We Baked 100+ Pizzas to Make 1 Perfect Recipe

-Hey y'all, Martin here in the studio today, and I'm excited to share with you our 2026 Recipe of the Year, Flaky Puff Crust Pizza. Recipe of the Year is an annual pilgrimage where all of us, from top to bottom, side to side, people from every team, put their efforts together to bake the best that we can and put it into a single product. And this year, we've got this delicious pizza, which, in many ways, breaks the category. But we've also got a special behind the scenes look into our test kitchen. We'll talk to the developers and we'll see what went into this incredible process. Join me for the video. The recipe link is right down there in the description. This is our Flaky Puff Crust Pizza.

- Recipe of the Year 2026 is finally done.

- Wrapped.

- It's been a long road, and I know you made many pizzas along the way.

- Mm-hmm.

- How many did you make?

- Upwards of 70.

- 70 pizzas. Okay.

- In the test kitchen, not with these beauties, but-

- Team effort.

- Yes, total team effort, but upwards of 70.

- What's going on in here?

- Hi. We are making pizza, and it's for a meeting. But it's a top secret meeting, and a top secret pizza. Today, we are doing, I think the first tasting, for Recipe of the Year. And Recipe of the Year is one of our hallmark campaigns. And the first part of Recipe of the Year is figuring out what the category is going to be. So is it going to be cake, or cookies, or pizza? So today, we are making some, like, concept pizzas to try to see if people can get excited around this idea, and then we will refine the recipe from there. So this is really like the very first stage.

- We've got two different types of cheeses, and we've got a portion of pepperoni on each pizza. We're trying to cover all the variables in two bakes. Sarah and I knew, at that point, we're like, "This isn't the pizza we wanna present to the group."

- Right.

- This isn't anywhere close to final, but here we are.

- Yeah, we did one version with double zero, and one version with AP. This is the Weeknight White from the book. I will say outright that there is too much sauce on these pizzas, so they're not as crispy as they have been in the past. So as you're tasting them, if your feedback is that there's too much sauce, I embrace that and agree with you.

- Monday?

- Monday.

- Monday.

- Like the structure was very different, but it wasn't really fun.

- Delicious.

- But is it hitting the thin crust trend? I think it's too thick for that. Yeah, and I don't know if I would feel good about calling this a thin crust pizza. Not that this is not the pizza, we just market it a different way.

- Pretty quickly, we got into putting butter in the pizza dough, laminating it in, kind of inspired by croissants and this trend that's happening in bread where butter gets folded into the bread dough. We were doing that with softened butter for a while, and I think the biggest development was when we started adding frozen, grated butter, which really made the layers defined and pronounced. And since then, we've been playing with how that butter gets incorporated and how much butter is in the dough. But frozen butter in the dough, is by far the most distinct, unique part of this pizza. One feature of this pizza is that it gets these really big bubbles from where the butter is steaming. So you can see it's starting to get brown. It's not quite finished. We really wanted to make a pizza that you can make on a sheet pan in the oven. No steel, no stone, but it gets crispy on the bottom. Last time we had this tasting, we pulled out the pizzas maybe a couple minutes too early. So our goal today is not to choke. Don't panic. Leave them in. Wait for the timer to go off, and then maybe add another minute. So I'm not going to take this out. I'm going to wait for a full bake like Martin would encourage me to do, whole bake.

- So Molly and Sarah have made what, 10, 12 more pizzas since we last tasted, focusing on kind of getting us across the finish line of that last, like, flavor explosion that we're looking for. If you could keep in mind, try to evaluate for the level of salt, which topping treatment you prefer, and just general thoughts are welcome as well. Like how this pizza compares to the one that we tasted three weeks ago.

- I do think the dough is more tender with the four tablespoons of butter, but it also is still crispy on the bottom. And I like the balance that it has right now out of all the ones I've tasted.

- Mm-hmm.

- Okay.

- So now I've got my sauce, I did some freshly grated Parm, and now this is shredded whole milk mozzarella. And then we also like to do cubes of fresh mozzarella on top just to make it a little bit more visually enhanced and get that extra cheesiness in there. This is pizza number 53 and pizza number 54 today. We went back and forth on cheese a little bit and then after that meeting was when we were like, it's the garlic basil oil.

- Right.

- That's the final, like, cherry on top of the pizza sundae that-

- Right.

- just takes it from great to outstanding.

- Right. So we want all of the bakers, people who know and follow us, and people who don't know about us, to make this recipe, share their experience baking it, make it their own as well. So it's really a celebration all year long of this one recipe.

- Did you hear that crunch?

- I work on a dream team, y'all. Being a recipe developer, working in a test kitchen is my dream job. And that's what a lot of people say to me when they find out that I have this job. They're like, "Oh, that sounds so cool. It must be a dream." And my response is, "It is. It sure is." I never had pizza like this. And I think the first time you bake it, you're gonna immediately want to bake it again.

- Yeah, let me see if you can hear it again. Check this out. So this is Martin from the studio saying thank you to our test kitchen and everyone else who's worked so hard on this Flaky Puff Crust Pizza, which is our Recipe of the Year. I hope you bake it. I hope you enjoy it. I'm gonna stop talking and have myself a bite of pizza. Cheers, y'all.

- Cheers!

- Cheers to a lot of hours and a lot of pizza.

- A lot of pizza.

- Yeah, that's true. We need Champagne in these glasses, not coffee.

- They don't know.