Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! I haven’t seen Ronnie Costello in 53 years, since he was the catcher on our high school baseball team, and 60 years since we attended Belmont Hills Elementary School as kids. We lived on different sides of Mary Watersford Road, the street that, like the Maginot Line, separated the mostly Irish and Italian kids of “The Hill,” from the mostly Jewish kids of Penn Valley….Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! In this episode, Bill Crawford, former Air Force jet fighter pilot and now owner of Righteous Slice in Wexford, Idaho, shows us all about his Grand Prize winning El Pollo Barracho Pizza (aka “Drunken Chicken” pizza,  with tequila marinated chicken) from the 2024 Real California Pizza Contest, sponsored by the California Milk Advisory Board. Peter competed in this contest too (and didn’t win), working directly…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest.  Yes, the Yodi’s are back! John Arena and Brian Spangler, our two original pizza gurus, who helped launch these Pizza Talk/Pizza Quest shows during the pandemic, are joined by the global bagel poet laureate of our time, Philip Korshak, for a delightful conversation of show-and-tell as we celebrate the emerging bagel renaissance across the land. More and more pizza operators are getting into bagels, as…Read More…

Dear Followers of Pizza Quest, First, Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!  For those still looking for a last minute special Christmas or New Year’s gift, the folks at Pizza University are offering a 10% discount on all 2024 classes (the offer expires on Dec. 31). This includes the three-day class I’ll be teaching with Scott Wiener on May 13-15, 2024 based on my book, Pizza Quest. If you…Read More…

Welcome Back to Pizza Quest! Yes, bagels are back — with a vengeance! — as wonderful shops are bobbing up all over the country in much the same way as the proliferation of their “kissing cousin” –donut shops — seem to be everywhere (but rarely do we see a bagel and a donut shop combined in one operation — could this be the next big thing?) . The bagel cycle…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! In this episode, I talk with Blaine Parker, the creator and host of the website Free the Pizza, a site devoted to the unending quest to make pizza in a home oven as good as those from a pizzeria. Can it be done? Blaine says yes, and has written an entire book showing readers how, as well as posting humorous essays regularly on his site…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Ed Zimmerman is a name not many people outside the pizza and food service industry know (though those of in the pizza world all know him), but all of us, whether in or outside of the profession, are impacted by the creative work he does. His company, The Food Connector, organizes the annual Real California Pizza Competition, on behalf of their client, The California Milk…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Most culinary savants are familiar with Chef Wylie Dufresne who, at his groundbreaking Manhattan restaurant, WD 50, brought modernist molecular gastronomy in the style and spirit of Heston Blumenthal, Grant Achatz, and Ferran Adria  to NYC about 10 years ago. Since then, like so many other great fine dining chefs, Wiley has fallen under the spell of pizza and is now expressing his creative genius…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! In this episode, Peter talks with Kyle Ahlgren, the producer/director of the Artisan Baking Center (ABC) Online streaming classes. A year ago, Peter and Kyle collaborated at the Artisan Baking Center, the educational component of Central Milling, in Petaluma, CA, where they video recorded a pizza course based on Peter’s most recent book, Pizza Quest. The book is a direct result of the many interviews…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest!         Chef Roy Elam learned how to cook in the cornfields along the borderland between St. Louis and Illinois, and then paid his culinary dues with some of the country’s finest natural foods chefs. But when he decided to open a plant-based restaurant of his own, dedicated to his mom, Donna Jean, Southern California was the logical place to do it. First…Read More…