Brittany Saxton got her start in the restaurant industry as a combination pizza maker and dishwasher at Michael Angelo’s, a local pizzeria in Kenton in northwest Ohio.
At 16 years old, she was looking to rake in some extra dough. But soon, the job became more than a source of income.
Pizza captured a slice of her heart.
“I slowly started falling in love with the art of tossing and making pizzas,” she said. “And I wanted out of the dish room, so I strived to become one of the best in the kitchen at the time.”
She succeeded, and two years later stepped onto an international stage, competing for the first time at the World Pizza Games.
Now, she has six championship titles under her belt. And this year, she’s hoping one of her pies takes the top prize in a simultaneous competition — the International Pizza Challenge.
Competing on a world stage
“The World Pizza Games are one of the biggest pizza events of the year, held in Las Vegas every year in March,” Saxton said. “Pizzaiolos from all over the world come to Vegas to compete there.”
They go head to head in categories like freestyle acrobatic dough tossing, where competitors perform routines to upbeat music, busting out dance moves while twirling discs of dough on their fingertips.
A row of judges score them on technique, evaluating elements like dexterity, difficulty and synchronicity.
Pizzaiolos also show down in contests like fastest pizza box folding, largest dough stretch and Saxton’s specialty — fastest dough stretch.
“For that competition you're taking five 12 ounce dough balls and slapping them out as fast as you possibly can,” she explained, demonstrating the skill in the kitchen of her restaurant, Six Hundred Downtown in Bellefontaine, about an hour northwest of Columbus.
On a workspace covered in flour, she pounded a ball of dough, then spun and flipped it with her fingers, transforming it into a large, round pizza crust in a matter of seconds.
The first time she tried doing this at the World Pizza Games…she lost.
“That first competition was scary,” she remembered.
But undeterred, she came back again years later, claimed the gold and has been winning medals ever since. She now has six championship titles.
“And I was the second woman ever in the world to own those medals,” she said. “Pizza has always been a very male dominant sport. Women are very much starting to get acknowledged and win the accolades they deserve in the industry, but it was not that simple all those years ago.”
Making an award-winning pizza
Now, Saxton is turning her focus to a new challenge: baking.
“In Vegas, again, we have the International Pizza Challenge, which is picking the pizzaiola of the year,” she said.
Contestants make pizzas that fit into five divisions: traditional, non-traditional, neapolitan, pan and world’s best cheese slice.
“We have award winners on our menu already,” Saxton said. “But I want to get every one of our specialty pizzas award winners, like our outside-of-the-box crazy ones. I want them all to have an award winner on it. So that's my goal now.”
This year, one of her employees is perfecting a pinched sausage and pepperoni pie for the competition, and she plans to enter a hot honey pizza.
“That has red sauce, mozzarella cheese, arugula, peppadew peppers, feta cheese, and natural casing pepperoni with hot honey drizzled on top,” she said.
Later this month, she’ll find out if it has what it takes. The competitions take place March 25-27 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
