Broken Tree Pizza is a woodfire pizza company that makes American inspired Italian pizza. Come enjoy our storefront or we can bring our storefront to you!
What is Broken Tree Pizza?
The journey to start my own wood fire pizza company has been a long and arduous quest. As with starting any type of business there have been many moments of success and many moments of failure. The path of discovery has taken me many different places, introduced me to many different people and led me through many ranges of emotion. I will admit that somewhere in the process I lost sight of the most basic element of this venture. I lost sight of the reason I wanted to start this company in the beginning. Passion, enjoyment, family, great food, and the communal sense had faded away and been replaced by regulations, insurance, contracts and individualism. It was almost too much at times. Then, one day someone asked me a very simple question that helped me refocus my attention to the core principals of what I was doing. What is your first memory of pizza? Such a simple question but it stopped me dead in my tracks. How could I think of my first memory of pizza? Pizza is so ubiquitous in our culture that we have all been eating it since before we remember it. After a couple of moments of searching it hit me like a brick wall. A day I hadn’t thought about in close to 30 years.
It was a brisk fall day and I was in first grade. My mother picked me up from school and told me that the oak tree in our back yard had fallen over onto our deck. My father was already home from work and he was going to need my help with cleaning up the tree. When we got home my father was in the back yard with a chainsaw cutting up the parts of the tree that had fallen as well as removing the parts of the tree that were still standing. It was a little bit sad because it was the biggest tree in our yard and I had spent many hours playing on and around that tree. My job was to start stacking logs. Together, my father and I worked well past dark in order to get everything cleaned up. When we were finished we were cold, tired and hungry. My father decided to order a pizza for us. Having pizza delivered for dinner was a treat for us back then. It wasn’t something we did that often. It was our reward for the work we had accomplished together. When the pizza arrived my father and I sat down at our kitchen table and I grabbed the first piece, the same piece I still grab to this day when I get a thin crust pizza that has been cut into squares, the corner piece. The small triangle that is one bite, the first bite, the introduction to that particular pizza experience. Usually still alarmingly hot and guaranteed to burn the roof of your mouth but worth every bit of the pain. I ate that first corner piece and was confused. I had to ask my father, Dad, why does the sausage taste so different? I had only had sausage pizza at this point in my life. It’s not sausage, he told me, its pepperoni. Was it ok? He asked. Is it too spicy for you? He inquired. Too spicy, no way. Not a chance. I had never tasted anything so alive in my life! It was spicy, savory, crispy and delicious. I had tasted peperoni for the first time in my life and it was a watershed moment for me. Looking back it is if that is the day my taste buds came alive. A moment I will always remember even though I had forgot it. Sometimes it is good to forget. A wise man once told me that.
So there you have it. My first pizza memory. The memory of tasting something that woke me up. The memory of reward after a hard day of work. The memory of my father and time spent with him. A memory of discovery. The memory of what I wanted to create for myself, my family and my community came back and presented itself more clearly than ever. The passion that was burning within was back and more defined, exciting and crystal than ever. It had never gone away – it was just forgot. Sometimes it is good to forget. What is your first memory of pizza? What have you forgot? What is your Broken Tree?
