Published: 2026-05-15 | 8
The Dallas Morning News came to my house last month. A reporter and a photographer. They watched me make a cheese pizza for two hours and then asked questions for another hour.
It was the first time I'd ever made pizza for someone with a camera who wasn't me filming it for my own account. I was extremely aware of my hands the entire time. I forgot the order of operations on a dough I've made hundreds of times. I dropped a pizza peel. Both of them were very kind about it.
When the article ran, I read it twice. Then a third time. Some of it was more flattering than I deserve. Some of it captured things about how I think about pizza that I've never quite been able to articulate myself. And some of it left out the longer story, the parts that don't fit in 1,500 newspaper words.
So here's the longer story. The full version, in my voice, for anyone who came here from the DMN piece or who's been following @DavesPizzaOven and never knew the backstory.
I'm Dave Hale. I'm 36. I grew up in St. Louis, which means my baseline relationship with pizza is genuinely weird, Provel cheese, cracker-thin crust, square cut. (We have a whole St. Louis pizza article on the site if you want to understand what that means as a regional identity.)
I live in Lakewood, in East Dallas, with my wife. Normal house. Normal kitchen. Normal KitchenAid oven. That oven, more than anything else on this site, is the thing that lets people imagine themselves doing what I do. The pizza you see in my videos gets made on the same equipment most of you already own.
My day job, and this one surprises everybody, is in medical sales. I sell eye equipment to optometrists and ophthalmologists across the Dallas area. It's a good job. It pays the bills. Monday through Friday I am not thinking about pizza.
The pizza thing is a hobby. It always has been. It still is. Even now.
In 2022, my wife, who, for the record, is not even a huge pizza person, suggested we make pizza from scratch for date night. We'd been ordering in too much. She wanted to try something new. So we made a pizza. It was bad.
The next weekend we tried again. Slightly better. Then again. Then again. By month two I was making essentially the same cheese pizza every weekend, tweaking one variable at a time, different flour, different hydration, longer cold ferment, different baking position in the oven. My wife was a great sport about it. I'm pretty sure she regretted ever suggesting the whole experiment.
I started posting pictures on my personal Instagram because I thought what I was making looked cool. Friends asked if I had a dedicated page. I made one in early 2023.
For two full years, that page had about 2,000 followers.
This is the part of the story I love telling, because most people see a 600K-follower account and assume it grew on a smooth curve. Mine didn't. For 24 months I posted regularly, refined every recipe, and stayed under 2,500 followers. The growth chart was a flat line.
I posted partly because I genuinely loved the editing process, finding the right cut, the right music, the right tempo. And partly because I wanted to share what I was learning. There was zero monetization. Zero strategy. I didn't show my face in any videos for the first three years. I was self-conscious about it.
I want to be clear about this: nothing about those two years felt like 'progress' at the time. It felt like a hobby with a tiny audience, and I was fine with that. If you're reading this and you have an account with 200 followers and you're frustrated, that was me for 24 months. Keep going. Or don't. The pizza is the point.
In 2024 I tried something different. Instead of posting one-off pizzas, I structured a week. One short video per day, for seven days. Day 1 was gear. Day 2 was building the dough. Day 3 was cold-fermenting it. Each day built on the previous one. I edited the series like a real tutorial, clean, in order, watchable in any direction.
That series is what changed the trajectory of the account. People stopped scrolling past. They started screenshotting. Comments shifted from 'wow that looks good' to 'I just made this and it actually worked.' Then the algorithm picked it up.
I'm not going to pretend I understand how Instagram or TikTok decide what to push. I don't. But for whatever reason, that single week of tutorials, seven videos shot at my kitchen counter, edited at my kitchen table, posted from my couch, pulled the account from 2,000 followers to 50,000 within a few weeks. From 50,000 it kept going.
A year later, the combined audience across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook is well over 1 million.
I still don't fully know how to feel about that number.
This came up in the DMN interview and I want to put it on the record here too.
I have nothing against people who call themselves influencers. It's a real job. It's harder than it looks from the outside. But the word doesn't describe what I do.
What I do is make pizza, film the process, edit it, and share what I've learned. I'm not selling other companies' products as my primary thing. I'm not building a brand around my daily life. I'm not doing outfit checks or morning routines or vlogs.
I'd rather be called a content creator, or a home cook who makes videos, or, honestly, just Dave. The pizza is the product. The videos are how I share the product. Everything else is in service of the pizza.
People assume from the handle, @DavesPizzaOven, that I have some specialty wood-fired beast in my backyard. I don't. I have a standard KitchenAid oven that came with the house. It tops out at 550°F. It's the oven most of you already have.
I do have three outdoor pizza ovens, and I use them now and then, they're great for Neapolitan-style pizza when you want 800°F char. But the pizzas I'm known for, the NY-style slices and the cast iron pan pizzas, I make in the home oven. Because that's what people can actually do.
The handle has no good story behind it, by the way. I wanted something more interesting than 'Dave's Pizza' and 'Oven' was the first word that came to mind. That's it. There's no metaphor, no hidden meaning. Just a generic name that happened to stick.
Most of my dry goods come from Jimmy's Food Store in Old East Dallas. Same Italian dry goods, cured meats, and cheeses that a lot of New York pizzerias source from. They carry crushed Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes, my single most important pantry item, hands down. They carry Grande mozzarella, which is what's on every great pizzeria pie in this country whether the pizzeria tells you or not.
If you live in Dallas and you make pizza at home, go to Jimmy's. It's the single biggest unlock for home pizza in DFW. I cannot stress this enough.
If you've been around the account for any length of time, you know I'm obsessed with plain cheese pizza. There's a whole long-form piece about it on this site. It came up in the DMN interview too.
Here's why cheese: the simpler the pizza, the more the technique shows. You can hide a lot of mistakes under pepperoni and mushrooms and burrata. You cannot hide them on a plain cheese pie. The crust has nowhere to go. The sauce has to actually taste like tomatoes. The cheese has to melt right. The bake has to be exact.
Mastering plain cheese pizza is the bar. Once you can make a plain that you'd actually order at a great pizzeria, every other pizza you make gets dramatically easier.
Since people always ask:
My default is a 3-day cold ferment. I weigh everything to the gram (a precision scale is non-negotiable). The dough sits in the fridge for 48 to 72 hours, which is where the flavor comes from. Slow fermentation breaks down the starches and develops the lactic acid that makes pizza dough taste like pizza dough and not like bread. See 48 vs 72 hour cold ferment for the actual data on this.
I bake at 550°F (the max of most home ovens, including mine) on a Baking Steel on the top rack. About 8 minutes per pie. The crust comes out darker than most American pizzerias would tolerate, that's intentional. We call it a deep bake. Light, crunchy, airy, with real char.
Then I run olive oil around the rim of the crust right out of the oven. Looks gorgeous. Tastes even better. Try it once and you'll never skip it again.
The DMN piece is the most public this account has gotten, but a few other things have happened that I haven't fully digested yet.
On April 19, 2026 I did a pizza-making demo at Pizza Fest at Eataly in Dallas. Biggest crowd I've ever cooked in front of. Heart was pounding the entire time. The pizzas turned out fine.
I collaborated with Alex Snodgrass (The Defined Dish, Dallas-area, cookbook author, much more established than me). That was a moment. Her audience and mine overlap in interesting ways.
I've done a few DFW pop-ups at restaurants around the metroplex. Lucky Dog Saloon in Uptown was the first. They sold out. I still don't quite believe it happened.
The pizza is making some money now, ad revenue from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. I run a small subscription site for people who want my recipes in a more organized, searchable format. None of it is quit-my-job money yet. I still sell eye equipment Monday through Friday. I expect to be doing that for a long time.
DMN asked me this. My honest answer: I have an enormous amount of respect for pizza shop owners. The work is brutal. The margins are thin. The hours are absurd. I'm not naive about what running a pizzeria actually entails day-to-day.
But, never say never. Right now my job is to share what I've learned and help people make better pizza at home. If something else makes sense later, I'll consider it then.
I'll close with what I told the DMN reporter and what I'll keep telling anyone who asks: I'm not special. The technique is learnable. The flour is the same flour you can buy. The oven is the same oven most of you have. The obsession is the differentiator, and you can develop that yourself if you want it.
The imposter syndrome hasn't really gone away after any of this. Not after 600K Instagram followers. Not after the Eataly demo. Not after the DMN piece. Maybe it never fully does. Maybe that's actually a good thing, it keeps me focused on the pizza instead of on me.
If you came here from the Dallas Morning News article, thank you for reading both versions. If you came here from one of my videos, thank you for sticking around. If you came here some other way, welcome.
Start with the NY Slice recipe. That's the one I make more than any other. If you make it and it turns out, tag me. If it doesn't, tag me anyway, I'll help you figure out what went wrong.
That's the whole story.
Dave