Not a fan of pineapple and ham or any bbq sauce pizza, or buffalo wing pizza either. But the worst topping I've ever seen (other than that picture on top which makes my skin crawl) was when my husband and I were in St. Martin and the local Pizza Hut was advertising TILAPIA pizza. First of all I wouldn't be caught dead in a Pizza Hut but second of all who the heck would put Tilapia on a pizza--especially with red sauce and cheese?! Blech!

Love this article and the shots of the pizza are stunning! My husband is a stone mason and built us a wood fired oven outside and we had countless pizza parties out there, some with as many as 35 people or more. The pies cook in about 2 minutes so the one on the peel and one in the oven scenario you mentioned is even harder but just as critical with that many people. We enlisted friends and put them to work in an assembly line of getting the dough on the peel, toppings, and getting them to the oven, out of the oven and sliced for serving. Once in the winter we were prepping inside and handing the peel out of the kitchen window closest to the oven to speed it up. When we first started, we learned the hard way to have pizzas coming out as the guests arrive because there is nothing worse than 15 hungry people standing around watching one 12-14 inch pie get cut up into 8 slices and wondering who is getting them first and who has to wait! When they spend 8 minutes on a stone inside the oven (we've done that too) it's even worse! That 8 minutes feels like an eternity! We found that prepping the ingredients well in advance and having them arranged as you said with the most used the easiest to reach made a huge difference too. The first few pies are the most stressful since you want to get a flow going & make sure everyone is getting some. We had the same issue as well with getting the guests to pace themselves if you have 8-10 different pies planned. Usually we had some favorites that we'd start with and then the fun began when we'd have a large assortment of toppings and let our guests think up their own combos to try. Not feasible if you're doing it for money but if you're just home with friends or doing an informal demo which we did a lot for potential pizza oven customers then the hands on approach makes it more fun for everyone. I think a lot of people are intimidated by the idea of making pizza at home and believe that they can't get good results in their own oven--which is not true at all if you have a pizza stone. This is a great article that demystifies the process and should inspire confidence that with proper planning and a couple of inexpensive tools anybody can make great pizza at home. As a side point regarding pizza stones keeping their heat, before we had the wood fired oven we used a 1 1/4-inch thick piece of soapstone in our kitchen oven that my husband had leftover from a counter top job. It absorbed the heat so efficiently that we had no trouble with doing pie after pie on it with no wait time due to cooling. In fact my oven self locked after we shut it off because it kept radiating heat hours later and was still very warm to the touch the next morning. I don't know if they sell them commercially but you can get scraps at stone yards and companies that sell or make counter tops. It's worth finding one if you make pizza at home a lot--huge improvement over the average pizza stone you'd find in your local kitchen store and probably cheaper!