Moosonee, Ontario.
Before Final Stretch had a name.
In 2010, I was flying small airplanes in Moosonee, a remote community in Northern Ontario where the way in was by train or by plane. There wasn't a long list of places to eat. If we wanted something different, we learned to make it ourselves.
Pizza night became a crew ritual. Everyone would pile into one apartment. The oven went as hot as it could go, a pizza stone preheated inside, and the ingredients took over the coffee table.
I had two peels. I'd put a stretched dough on one and set it on the coffee table. Someone would build whatever pizza they wanted. I'd fire it into the oven, hand over the second peel with another dough, and while the first pizza baked, the next person started theirs. Turn, bake, launch, repeat. Eventually the whole room had eaten.
The dough back then was shit compared with what I make now. But it was all I knew — and pizza night kept happening.
Years of dough, ovens, fermentation, travel, ingredients and a lot of pizzas came after that. Final Stretch is the grown-up version of the same idea: make something worth gathering around, and keep passing the next dough across the table.