You are looking at, and probably savouring, the 1st Prize winning pizza from the 1st OONI OFF Pizza Making competition held yesterday at the St. Elmo’s Brewery in Austin, Texas!!! Yup.
Here are the winners.
Daughter Meghan and her husband Kaled entered on a whim when Kaled’s friend mentioned he was going to participate.
Neither MEGHAN or KALED has formal food education. Kaled work for a bit in a pizza shop a few years ago.
They had to apply to be selected as one of the 15 contestants.
OONI is an Edinburgh, Scotland 🏴 based pizza oven company with U.S. head office in, you guessed it…. Austin.
The event was held at St. Elmo’s Brewery in South Austin.
Tickets were sold and 150 to 200 patrons attended. They had to cook and serve 15 pizzas!!!
Megs and Kaled practiced making their dough for a few weeks. It was the first time they had made pizza in on OONI, or any other pizza oven. They had just used a conventional oven to this point. MEG said their first doughs were over- proofed but they scrapped those, stayed the course and got it going.
There were 3 local pizza savvy Austin based judges. They were from All Day Pizza (which I can vouch is fantastic), Detroit 313 and Smalls Pizza.
Here is the link to their website:
And the description of the winning pizza – Red Pie.
As winners, they received the trophy and fancy pizza peel seen above, $500 cash and an OONI pizza oven worth almost $1K!!
Now for a song. Although I never imagined doing for a song for the group on winning a pizza making contest, it didn’t take me long to think of a track from my collection that married up a band name and song title with this tale. (The lyrics not so much.)
Here is “Prize” by faves KITCHENS OF DISTINCTION 🇬🇧. Ironically, I did a feature on this band and lead singer Patrick Fitzgerald just 5 weeks ago on Feb 1! See songs 1518-1525.
Congrats guys!
SPOTIFY-
https://open.spotify.com/track/6aa93HiyujHt2WWy8ELAC4?si=GuAyIyJATfSlNGktRFW_iQ
(SONG 1631)
Play Loud and Cook Louder!
3/8/2026
underground365 
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