You Have To Schedule An Appointment To Eat This 12-Hour Pizza Soufflé

Pizza: Just when you think you've seen it all, some madman comes by, slow-cooks a pie in an oven for half a day, and proves you wrong. The "DoughDici" pizza soufflé (a riff on the Italian word for 12) is a pie so delicate that it takes 12 hours for the dough to rise, and then the last half hour is spent carefully dressing the pie with fresh mozzarella and grating cheese before it collapses (much like the notoriously complex nature of a traditional French soufflé).

But getting your hands on this pie is not as simple as punching in a Seamless order on a Friday night. DoughDici costs a hefty $38 per pie and is only available at Sofia Pizza Shoppe on 1st Avenue in New York City by appointment. Since the pie is so labor-intensive, they only make two or three daily.

Tom DeGrezia, the mastermind behind this complex pizza creation said that he was inspired by Detroit-style pizza, which is traditionally made with a crispy, deep-dish crust and topped with gooey mozzarella and ribbons of tomato sauce on top.

"It's a labor-intensive process and an exercise in extreme patience," Degrezia told the blog Best Pizza NYC. "Depending on the temperature in the room, we're constantly checking to see if ingredients need to be added to keep the dough soft as it rises."

Here's the breakdown of every excruciating detail that goes into making a pizza soufflé:

The house dough is cold-fermented for 72 to 80 hours and is embellished with some secret ingredients. It then rises in an olive oil and grated cheese-lined pan for 12 hours. Throughout the long process, olive oil and grated cheese are added at a slow but steady drip. Then, during the last half hour, it is delicately dressed with layered homemade mozzarella, sauce, and grating cheese before baked being for a final ten minutes and sprinkled with (what else?) more cheese and fresh basil.

Exhausted yet? Just hearing about the extensive process makes that $38 price tag look fairly reasonable. And as for the taste? Best Pizza NYC likens it to a "garlic knot-esque Sicilian pizza" crust that won't put you into an immediate carb coma.