Ashley Grillaert got her first job at age 15 at Zeeks Pizza in Seattle, where she grew up. When she finally left six years later, she had “graduated” to making pizzas there, which included fermenting the dough, rolling it out, spinning and stretching it, and then baking the pies.
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“I liked the production aspect of making dough. I thought it was cool that it was alive and that it changed every day,” said Grillaert, who owns Outside Pizza, a Denver food trailer, with husband Ryan. It was that same fascination with yeast and fermentation that led Grillaert to a job with Washington’s 10 Barrel Brewing Company in 2015, where she stayed for five years.
“It’s like all that I think about,” she said about pizza dough.
When she and Ryan both lost their jobs at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, though, they decided to try something new, so the pair moved to Denver and began tweaking their sourdough crust recipe using different flours, and hosting pizza parties for friends and family.
Once they had it down, they outfitted a vintage, 1958 Shasta trailer with pizza ovens and began popping up at breweries and farmers markets around the city.
“I always knew I would find my way back to pizza,” she said.
But pizza — like brewing, cheffing, baking and “food in general” — is “very much a male-dominated scene,” Grillaert said, which is why she’s participating in Women’s Pizza Month, a nonprofit that highlights women in the industry during Women’s History Month (March).
Founded by New York sourdough baker, pizzaiola and consultant Christy Alia, of Real Clever Food, Women’s Pizza Month has gained traction in Colorado with some of Grillaert’s fellow pizza chefs, including Audrey Kelly of Audrey Jane’s Pizza Garage in Boulder, Melinda Carbajal of the Simply Pizza food truck, and Melina Feliz, co-owner of the Pizza Bandit, a Littleton truck that just opened a location inside Avanti Food & Beverages in Denver.
“Men, specifically in the food industry, are usually loud and outspoken in the best ways. But that can overshadow women who feel like maybe they can’t be as loud,” Grillaert said. “So, this allows women pizzaiolas to show that they can be loud, too, and that they are here.”
For Grillaert, one of the ways to be loud is to post videos on social media of her spinning pizza, a stretching technique that is as cool as it is necessary, she said. “I learned how to do it as a teenager working at Zeeks — one of the owners taught me how.”
Grillaert is quick to point out that she doesn’t do tricks — real pizza dough wouldn’t hold up to that much spinning. And although spinning adds a bit of “flair,” gravity and wind resistance are the real keys to what makes high-flying dough work in the oven.
Customers seem to think so, too. Outside is typically slammed on weekends when it shows up at Cerebral Brewing, Ephemeral Taphouse and Novel Strand Brewing, all in Denver.
In April, Cerebral will open its third taproom at 3257 Lowell Blvd., with space for Outside Pizza to set up a permanent location inside a month or two later.