Three pizzas from Austin, Texas, for My Pie Monday.

Pizza has become my obsession recently. While it's such a simple food that even in mediocrity provides a lot of pleasure to everyone, pizza has the depth that allows an obsessive like me a rich palette to experiment with. Here are the the latest creations.

We did four pizzas. Took pictures of three:

Margherita pizza: I made a crushed tomato sauce with San Marzanos, garlic, lemon juice, and basil. Fresh and simple. Not cooked. Mozz was fresh made from Central Market. Basic from the Saturday farmers market. Simple and delicious.

Mushroom: Baby bella and oyster mushrooms sauteed with garlic and parsley topped the pizza. Fontina cheese. Finished with truffle oil. Yum.

Rosso: Stolen from the best pizza maker in the world, Chris Bianco. Red onions from the farmers market, Parmesan, pistachios, olive oil.

I also did a shaved asparagus pie with guaniciale. We were too busy stuffing our faces to take a picture.

Dough: For a long time I was using Peter Reinhart's Neapolitan dough recipe from American Pie, but I've recently switched to a modified version of this one: http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,10237.0.html. I started the dough Friday afternoon, let the biga develop overnight, mixed the rest of the dough Saturday morning, and then stuck it in the fridge to slow things down before a final 3-hour rise. I make my dough very, very wet and I usually like to make enough to bake a loaf of bread with it. I also knead it less than the forum recipe recommends.

Cooking Technique: Before I take the plunge and get a real wood-fired pizza oven, I wanted to run some experiments about how my dough recipes stand up to really hot ovens. So I built an oven inspired by the Pizza Hacker. This was my first attempt to fire it up. And fire it up I did: at its height, I had a cooking surface that measured to 790 degrees. It was amazing to watch the cornicione develop in a matter of seconds. And it was pretty cool to cook a pizza in less than 2 minutes. The downside was that the ambient temperature in the oven was probably about 600°F and the top didn't cook quite fast enough. Next time I'll try some different strategies for heating the frankenweber.

[Editor's note: Jeff "Pizza Hacker" Krupman now calls his invention the Pizza Forge. Also, Jeff, if you're reading this, I owe you an email about something ... you know what it is. I'll shoot some pixels at you shortly. —The Mgmt.]