My name is Austin. I’m a late 20s dad in the midwest, and for years cooking has been a passion of mine. I’ve always liked to think that I cook from scratch and make food from raw ingredients, but what does it really mean to cook from scratch?

For me cooking from scratch has long meant not using boxed mixes and canned ingredients. If I make a cake, I make it with flour and butter and eggs and sugar, then making the icing from powdered sugar, butter, and cream cheese. It’s certainly more involved than buying a boxed cake mix and a tub of frosting, but is it really from scratch? Where does the flour come from? What about the butter and eggs and sugar? As Carl Sagan famously said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

I want to learn more about where my food comes from, and this blog is going to chronicle my adventures as I go. I don’t anticipate that I will invent the universe, but I hope to find out more about the ingredients I use.

Over the next few months I plan to document the creation of a pizza, tracing all of the ingredients back as far as I can. Next week I’ll post my signature pizza recipe; one that I’ve made for years that gets a lot of praise from family and friends. In the weeks that follow I will document the origins of each ingredient.

I plan to make several field trips, taking my kids to a dairy to learn where milk comes from, then teaching them how to turn milk into butter and cheese. I’m trying to find contacts at a wheat farm so that we can learn how wheat is sown, reaped, and processed into flour. When tomatos sprout up from the family garden, we’ll talk about how tomatoes can be made into pizza sauce.

I plan to post weekly for as long as it takes to make a pizza from scratch. I’m walking into this with a lot of uncertainty, so I don’t know how many posts it will take, or if I’ll even be able to track down all of my ingredients. If I enjoy documenting the process of making a pizza from scratch, I have lots of other recipes I’d like to explore.