The Weekly Sear #003: Pizza Night Returns

Rex opens the doors

Squad, we took the one food everybody swears they miss and rebuilt it from the meat up. Chef Sear pressed ground chicken and parmesan into a crust, baked it stiff, and topped it like a Friday night order. Half this pizza carries 49 grams of protein. That's not a substitute, that's a statement.

This week's recipe: Carnivore Pizza

This is the recipe for the night the family orders pizza and you want to stay on plan without eating a sad plate next to them. The crust is ground chicken, egg, and parmesan. It bakes flat, browns at the edges, and holds a slice shape you can lift with one hand. The cross-section is the proof: meat where the dough should be.

49g protein per serving, 25 minutes, about $7 for the whole pizza. The full recipe, step by step with macros, lives here: Carnivore Pizza.

Two notes from the pan. First, press the crust thin. Thin is what turns it crisp instead of meatloaf-shaped. A wet hand or a second sheet of parchment makes the pressing easy. Second, do not skip the first bake. The crust needs those 12 minutes alone to set its structure before the toppings add moisture back.

Doc Ribeye: "You can only absorb 30 grams of protein per meal"

Let's look at what the data actually says.

This myth survives by mixing up two different words. Absorption is your gut taking protein in, and your gut absorbs virtually all the protein you eat. Larger meals just digest more slowly. The famous 30-gram figure comes from studies measuring something narrower: how much a single dose acutely stimulates muscle protein synthesis in the hours after eating.

Schoenfeld and Aragon worked through this in a 2018 review in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. Their reading of the evidence: to maximize the muscle-building response, a target of roughly 0.4 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per meal makes sense for lifters, and total daily protein remains the number that matters most.

The calibrated takeaway: your 60-gram steak dinner is not wasted. Nothing gets flushed. If you lift and want every edge, spreading protein across the day may help at the margins. If you just want to be full and hit your daily total, eat the steak and stop doing arithmetic at the table.

Myth busted. Steak rested.

Macro Mama's prep tip: one roast, four plates, and a snack you did not pay for

Sunday, put four whole chicken legs on a rack at 425 F for 40 minutes with salt and a butter brush. That is dinner tonight plus three lunches at roughly 36 grams of protein each, and chicken legs are one of the cheapest proteins in the store. Then start a skin bank: any time a recipe has you skin chicken thighs, drop the raw skins in a freezer bag. When the bag hits a few ounces, press the skins flat between two sheet pans and bake them into chips. The snack costs nothing because you already bought it.

This week on the channel

• Chef Sear is loading the pizza shot this week: the slice lift with the crust holding stiff and the cheese pull stretching. Cross-section included, because nobody believes the crust until they see it.
• Rex runs the protein math on flanken short ribs: 2 minutes per side, eaten off the bone with your hands. He has opinions about forks now.
• Doc Ribeye drops the 12-second version of the 30-gram myth. It fits because the answer is short: that is not what absorption means.

Find it all @searsquad, every platform.