the wording on what the startup is doing. My best word is the one I used, "meaning".
How exactly will you know a user's "meaning" when they are asking for content? Do you intend to read their minds, somehow? Or perhaps you might hook them up to a heart rate monitor, track their eye movements and use ML to obtain user sentiment without requiring them to provide click-based feedback (like likes/dislikes).
That doing well with meaning is a bit amazing as it is.
Saying "exactly" how is a bit much for a blog post. Besides the key is some deep pure and applied math with no way to explain those. Even if I gave an explanation, say, from my math derivations typed into D. Knuth's TeX math word whacking, nearly no one in the Sand Hill Road culture has the math prerequisites to understand it. Only a small fraction of those could do the original work I did. Even if they did do that work, no one on Sand Hill Road would have any interest at all.
I wasted MONTHS jerking the chains of the firms on Sand Hill Road, and all I got were laughs or silence. I explained as here the opportunity for the other 2/3rds of search but no one cared. I never got even to first base with Ycombinator.
One lesson is that Sand Hill Road just will not, Not, NOT do technical due diligence on original technology.
Right: They want a big market. My work stands to be of high interest to nearly everyone in the world with any access to the Internet, smartphone to high end work station. My Web pages will look just fine on nearly any smartphone. Big enough market?
World class research university pure/applied math Ph.D.? No interest. Long background in much of the best in computing at IBM's Watson lab? No interest. Running code ready for production? No interest.
Another lesson is that Sand Hill Road will be interested when I have a few servers busy, revenue significant and growing rapidly. Then they will offer me a term sheet where I go from owning 100% to owning 0% with a vesting schedule with some chance of getting back to maiybe 40% ownership if I don't get fired except it is in the fiduciary interest and responsibility of the board member investor to FIRE me so that I don't get my stock vested.
The US DoD, NSF, NIH, NASA, DoE, etc. WILL do careful evaluations of technical material; Sand Hill Road just will NOT do that.
I also have to ask if I want to report to a BoD with people who have shown with their feet locked deep in reinforced concrete and their eyes and ears totally shut: They can't play a productive role in my work now, and I can't believe they would be able to play a productive role later as the technology improves.
One of the least pleasant ways to spend an hour is to listen to a math lecture when don't understand anything said. I can see clearly: I give a presentation to the BoD about a small, new direction or initiative for the business, based on some applied math, complete with theorems and proofs, one of the best sources of credibility, and several of the BoD members get physically ill and rush to the restrooms. Then the BoD leaves, convenes in a local bar, has a dozen rounds of drinks, and votes me out of the CEO slot.
Those Sand Hill Road people just don't belong on the bridge of my ship; they are NOT qualified; they are a severe threat to the ship.
From some Mary Meeker (KPCB firm) data and some of my software timings, if I can get traffic enough to half fill my first server, then I'll have ballpark $250,000 a month in revenue with essentially all of that pre-tax earnings. At that time, no way will I accept a term sheet; not a chance. Instead I'll expand into three spare bedrooms, put in some good window A/C, get more electric power, install UPS boxes, get a backup generator in a hut out back, and grow to a few $million a month. Then I'll lease or buy some space enough to grow significantly more, hire, and plan for a major organization and server farm. Ah, it's just 2/3rds of search for nearly everyone in the world.
And no way will Sand Hill Road fund anyone to compete with me.
I've funded all of this from my own checkbook and am 100% owner. Some external funding would have helped, but now it's too late for that and for Sand Hill Road and Ycombinator.
It's really a math project; given the math, the rest is nearly all
just a lot of routine typing although I did cook up a few maybe new computer science style algorithms, programmed them, and am using them in the code.
When I have alpha and beta tests, you will be able to see more although it will look like magic.
I can't keep people from calling it AI/ML, but I call it applied math.
That's not an elevator pitch, you just used my question as an opportunity to fume about toxic Silicon Valley culture.
I can't deny, you gave me a few good laughs:
> Then they will offer me a term sheet where I go from owning 100% to owning 0% with a vesting schedule with some chance of getting back to maiybe 40% ownership if I don't get fired except it is in the fiduciary interest and responsibility of the board member investor to FIRE me so that I don't get my stock vested.
> I give a presentation to the BoD about a small, new direction or initiative for the business, based on some applied math, complete with theorems and proofs, one of the best sources of credibility, and several of the BoD members get physically ill and rush to the restrooms. Then the BoD leaves, convenes in a local bar, has a dozen rounds of drinks, and votes me out of the CEO slot.
> Those Sand Hill Road people just don't belong on the bridge of my ship; they are NOT qualified; they are a severe threat to the ship.
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or not. Are you yanking my chain?
I know; it's possible to set up a corporation so that I have investors but control all the voting stock so that, then, really, the BoD can't fire me. But doing that would be a constant fight; I would be inviting into my company some potential enemies and would spend a huge fraction of my time, money, and energy fighting them. They would be there for themselves and trying to take from me. Easy solution: Don't invite them into the company. They don't want me now, and when they do I won't want them.
I'm going to stay a sole, solo founder.
Some people in business have been successful doing that. I know some, and one of them, whom I don't know, is sitting in the White House now. Indeed, from the time I spent in yacht clubs, nearly all the members did that -- sole, solo founders, a family company, private company, no VC/PE or other outside investors, no public corporation.
My point about how much people hate math lectures with theorems and proofs is exactly correct.
Then the scenario of the BoD rushing to the toilets and convening in a bar, getting drunk, and firing me is only a slight exaggeration for what would likely happen.
E.g., I'd be like that guy in Scion Capital in the book and movie The Big Short and Billy Beane in the book and movie Money Ball. They were both right and for the right reasons, but they nearly got shot down by skeptics. Indeed, the skeptics or their skepticism was the cause of much of the opportunities.
My views of Sand Hill Road versus DoD, NSF, NIH, NASA, DoE is literally, rock solidly true. DoD, etc. will invest in some applied math and mathematical physics, e.g., the US Navy's version of GPS (I worked in that group for a while), and Sand Hill Road just will not; they won't even consider original, powerful, valuable, advanced applied math. I have hundreds of e-mail messages proving that.
You seem to have wanted an "elevator pitch". Okay:
As has been clear going way back in information retrieval, key words do well in only about 1/3rd of the content on the Internet, searches people want to do, and results they want to find. I'm going for the other 2/3rds. Sufficient for this, I've derived some original applied math based on some advanced, pure math prerequisites, written the production quality code, and am rushing to go live. The math makes powerful progress on the challenging problem of the meaning of the content. The work stands to be of intense interest to nearly everyone in the world with access to the Internet via any device from a smartphone up to a high end workstation. First I will target users in the US and then Europe and then target the rest of the world as there are revenue opportunities.
That's just what I've done and am doing.
Nothing could be more simple or true.
The main issue is the math, but the set of people in a position to understand the math and with confidence to see its power is really tiny. Even among the best trained Ph.D. mathematicians, the prerequisites are not well known.
From my Ph.D. work, but NOT from my time at IBM's Watson lab, I know some people with the prerequisites. When I did original work building on those prerequisites, those people liked my work right away. When I went to publish, my work was published right away. Now should I explain my original work, those people would think for a few days and then say something like "Nice. Right, that should work.". I was confident in my research then, and I'm equally confident now.
Much of the confidence comes from theorems and proofs -- I've always liked those because they have saved my skin many times since no math teacher or prof has ever been able to find anything wrong with my correct proofs, and after I had started to learn the material, my proofs were correct. Maybe the teachers/profs hated me; it was clear that some of them did; maybe they wanted to laugh at me, and too often did, like you do and like the people in those two movies did; but they can't find anything wrong with my proofs. If I were not confident, then I wouldn't be doing this.
I got into math and science partly because in high school the teachers had to give me A's in math and science. In English and history, the best I could do was get social promotion. In college I saw that math and science looked far and away like the best subjects for a good career. Early in my career, in applied math and computing on national security problems near DC, I saw more value in math and did a lot of independent study of both pure and applied math. Then I got a Ph.D. in applied math with a lot in pure math -- some of my publications can be regarded as both pure and applied.
For competition, just for the prerequisites, people would have to study and learn brilliant work in math going back 200+ years or reinvent that material. The studying is too hard for all but a tiny fraction of the population and reinventing is much harder, essentially impossible. The people Sand Hill Road likes to back haven't studied the material, won't, and certainly won't reinvent it. Then they'd be faced with my original work. Nope: I don't expect competition.
That's just the way the project is. Seems entirely reasonable to me. But you want to laugh at it. Hmm ....
I wasn't really laughing at you, more so at your way of explaining those people you interacted with. You just had some funny prose -- which is hardly a bad thing.
So you'll scrape lots of web data, run it through your 'meaning algorithm' and then provide a search bar to search said data? So, like your idea is like Google, but it understands english sentences close to like a human would? Did I understand that correctly?
> I wasn't really laughing at you, more so at your way of explaining those people you interacted with. You just had some funny prose -- which is hardly a bad thing.
Much of the prose was intended to be funny.
> So, like your idea is like Google, but it understands english sentences close to like a human would? Did I understand that correctly?
You could work on a better description. The ability to understand a question without getting off topic and describing things eloquently, concisely and in layman terms are necessary skills.
I gave short, concise, layman's terms, user's terms, on topic descriptions lots of places in this thread: Going for the rest of search, the 2/3rds currently served at best poorly, and based on the meaning of the content. I said all that.
I'm not pitching VCs here: As I made clear, I wasted months on VCs and gave up. The short, simple, ..., description of why is that (1) they won't evaluate and, thus, won't invest in technology and (2) they want to invest in traction significant and growing rapidly and by the time I have that I won't accept an equity check or a BoD. As I wrote, the VCs don't want me now, and when they want me I won't want, need, or accept them. Nice and short.
Want a shorter elevator pitch? Google and Bing are good in about 1/3rd of search. I'm going for the other 2/3rds.
Elevator pitches are for investors, and I spent months sending pitches just this short, with more below, longer, varied, etc. The conclusion was simple: The first requirement for any check is traction. Many VC Web sites were deceptive on this point; as a determined entrepreneur I kept trying; but I've learned my lesson -- no role for VCs.
It was not clear that you were actually asking a question or wanting an "elevator pitch".
For my "abilities", your statement is patronizing and an unjustified insult. My abilities are just fine, thank you.
Your guess at what my startup is doing is not good. What I am doing is much better than anything that could be or follow from your guess.
Again, once again, over again, yet again, one more time, the crucial core is some original applied math based on some advanced pure math prerequisites. It really is. That's the truth. The work is from some of my studies in my Ph.D. in pure/applied math and more studies and then my original work. This is just literally true, not hype. It's TRUE. That few startups are doing such things is not my problem but some of my opportunity. But one result is that the only people with even a shot at evaluating or understanding the core technology are well trained mathematicians. That's just true, and as such I have no better way to put it.
That the startup also uses some computing does not mean that Sand Hill Road or academic computer science is qualified to evaluate or understand the technology. More generally, Sand Hill Road and academic computer science just do not cover, even significantly cover, all the technology that can use computing and be valuable for a startup. In particular, there is applied math, and that is much more broad and deep than Sand Hill Road or academic computer science; such people just have no chance of understanding the work because they don't have the prerequisites and just will not reinvent them. I've been clear on this.
With some of the other news on HN now, I should insert, as I have in my more polished descriptions, that my search engine is to be "safe for work". It should also be safe for kids and be family-friendly.
Yes, I'm going for the other 2/3rds of search, but the whole of search I'm considering has no porn, etc.
Finding content based on meaning should be one of the best contributions to culture and civilization, and I hope the site does that.
And the site stands to have some of the best protections for user privacy on the Internet: E.g., the engine does not set, read, write, or use HTTP cookies. User Internet history is not collected or used: Two users who use the site the same way at essentially the same time will get the same results.
The site has nothing to do with natural language processing, the semantic Web, the interest graph, neural nets, etc.
In no significant way is the technology accessible to the Sand Hill Road community, no more than to some unknown tribe deep in the Amazon; they have the same on the prerequisites -- nothing.
> Again, once again, over again, yet again, one more time, the crucial core is some original applied math based on some advanced pure math prerequisites.
This is super descriptive! I should have understood you the first time. My apologies.
