Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

What do you do when life gives you lemons? Well, of course, we all know you make lemonade! Recently, life delivered a volunteer jalapeño plant in a section of my yard that shouldn’t have been growing anything because my sprinklers are on the fritz and we’re in the middle of a drought here on the West Coast. A few weeks later, while the fire in my Primavera wood-fired oven was…Read More…

Peppe Miele, our Virgil of the Vera Pizza Napoletana universe, continues his guided tour in this segment, turning his attention to one of my favorite subjects, dough fermentation. We receive a lot of e-mails asking about how long dough should be fermented before making the pizzas, and the answers are nearly infinite and weighted with lots of theories and opinions. But Peppe cuts right to the chase as to the…Read More…

Okay, this is going to take a few posts to do it right, so let me start here and carry on over the next few weeks: On the morning of September 17th, 2015 the Pizza Quest film team, who all converged from a number of different locations, met up at 9 AM in San Francisco for the first of four days of filming. We met at the front door of…Read More…

In this short segment we discuss with Peppe the use of Italian -00- (Double Zero) flour, which he defines as a balance between the fineness of the grind (ground very fine and, in my words, extracted from the pure endosperm with all the fiber sifted out) and the protein content (he doesn’t specify the amount but it’s probably between 10%-11.5%).  An important take-away form this conversation is the ideal fermentation…Read More…

Hi Everyone, I just got back from an amazing weekend at the Forno Bravo Expo, in Salinas, California (near Monterey) where we did demo’s, filmed hours of new material for Pizza Quest, and met a lot of great people, many who already own WFO’s (Wood-Fired Ovens), and even Fire Within ovens on wheels.  I’m still unpacking, so will write a longer post, with photos, in a few days after I…Read More…

Welcome Back! We have 10 webisodes in this interview series with Peppe Miele, so we’ll be covering a lot in the coming weeks. In this segment, Peppe explains a little more about the Vera Pizza Napoletana school of thought, focusing on the famous tomatoes from San Marzano. As you will see, the sauce made from these tomatoes is beautiful (and it tastes as good as it looks, with a fresh,…Read More…

First of all, if you haven’t watched the series, Chef’s Table, on Netflix stop reading and go watch it, especially the episode I’m about to describe. If you don’t have Netflix, sign up; this post will be here when you get back! There was a visual moment in the episode about the brilliant, iconoclastic chef, Francis Mallmann, that is never spoken about in the narration, no dialogue, but it jumped…Read More…

Hi Everyone, I received an e-mail from Maxwell Kessler, a film and television producer, letting me know about a new TV series that he and a friend have written. They are currently raising money through an IndieGoGo campaign to fund the pilot episode and are also making a different kind of request.  Here’s an excerpt from his email: Later this month, I am producing a sitcom pilot about the friends…Read More…

We’re back with a new series of webisodes featuring a fascinating conversation with Peppe Miele, the first restaurateur to open a certified Vera Pizza Napoletana pizzeria in the United States. We did this interview a couple of years ago, before he closed his beautiful cafe, Antica Pizzeria, in Marina del Rey, California, due to a massive rent increase (it wasn’t far from the LA Airport — listen carefully and you…Read More…

Hi Everyone, We have a new webisode ready to post, featuring Peppe Miele, the founder of Antica Pizzeria in Los Angeles and now the culinary director for MidiCi Pizzeria, a new Napoletana pizza concept. We’ve run into some technical problems loading it to this new Pizza Quest platform but should have that worked out soon. So, if you logged on today expecting to see the webisode, so sorry, but it…Read More…