It's a beautiful day here in Lano, Texas. The birdies are chirping, the wildflowers are in bloom, and it's day three of the Lano Earth Art Festival. But I'm not here for the music or the World Championship Rock Stack in competition, although I will definitely be checking.
That out look at that pie.
I'm here to get some pizza, all right, man. But as you're about to hear, this isn't your run of the mill pizza.
My name is Jake Wright.
I am the owner of Oh My Pizza Pie, a mobile, wood fired pizza business. I'm based in San Marcos, Texas, but we sling pizzas all across Texas, all right.
Jake Wright never planned to be a pizza man, but as you're about to hear, life had other designs. To understand that, though, we need to take a look back way back. Jake's childhood was one filled with music. His mom was a music teacher, and he and his siblings played instruments. His was the type of family that had lugged their guitarist to church on Sunday, and it wasn't uncommon to have a family sing along in the evenings.
So when it came that time at the end of high school to start making a plan for his future. Jake did what many of us do. He tried to turn his passion into a career. For Jake, this meant enrolling at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, a highly regarded school in the music industry, with the hopes of one day becoming a producer. Only when Jake got there, he found that the music industry wasn't all kumbayas around the fire.
What about school? Didn't you like most of it? Oh?
I didn't realize how competitive it is, and I learned that I crumble under competition. So it's a very competitive industry, the studio work for music.
Jake then did another thing that many of us do when we're not entirely sure if we're on the right path. He went abroad, took some time away to learn a new language, experience another culture, and maybe find some inspiration, which is how Jake wound up on farms in Germany doing things he'd never expected to do.
What were you.
Doing on these farms cutting grass with a scythe where.
It was Yeah, cutting grass with a scythe shearing sheep, picking apples, harvesting cherries.
And in Bavaria, I slaughtered a chicken.
Well I didn't slaughter, I held the chicken while he got clubbed over the head and then had his throat slit. For a vegetarian, that was an eye opening thing, the.
Murdering of chickens. Aside, Jake enjoyed his time working on these farms, but there was one task that he loved more than all others.
Baking bread in the farm's bayhouse.
So the setting of the farm, this magical place in northern Germany, and it's an old house hundreds of years old, amazing flower garden, sheep and kind of right in the middle, and the central location is this old bake house from I think it dates before eighteen hundred. And you walk in and it smells like fire in there, and there's this old mill. We milled our own grains and it was a special meal made out of a certain type of wood so that moths wouldn't get the grain, And
just an amazing setting. And then the oven's probably six feet deep and four feet wide, just just gigantic. And the way you heat it is you just basically blaze it. You have to get it so hot that the bricks soak up all of the heat, so when you're ready to bake bread, when the fire is finished, it's way too hot to bake bread. And then it cools down and then you can bake bread and you can use that residual heat for a few days, and most ovens like that.
If this were a profile of nearly anyone else, this would be the point where that person stops everything and becomes a professional baker. But that's not exactly how it played out, because when Jake saw that oven, he didn't say I'm going to be a baker. He saw that oven and he thought, I'm gonna build an oven of my own. So you're in Germany, you see this oven, and you get inspired, and you think, I'm gonna go back to Texas and I'm gonna make an oven.
Yeah, after I learned to bake in that oven, I decided to build one.
What made you think you could make an oven? I don't know. I'm pretty handy.
I'd built things before, and I typically like, don't question, like someone else can do it when I can't. Die, So I just, you know, I just thought I could do it when I've had.
The benefit of knowing Jake for a number of years now, and I can say that this is perhaps his most admirable quality. Call it an innate confidence, or an obstinate tenacity, or just some good old boy grip, whatever you want to call it. Jake's the kind of guy that just gets stuff done. He's not going to wade around to the stars aligned to get a plan into place. He's just going to roll up his sleeves if he's wearing any,
and figure it out on the fly. But remember, at this point in our timeline, jake'sa financially strapped college kid scraping by working on farms. He doesn't have the money to just build a personal oven for his own backyard. In fact, he didn't even have his own backyard. So if he's going to build an oven, he needs to make his money back on the investment. As Jake saw it, he wasn't just building an oven. He was building himself a job. Job he came up with was to make pizzas. Would find pizzas.
What are you doing brushing the fireback? Yeah, and brushing the ashes.
Out of the way so we don't get ashy pizzas.
And then I need to add a log because it's looking a little low. I gotta keep it blazing.
And with his background in music, Jake got the clever idea to put his pizza oven on wheels and then drive it around to music festivals and other live events all over his home state of Texas. So you came home from Germany and you told your parents, I'm gonna build a pizza oven.
Yeah, outside your house.
They're very supportive, but I think they're probably a little bit skeptical.
You know, I had no money.
Yeah, my dad helped me some and probably three or four months later, ready for the first festival.
And after his dad had to put his own sweat into the building of the oven, he wanted to see the thing in action, so he offered to be Jake's first employee, at least for that initial weekend. So you and your dead drive your homemade pizza oven out to Alpine, Texas for day one.
Yeah, we pack up.
You know there's it's before like the final version of the trailer. So you know, there's trash cans hanging off the side, tints hanging off, wood packed as high as it can go in the truck, this big metal cylinder on a trailer. We kind of looked like the medicine man fling into town. But we made it there. All the wheels stayed on and we sold a lot of pizza.
How many pizzas do you think you made that day? I still remember one hundred and forty. When we come back from the break, Jake becomes a man of the road.
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We're back speaking with Jake Wright, who, since that first weekend of selling pizzas with his dad in West Texas, has spent the last twelve years rambling all over the lone Star state with his wood fired pizza oven in tow Tell me some of the places you've made pizzas before? Uh, everywhere. I've seen a lot of Texas. Oh hang on, let me cue Johnny Cash's song I've been everywhere. Oh wait, we don't have the rights, all right, this free song I'll have to do.
Yeah, we go all over Texas. We're in the middle of Texas and we'll go five or six hours in any direction. Basically, I there's a good festival, we'll go. So we might be one weekend and right in the middle of Houston doing the Houston Beer Fest. And the next weekend we can be in a town where Wuero there is no pizza. Atlantos gas station pizza but nothing else. Dallas tumbleweed town, a tumbleweed town, yeah exactly, Marfa, Fort Stockton, I Alpine Pecos and Burnett and Bluebonnet Festival.
Yeah.
Sometimes going to a festival, you never know where you're gonna end up, especially if it's the first time and no two are really alike. So one festival we can be selling pizzas to people dressed up as wizards and fairies walking. By the next week we're in some small town and it's cowboys with cowboy hats, jeans tucked into their boots, literally wearing spurs like they just got off their horse.
But no matter how different they all are, they all love pizza exactly.
They all love pizza. It's a great business to be it.
So if the oven's running at nine hundred So how long does it take to cook a pizza at nine hundred degrees?
About ninety seconds to two minutes if we're ranging from eight to nine hundred degrees, So.
You got to really be paying attention. You can't be slacking on the job.
No, we typically have one guy that's just the oven guy, and it's kind of my favorite job because you just kind of get lost in the fire.
And how many pizzas can you fit in that oven at the same time?
Ah, we typically have four, but you could fit five or six.
But we typically were going so fast at four at a time.
What's the record pizzas in a day?
Forty damn? Yeah that was that was a busy day.
But before you head out to your backyard to build your own pizza trailer, Jake would like you to know that it isn't all peace, love and profit out there. So you're not making pizza in a nice, climate controlled space. You're out there dealing with the elements. Yeah, yeah, completely.
You know homemade trailer with old corrugated tin on the side that you know, if it pours it can leak a little bit. Yeah, we're definitely out in the elements. We've made pizza in rain storms, ice storms, We've gotten stuck because the car couldn't pull out of an icy parking lot. So we're we're definitely in the elements rain or shine.
And let's remember they're in Texas, which if you've spent any time there, you know just how freaking hot it can get. What's the hottest temperature you think you ever made pizza in?
I'm pretty sure the Georgetown Rodeo maybe nine years ago was one hundred and seven.
Oh my god. Yeah, that was no fun. Every part of that festival was no fun. Did a lot of people get pizzas that day?
No, it's too hot. They got snow cones.
And then there are the porta pottis.
So you know, just imagine these hot festivals where it's one hundred outside and you go to porter potty. It's essentially a greenhouse in there, so it's one hundred and ten in there. And then after a full day of that, wondering where you're going to shower, So you're really roughing it out there.
Yeah, yeah, we're roughing it. You know.
We end at midnight sometimes and then we'll go to the campor four of us sleeping in the camper.
In spite of the heat and the bad weather and the occasional vehicle breakdowns and a whole big chunk of downtime when all live events were canceled due to the pandemic, Jake Wright has managed to persist through the hardships. He's even expanded his operation with another oven and a whole other team of employees to run it so he can hit two festivals in a weekend. All right, so we
got dough balls here. You're making these on site, making these on site, made the dough this morning, got the cheese on, not too much, A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Do you like living this in your eccentric mobile festival life?
Yeah? I do like it definitely, times where I where something steadier sounds nice, or like a paycheck does sound.
Nice, looking good, that looks great.
But overall, one hundred percent, I like the freedom of it, being able to move about how I want, and I could shut down shop and no one misses me as long as I show up to the festival the next year.
One of the prettier ones of the day for you. So you made four hundred of these yesterday.
Yeah, four hundred and change, crazy and we got a crew in Tomball, Texas at a German festival.
You're doubled up this week, doubled up and they beat us by a little bit.
But but we're at a cooler festival, so sorry, Tumble. Generally, the people are all happy to be removed from you know, work or stress for a few days, to be out with friends, partying, having a good time eating pizza.
And I get to give pizza to these people.
Doesn't seem like a bad life. No, it's really not. It's a good line. I know Jake didn't live out his childhood fantasy of getting into the music industry. One of the plus sides of being a mobile pizza slinger is he gets to listen to live music almost every night.
What time does the band come on tonight? The band comes on at eight tonight. You're looking forward to it? Yes, I think you'll be able to step away and go check them out for.
A minute for a few songs. And there's also Friday and Saturday night. There's right over there in the alley. A few years ago they started Shakedown Street and it's sort of Grateful Dead themed and there's got a great band that plays in there. It's really small, it's like thirty fee thirty feet.
It's very cool for on the job. I'm Arey Thompson.
Tracy. Okay, so my voice is cracking. I'm older than fifteen. I've just been talking over music all day