Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

I was walking through one of my local markets and, in the produce section, a large oval green shape caught my eye.  As I turned to look closer and my eyes focused on what I was seeing, my smile grew at the same time.  My market had fresh cactus!  I had literally made my pickled cactus sauce, ode to the Nevada desert pizza, “The Hwy 15 Pizza,” a couple days…Read More…

Part I OK, you’ve been making pizzas at home now for years. You invested in a great oven. You source the best ingredients. You stay up all night arguing on the internet about water sources and fermentation times. You obsess over every detail.  Everyone tells you that your pizza is better than what they can get in any pizzeria. Well… even if no one else says it, you know that…Read More…

  This is not a restaurant review! This is a selfish blog posting about being on my own little pizza quest and running into one of the masters in the world of artisan pizza.  I had been trying all week, while I was working in NYC a while back, to fit in some pizza questing and I had the opportunity to visit one of New York’s newest ventures. Don Antonio…Read More…

Here’s the first question that came, from Doc.Dough. He must be a doc, for sure, as it takes a little study to understand the question — but I’ll take a stab at it and then all of you can chime in with comments. Over on TFL I see lots of people slavishly following very exacting instructions without understanding what the instructions are intended to convey. Perhaps Peter could attempt to…Read More…

Two quick things: The home page here is getting kind of long so I will soon be trimming it and sending some of the older pieces into their respective archives, which you are always welcome to open with the buttons at the top of the page. I’ll also be shortening some of them with a “continue reading” tag at the end. But util I do that, for those of you…Read More…

I just finished attending the amazing Kneading Conference West 2012 here in the Northwest. It was the second annual Kneading Conference West and was held on September 13, 14 and 15 at the WSU Research and Extension Center in Mt. Vernon, WA. I was fortunate to be able to attend the class, “Pizza in the Wood – Fired Oven,” given by Mike Dash of www.rollingfire.com. He had his trailered Forno…Read More…

A few months ago I went to Las Vegas for the Pizza Expo.  I wrote about visiting with John Arena of Metro Pizza.  While driving to Vegas I had been a little lost in thought.  No, I wasn’t on my phone, but I was drifting along somewhere out in there in the desert.  I was thinking about the email exchange I had with John and the fact that he mentioned…Read More…

Pizza has always been America’s favorite food. It’s been the subject of movies, books, and songs. Pizza is not only a food of sustenance, but for some has become an obsessive delight. And for many fans, pizza is a sheer and utter passion. Pizza debate brings on an endless thirst for argument that cannot be easily quenched with just a slice or two. People discuss their favorite pizzerias with the…Read More…

In my recent Peter’s Blogs we received a number great comments, including an offer to engage in some dialogue on dough methodology from Scott123. Rather than answer his first question in a Comment box in the previous post, I thought it might be best to make it the topic of a new Peter’s Blog, and we can keep all the comments related to this question here, and deal with subsequent…Read More…

When you do a pizza night, half the fun is coming up with the menu.  With the prep work that goes into making pizza, it just doesn’t make sense making one type of pizza for the night.  You usually have the idea pizza for the night and then you borrow ingredients, add others and come up with supporting pizzas for that particular event. Our friends had us over and as…Read More…