Pizza Night! (With a side of AI)

I always love when I have an excuse to toss some pizzas. The latest excuse was book club. Our neighborhood has a book club where, yes, they actually discuss a book and, when we host, I make pizza.

I decided on 8 pizzas this time. Not that there was going to be enough folks to consume 8, but because I wanted these 8 pizzas in my life. And this also leaves enough leftover such that neighbors can take some home for the folks that didn’t make it.

The Menu

• Basic Cheese
• Pepperoni
• Heirloom Tomato & Basil
• Pesto & Basil
• Mushroom & Truffle Salt
• Fig Jam, Prosciutto, Arugula, Pine Nuts, Goat Cheese
• Cream Cheese, Capers, Salmon, Dill
• Southwestern

I missed taking a picture of the Southwestern Pizza.

All in all, a huge success. The pizzas were great. The company fantastic. A lively book discussion was had with the author present. Good times!

AI and Pizza?

This party was significantly different in execution. Namely, I used AI – specifically, Claude Code – in a project management role to organize the shopping, prep, and execution.

It was, by far, the most relaxing pizza night I’ve executed!

Planning

First, using Claude Code, I manage what I call the “California Kitchen” recipes file. These are recipes that I’ve collected over the years while living in California. This is in parallel to the gigantic library of family recipes – spanning back 100+ years – that my mom and sisters had collected (I used Claude Code to convert all of those from a mish mosh of dead file formats to markdown files, then published to a family accessible web page).

I created a new directory in California Kitchen called “Events”. It is where I work through the food/drink planning for parties we throw.

In that directory, I jotted down some ideas for the various pizzas I wanted to serve, eventually narrowing it to the 8 you see here.

I then asked Claude to generate an ingredient list from the pizzas. All the ingredients that would be needed to make all the pizzas.

With that in hand, I checked what I had on hand and marked those off. Made a couple of substitutions based on what was on hand.

Literally, to Claude: “I have ingredients for the pizza sauce, olive oil, mexican cheese, an onion, etc.etc.etc… sub pecorino, which I have, for parmesan” and Claude figured out what was still needed and modified the recipes accordingly.

Day Before Prep Planning

The best part?

To Claude: “Making a 62% hydration dough, want an overnight rise in the fridge. When do I need to start it, when to ball, when to pull from fridge prior to cooking. Dinner will start at 7pm.” Boom. Schedule done.

Also: “What prep work can I get done the day before? Make a checklist.” Came up with a checklist and even formatted it with checkboxes that I could cross off (I do print these things in this case).

Day of Planning & Execution

Did the same for day of prep, too.

As for the cook? That was another checklist from Claude where it listed out each pizza and the ingredients needed. Made it trivial to stay on top of which pizza I was working on and exactly what I needed. As well, it was easy to grab the ingredients for the next pizza while the current one was cooking.

Finally, after it was all said and done, I gave Claude some notes on which pizzas went the fastest, which had the most leftover, and any comments I overheard from the guests. That’s all been recorded such that the next time we host book club, I’ll know that I should make more mushroom, that we have at least a couple of vegans attending, and that one guest is mildly allergic to onions (I’ll keep onions out of my sauce).

Normally, slinging 8 pizzas back to back is non stop busy work. There is a lot to keep track of and a constant struggle to keep all the details in my head. Writing it down definitely helps, but having the extra project management oversight of the LLM took it to a whole new level.

As well, Claude was exceptionally helpful planning the prep. Suggested several techniques for prepping ingredients that I hadn’t encountered before. Salt and drain the tomatoes. Lay out the fresh sliced mozz on a cookie sheet and let sit in the fridge for a bit. Save the rehydrated mushroom broth to add a bit to the mushrooms when sautéing for extra flavor intensity. That sort of thing. All on point (I double checked).