Jonathan Shapiro’s backyard over-looks the grass fields at the school where he’s taught math for more than a quarter-century.
On a table in that backyard, he’s laid out several tools for his task ahead — flour, bowls of ingredients, a clean cutting board, a pizza shovel and a handheld cutter.
All of these are crucial instruments for a man who leaves friends and coworkers awestruck at how he uses them to transform dough, sauce and cheese into something magical.
Born in New York City, Shapiro was surrounded by pizza his entire life. He moved to Berkeley as a child but never lost the love for the food that he developed in his native city.
In early February, Shapiro hosted several colleagues from the Cal Poly mathematics department in his backyard, where they sampled five of Shapiro’s creations.
Shapiro caressed the dough gently with his hands silently except for his short deep breaths. He had spent three days preparing the dough balls beforehand.
The NYC native uses sauce made with Italian San Marzano toma-toes, his cheese from the country’s parma region – even the flour he uses to make his dough is from the Mediterranean country.“
It just shows the care and love in preparing [the pizza],” Elsa Medina, another math professor, said.
After doling out sauce, laying out cheese in a careful pattern and driz-zling the pie with oil, he slides it into his Zio Ciro pizza oven, handcrafted with refractory concrete on the Italian island of Sardenia, which reaches nearly 900º F and cooks pizzas in just two minutes.
Shapiro bought the oven a few years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he decided he wanted to step up his passion for the food. YouTube was his main instructor for learn-ing traditional Italian pizza-making methods and he’s since mastered the traditional Neopolitan style.
But he didn’t stop there.
Shapiro makes everything from a fig-and-goat-cheese pizza – using fresh figs from a tree about ten feet from the pizza oven – to a dessert pizza with strawberries, Nutella and blueberry chèvre.
“You can take any ingredients you like,” Shapiro said. “It’s not a hard thing to make something that tastes good.”
In some ways, Shapiro’s pizza-mak-ing is his second form of art.
Shapiro said that despite what many people may think, math is an extremely creative field. Mathematicians have the ability to analyze models and constructions that have never been seen before and then create proofs for these models in any way they want to.
His research focuses on topics like Operator Theory, a type of functional analysis that builds the basis for quantum mechanics.
Besides connecting him with “regular people,” pizza making is freeing in a way for Shapiro. For him, there’s no topping too daunting, no style that he won’t try. It gives him a sense of freedom.
“I love everything about it,” Shapiro said.