Jim Mumford, the author of a new cookbook called PizzaPedia, has always enjoyed cooking and eating good food.
The Portage resident says he has long been delighting family and friends with his signature style of cooking “healthy comfort food.” He even created a blog, JimCooksFoodGood.com, to keep track of the meals he’s prepared, and shared it with friends and family. When a professional recipe writer friend asked him for help tinkering with some recipes, he “fell in love with that instantly.”
So he wrote his first cookbook, The Food Good Cookbook: Healthy Comfort Food Reimagined, which was picked up by Broadleaf Publishing in 2023. “And then the snowball kept growing as it rolled downhill,” he says.
He started the I Need Pizza Club podcast, taking on brand partnerships, ghost-writing projects, and contributing writer roles, doing interviews on websites like MarthaStewart.com, and becoming a certified judge at the World Food Championship.
But Mumford is not a classically trained chef nor a recipe maker by trade. In fact, he spends his 9 to 5 as a chemical engineer — the fundamentals of which proved to be a solid foundation for his foray into the wide, technical, delicious world of pizza and the creation of his new cookbook, PizzaPedia: Favorite Recipes from Across America, released last June by Fox Chapel Publishing.
The cookbook digs into the history of more than 100 pizza recipes, their origins, and best practices for pizza making. While introducing the tools necessary for a successful pie, Mumford also presents the technical aspects of making a pizza in a matter-of-fact way that will give even a novice chef with a passion for pizza confidence to fire up the oven.
“I made over 500 test pizzas for this book,” Mumford says. “I was very purposeful on writing for a first-time cook and someone who might not have a lot of confidence. I spent years writing and rewriting for that audience.”
How did you get to where you are today?
I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, as an only child. My mom and her mom are Sicilian, so pizza and pasta and an Italian-American vibe were present throughout my childhood. I joke that I didn’t realize pizza came as round until I was a teenager — it was always a square Sicilian kind of sheet pan.
I went to Purdue University for engineering, graduated in 2008, then moved to the Chicago area and worked in nuclear power for over a decade. That’s where my culinary eyes became wide open and where my love of food blew up. My wife Gloria and I lived above a pizzeria, Flo and Santo’s, where we had one pizza that we would always order. In the book I call it the “G&Jim.” It’s got pepperoni, goat cheese, sun-dried tomatoes and red onions in the tavern style. It’s the pizza we ate the night I proposed.
Our daughter, Danielle, was born in late 2017, so in 2018 we decided to move to the Kalamazoo area. I’d had friends and family saying, “Hey, Jim, we love that you cook food for us. Can you share a recipe?” I made a website originally for friends and family, JimCooksFoodGood.com, purpose-fully tongue in cheek, to share recipes of food that I made for them. That blew up in a way I could have never imagined and kicked off my culinary journey from hobby to where I am today.
PizzaPedia is a mix of ingredients in its own right: equal parts love letter to pizza, history lesson, travel adventure and strict commitment to the process. What was your inspiration for this cookbook?
As with most of my cooking adventures, PizzaPedia was kind of an accident. We had just moved here, and I had to travel to Connecticut last minute and decided to drive. A blizzard hit along the way, and what should have been a 10-hour drive took three days. I made an adventure out of it, Googling “pizza near me,” and stopped at places in Youngstown and Cleveland, Ohio, and Pittsburgh. Every place had a different pizza.
It’s so interesting that I drove basically a straight line, a few hundred miles, and yet every 50 miles, the pizza was just different. I talked to people, asking, “What style is this? What’s that?” and made friends and connections. I thought, “There’s a story here, and one day, when I have nothing to do, I’m going to figure this out.”
Then the pandemic happened, and I started diving in, calling some people that I met along the way. What surprised me was the pizza community, their openness, and how many people flat-out gave me their recipes. I think you can see in the book the love these pizza makers have for their pizza.
What advice do you have for the novice pizzaiola or pizzaiolo (meaning pizza maker)?
I want them to do two things. One, don’t worry about it. It’s not going to be perfect. I’ve been making pizzas basically nonstop for six years and consider myself a rookie compared to some of the people I’ve met. Don’t fuss about it being perfectly round; it’s still going to taste delicious because you made it with love and it’s pizza. The second is to please measure and weigh everything. When I had my friends and family test this book, the ones who had the worst results were those who eyeball everything. Unfortunately, you really do have to weigh ingredients. Go nuts with the toppings and cheeses, but for the dough it has to be a little more scientific. A couple grams either way can make or break it.
How did the Kalamazoo Style pizza come about?
The Kalamazoo Style pizza is one I’m arguably the most proud of because it was a lab accident. I made over 500 pizzas for this book. Different doughs, different sauces, different combinations. I always made extra of everything so I could make multiple batches. I ended up with some scraps: Chicago dough, Detroit sauce. I had this vision in my mind of what I was doing. It was just a perfect cross-section of Detroit-style pizza and Chicago-style pizza – isn’t that what Kalamazoo and Western Michigan are? Yes, we’re in Michigan, but we’re so influenced by the Great Lakes, the Midwest and Chicago. Culturally, this area takes influence from everywhere, but it’s still uniquely itself.
— Interview by Jordan Bradley, edited for length and clarity
