It begins, as so many modern love stories do, with a gas grill and wildly inflated confidence. During the long months when the world slowed down and kitchens became laboratories, Neele and Saskia were doing what they had always done: cooking together, feeding friends, and chasing flavor with sincerity and joy. Their early pizzas were earnest, heavy, and unapologetically maximalist. Thick dough. Mountains of cheese. Six-hour proofs. They were convinced they had reached the summit.
They had not. They were standing at base camp.
What followed was not just a refinement of technique but the quiet unfolding of an identity. A portable pizza oven arrived. Then another. Then an obsession took hold, the productive kind that reorganizes your weekends and sharpens your senses. Pizza stopped being dinner and became language, craft, experiment, and eventually community. Today, under the name “TwoGirls and a Pizza,” Neele and Saskia are part of a global conversation about dough, heat, creativity, and the particular joy of making something beautiful with your hands and sharing it while it’s still hot.
Their story is less about virality than devotion, less about trends than touch. In an online world that often rewards speed, they have built something slower, warmer, and more enduring: a body of work defined by curiosity, generosity, and a refusal to treat pizza as anything less than serious play.
From Hobby to Calling
High-quality food was never incidental in their lives. Neele grew up surrounded by it: parents who ran a health food store, grandparents who worked as butchers. Saskia shared that reverence, and together they treated cooking not as routine but as ritual. When they first started making pizza at home, it was intuitive, enthusiastic, and blissfully uninformed. That phase ended the moment Saskia decided they needed a real pizza oven.
In December 2022, they bought an Ooni Koda 12. The effect was immediate and irreversible. Once the door to high heat and fast bakes opened, they walked through it at full speed. They read, tested, failed, adjusted, and repeated. Pizza was no longer something they made; it was something they studied. The goal shifted from “good” to “right,” from satisfying to sublime.
Pizza as Creative Medium
Friends noticed first. Guests were struck not just by quality but by imagination: unexpected combinations that worked because they were thoughtful, not gimmicky. A yellow tomato base with spicy salami, onions, and hot honey. Crunch meeting sweetness meeting heat, calibrated rather than chaotic. Those reactions planted a simple idea: maybe this was worth sharing.
Online, the response confirmed it. People weren’t just saving recipes; they were asking why things worked. Pizza became a canvas for expression and a vehicle for connection. The smallest twist, they learned, could change how someone thought about an entire dish.
Finding Their People
Few communities have embraced them as fully as #pizzawomen. From the beginning, other women in the pizza world offered advice, encouragement, and practical help. That support shaped not only their skills but their confidence. What began as mentorship grew into friendship, and then into responsibility. Neele and Saskia now see it as essential to extend that same hand to others, to make the craft feel accessible rather than gatekept. If there has long been a “bro code” in food culture, they are actively writing something better.
The Tools of Obsession
Joining the Gozney Collective felt like a natural next step. Surrounded by people who care deeply about outdoor cooking and oven physics, they found both inspiration and camaraderie. Their first bake in the Gozney Dome was a turning point: the design, the heat retention, the precision. Pizza-making shifted again, becoming smoother, more intuitive, almost meditative. Once you experience that level of control, there is no going back.
Risk, Failure, and the Edge of Good Taste
They are known for pushing toppings past the polite boundary. Sausages with nacho crumbles. Carbonara pizza topped with spaghetti. Corn cream with pickled red cabbage. Not every experiment succeeds. Early on, a strawberry-basil base paired with mushrooms taught them an important lesson: visual beauty does not guarantee harmony. Failure, in their kitchen, is simply data.
If one pizza had to represent them on a restaurant menu, it would be the Bella Verde. Mascarpone and garlic as a base. Baby spinach sautéed until just tender. Feta, pine nuts, lemon, black pepper. Rich, balanced, unapologetically indulgent. It is not concerned with calories. It is concerned with pleasure.
The Science Beneath the Romance
Their dough tutorials attract a global audience, in part because they dismantle a persistent myth: that a recipe alone guarantees success. Flour, water, salt, yeast. The variables are few, but the interactions are complex. Temperature, hydration, fermentation time, and flour type matter more than exact measurements. Their advice is steady and unglamorous: practice, observe, adjust one variable at a time. Learn to feel the dough. It will tell you what it needs.
Messages flood in daily, often deep in the weeds of fermentation curves and oven temperatures. They answer as many as they can, thoroughly and without condescension. When someone recreates a recipe and tags them, it lands not as flattery but as fulfillment. Inspiration, passed on, completed.
Looking Outward
Their list of dream collaborators reads like a map of contemporary pizza excellence: Emily Downs, Gabriel Reboul, Nic Jackson-Jones. Each represents not just skill but personality, a reminder that pizza culture at its best is as much about people as product.
At home, their dynamic is fluid. Both cook instinctively, but Saskia takes the lead on presentation. Their liveliest debates tend to circle meat versus vegetables, with Neele arguing for the right ham or sausage and Saskia happily championing plant-forward alternatives. These are not conflicts so much as textures in a shared language.
When people call pizza a love language, they take it literally. They are married. The oven is their meeting point, the kitchen their common ground. They push each other, synchronize without speaking, and believe that care is something you can taste.
Beyond Their Own Oven
Some of the best pizza they’ve eaten lives in memory rather than geography. New York left a mark, from classic slices to Grandma and Sicilian styles. Naples remains a pilgrimage yet to be made. In Germany, Neapolitan excellence thrives in places like L’Artista in Stuttgart and Berlin’s Gemello and Gazzo.
Ask where they would open a one-weekend pop-up, and the answer is immediate: New York. A city of density and difference, where a menu inspired by many cultures would feel at home. Friends would be involved. The energy would be high. The oven would never cool.
What Comes Next
Ten years from now, they hope “TwoGirls and a Pizza” stands for something clear: passion without pretense, skill earned through repetition, creativity anchored in respect for the craft. They imagine a physical place, someday, where others can learn, experiment, and fall a little bit in love with pizza themselves.
For now, they keep doing what they have always done. They cook. They test. They share. They invite others into the heat and the joy. Pizza, in their hands, is not just food. It is a practice. It is a partnership. It is a life still rising.
