Pizza is emotional.
Ask a pizza lover about their favorite pizza place and prepare for a short lecture on the superiority of the crust, the perfection of the cheese blend, and the sauce ratio.
Bring up their beloved childhood pizza parlor and you might induce a misty-eyed reminiscence about the smoky spot they visited every week with their grandpa, or warm memories of personal pan pizzas and giant, red Coke cups at Pizza Hut.
Don’t get anyone started on New York versus Chicago-style pies unless you crave culinary violence.
For Brett Freedman, owner of DTC Slice at 8000 E. Belleview Ave, in Greenwood Village, emotion is about half of what makes a great pizza. The other half is data-gathering.
“Having a technology background, I’m very precise,” said Freedman, who spent a couple of decades in computer programming before opening DTC Slice in August. “I don’t know how else to do it. If I want to have the best dough in Colorado, in the United States, that’s the only way I know how to do it — document everything and figure out how to make better dough.”
Freedman’s perfect pizza is what he calls a “Neo-Neapolitan”: Thin, but with the firm, crisp underside of a New York slice. The crust’s edges are crunchy on the outside, but soft and airy inside, like an irresistibly dippable mini-baguette.
After the stress of the Covid years, Freedman decided to take a sharp turn into pizza-making. Though he had experience cooking pizzas at home, he looked to a consultant for advice on perfecting his dough game. “I wasn’t going to completely wing it,” said Freedman. “[But] I wanted to do my own thing. I definitely didn’t want a franchise. I didn’t want anyone telling me how to do it, I wanted to do it my way. So I found a consultant that resonated with me.”
Freedman called upon the wisdom of Alastair Hannmann, also known as The Pizza Buddha, a former pizza shop owner who now helps pizzerias and chefs around the world with everything from recipes and techniques to kitchen design and equipment. After visiting Hannmann in Hawaii to talk pie, Freedman and Hannmann joined forces to develop DTC Slice’s recipes. (Watch their process on Hannmann’s Instagram page, @althepizzabuddha.)
The altitude didn’t give them much trouble, said Freedman, but yeast did.
“We changed yeast a couple times and had crazy variations on the dough,” he said. “The batches were wildly different. We try to have the final temp of our dough between 75 and 77 degrees, and we did that almost every time. Then we changed the yeast and were getting 71 and 81 [degrees] – we basically just threw the dough away.”
Their successful dough recipe uses 00 flour, a fine-ground Italian flour preferred for a lighter, less-glutinous crust. The dough ferments for three days at low temperature to develop flavor, then proofs in a programmable proofer-retarder machine that adjusts temps as needed.
The house-made sauce is tomato-forward – bright and potent, but not sweet. Toppings are familiar classics like pepperoni, sausage and the standard veggies, formatted into a short menu of house pies or as build-your-own options.
“We really want people to taste our ingredients, our crust,” Freedman said. “Everything we do, we try to be extremely balanced. We don’t try to overpower you with anything, just simple, high-quality ingredients.”
Freedman cites Lakewood’s Pizzeria Lui as his inspiration to keep things uncomplicated. “I think us and them are the best pizza in Colorado,” he said. “Lui’s been doing it longer so his pizza might be a little bit better … It might take us a year or two. We won’t stop ‘til we get there.”
Instead of using marketing data, Freedman’s been unscientifically relying on vibes to attract pizza people to his Tech Center storefront.
“I haven’t done any advertising,” said Freedman. “Zero. I love information coming from the community … I should be concerned more with profit, but I’m only concerned with pizza.”
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