Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

(Note from Peter:  John O’Hanlon, a serious home baker and long time correspondent, sent me this story of his recent quest to make a killer vollkornbrot (translation: 100% whole grain, German style rye bread). His passion and determination inspired me to ask his permission to share his story and his recipe with you, so here it is. Let us know if you try making this bread — we’d love to…Read More…

Blog Post – Breakfast I’ve been gone from these pages a while!  I have been busy with my real life, not this fantasy pizza guy life.  I’ve been working out of town a bit and when available, racing around to my kid’s sporting events!  I thought life was busy when they were little!  It’s funny how your perspective changes to catch up to reality.  One day you look back and…Read More…

Hi All, Just a quick announcement.  I just heard from Craftsy that they are running a Memorial Weekend Sale and will be donating a portion from each sale to various veterans groups.  Some of the courses are as much as 60% off.  To check out their courses go to: http://www.craftsy.com/ext/PeterReinhart_holiday This sale ends at midnight Monday.  BTW, the free Mini-Pizza Course now has over 37,000 people enrolled — I’m blown…Read More…

The story unfolds (and if you are just joining us, you can see all the segments leading up to this one by going to the Webisodes section — see the button above — and catch up): So, here we are, the Basta team, our Pizza Quest team, and Patrick Rue, the owner and beermeister visionary of The Bruery, in Placentia, CA (Orange County). We threw down the gauntlet in our…Read More…

A few weeks ago I posted about the first part of a local mini pizza quest I went on here in Charlotte. In that post I focused on Wolfgang Puck’s new Pizza Bar, but that was only the first stop of the day. From there, journalist and fellow pizza lover Michael Solender, along with photographer Tonya Russ Price and went to three other places, which I want to tell you…Read More…

You may think I’ve gone off the rails here with my pepperoni-ing of everything, but realize this isn’t all I eat!  I sit around and come up with an idea and make a bunch of pizzas to try something out.  As you can see from the last few weeks, it takes some time to get these postings together.  It doesn’t take nearly the time to make and devour the actual…Read More…

Isaac Newton has long been one of my science heroes—my earliest life journey was as a science and math geek. Now he is my newest baking hero.   Most everyone knows that Newton developed his theory of gravity after seeing an apple fall from a tree. Every high school physics student learns of his three laws of motion. He built the first practical reflecting telescope, confirmed the accuracy of Kepler’s…Read More…

After all the prelude webisodes you’ve been watching, things are starting to heat up as we now head into the main story. This segment contains the moment when we threw down the gauntlet and asked Patrick Rue, world famous brewmeister and owner of The Bruery, not knowing if he’d go for it, if he would be willing to create a beer inspired by a pizza that we would make.  But…Read More…

Dave Wilson and I set out about 7-8 hours earlier on a mini pizza quest, where we started at Di Fara Pizza and were now just leaving Roberta’s — both in Brooklyn, NY.  You can read about these stops in Part I and Part II of this series.  Links:  Part I, Part II   As we staggered out of Roberta’s for the second time that night, after running into the…Read More…

This pizza dough is a sourdough variation of Peter Reinhart’s Neo Neapolitan Pizza dough. The dough uses a small amount of commercial yeast and sourdough starter at 100% hydration. The result of this high hydration dough is a bubbly crisp pizza crust, which is easy to stretch out once you allow it to proof long enough. 1 teaspoon active dry yeast (or 3/4 teaspoon instant yeast) 1 oz/28g hot water,…Read More…