Bye bye, delivery guy -- we’ve turned our kitchen into a pizza parlor

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We turned today’s Food section over to one of our favorite foods: pizza. We’ve got everything you ever wanted to know, or needed to know, about pizza.

Seriously.

You probably think you cannot make good pizza at home because you lack a pizza oven. Well, think again. Times test kitchen manager Noelle Carter shows you how to line your oven with fireproof bricks*** so you can achieve that trademark crispy crust. (You can also watch her do it in the video.) All good pizzas start with homemade dough, so we’ve got a recipe for that as well as recipes for pizza Margherita (and a no-cook sauce) and potato pizza. We’ve also got a look at variations on that theme.

But let’s say you’re not the cook-at-home type, or you want your pizza, and you want it RIGHT NOW. Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila takes you on a tour of the best gourmet pizza spots in town and here’s a list you’ll definitely want to bookmark, as well as a locator map. (And by the way, did you ever wonder how we got from regular old-fashioned pizza to gourmet pizza? Check out this cool pizza chronology flash graphic.)

What’s that? You say that you can’t get good pizza west of Manhattan? Then check this out. And then check out this list of places were you can buy it by the slice.

Finally, here’s a photo gallery look at testing out pizzas in The Times’ test kitchen, from start to finish, and here’s a recommended wine to wash down that slice of ‘za.

(***Note that we said fireproof bricks. If you use the regular ol’ bricks you’ve got piled up in the yard, they could explode. And that’s not a good pizza topping.)

-- Rene Lynch