Crazy Pizza People (Chow)

Experimenting with some pizza of our own today, NDM ran across a pizza website whose owner's dedication to his food not only magnificently exceeds my own but perhaps crosses over into the realm of mania. This is Jeff Varasano's take on pizza. Jeff has defeated his oven's safety features so he can use the cleaning cycle to bake his pizza at well over 500 degrees.

He's making the most spare type of Neapolitan pizza margherita, so his focus is quite different from my own. He doesn't even make a sauce, while for me, while I like a good crust, it is all about the sauce. I'm cooking one now:

1. I browned 6 roughly chopped cloves of garlic in a few tablespoons of olive oil on high heat.
2. I threw in about two tablespoons of spicy Italian peppers and crushed dried bird peppers.
3. Then, I splashed in maybe a cup and a half of a Shiraz I had open and reduced it with 3 large bay leaves.
4. We picked a tray full of fresh tomatoes (These are an unknown small red hybrid which EJB gave us the seeds for several years ago -- NDM grew them this year for the first time as a lark. They are excellent.) that I diced and threw in. They're still simmering, mostly filling a dutch oven.
5. I also threw in a fair does of basil, oregano, and freshly ground black pepper along with a dash of chili powder to stew with the tomatoes.

By the time we're ready to sauce the pizza, this will have cooked down to an incredibly rich and potent red sauce.

Of course for the wife it is all about the genuine buffalo mozzarella. Luckily I can live with her mozzarella fixation if she can live with my spicy sauce fixation.

Updated...
So here are the results!