All pies on Sourdough Willy.

Will Grant, Kitsap’s internationally acclaimed pizza maker, made and donated 80 pizzas to local organizations Feb. 9-10 to celebrate National Pizza Day.

About 235 people at Mary’s Place, an emergency shelter for women and families in Seattle, and about 80 people at the Salvation Army in Bremerton enjoyed slices of pizza made by hand at Grant’s family’s restaurant on Bainbridge Island, That’s A Some Pizza, made with his signature pizza dough recipe. Grant also owns and operates Sourdough Willy’s in Kingston.

Grant tossed, floured, sauced, added toppings to, and baked 60 cheese and pepperoni pizzas for 4:30 p.m. delivery to Mary’s Place Feb. 9. The process took about three hours, including an hour or so of transit. Grant loaded the pizzas into his 1941 panel delivery truck at That’s A Some Pizza in Coppertop Park, boarded the ferry, and delivered the pizzas to the shelter in Denny Triangle. Grant repeated the process with another 25 pizzas Feb. 10, delivered to Bremerton’s Salvation Army.

“That’s really the beautiful thing about what I do with sourdough pizza — actually, the longer it is from the time you bake it, the better it tastes,” said Grant. “That’s why it’s so great for delivery, or even a long delivery like that.”

The sourdough Grant works with has earned his pizzas global acclaim since 2017. The starter dates back to the Klondike Gold Rush, when people hoping to take advantage of gold discovered in Alaska and Canada in 1897 often carried sourdough starter as a lightweight and versatile source of food in the harsh and remote backcountry. Grant’s starter has been alive for over 120 years, which “gives our pizza a completely different flavor profile and consistency than any other pizzeria in the world,” per the restaurant’s website.

“It’s part of the fermentation process. Anytime, even at home, you bake bread and toast it again, it’s always gonna be better than the first time you bake it. I have a five-day fermentation process with all my doughs, so the more you have to bake it, the better that fermentation allows for a quality product,” Grant said.

Grant is proud of how long That’s A Some Pizza has been around— 42 years — and aims to give back to the Kitsap community when and how he can. He has participated in the National Pizza Day “Slice Out Hunger” campaign for about five years, he said, but this was the first time he delivered to Mary’s Place. In past years, he has donated pizzas to the Salvation Army in Bremerton for the organization’s meals program, but since nailing down his delivery method, he wanted to branch out, he said.

“This was new for me this year. I wanted to do something a little bigger, a little bit more, after I realized that I could deliver pizzas to the city just as well as I could deliver it in Bremerton, I was always having an issue of, there’s not a lot of shelters in Kitsap County, at least not when I started this five years ago,” said Grant. “And usually it’s 20 pizzas — 10 from each pizzeria — but they had 235 people that needed pizza today, so I made 60 pizzas to make sure I fed everyone there.”

Will Grant poses with his historic sourdough starter and his pizza oven.