Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

Being last isn’t always a bad thing.  As I often say, one of my favorite pizzas to make is the one that develops with left over ingredients or by chance.  Making pizzas is no small task.  You don’t generally just make one pizza – at home anyway.  You prep and throw a few pies together because it’s a bit of work and the operation does create a bit of a…Read More…

It’s fitting that we wrap up our first year of PizzaQuest.com with the final segment of our series with World Champion pizzaiolo, Tony Gemignani. We did it in grand fashion, climbing to the top of a hill above the Golden Gate Bridge, looking back on Tony’s new “kingdom.” It looks almost like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, and the view was truly majestic, as you will see…Read More…

I’m still working on my Pizza Quest Signature Pizza series.  I set out to make a few versions to try with a glass or two of my Birra Basta.  I can’t just let the keg sit there, right?  It was all created to be used; The Bruery didn’t brew this beer to pour it down the drain.  The makers of my “new” kegerator surely wanted beer to flow through it. …Read More…

Hard to believe how soon Christmas and Chanukah will be upon us. If you are like Susan and me, things start to get a little frantic around now, with too many things to get done and nowhere near the time to do so. So, as a favor to us all, we’ll be wrapping up this, our first year (yes, we actually launched on Dec. 14th of 2010 — wow, seems…Read More…

I love our Signature Pizza.  I didn’t come up with the recipe but, I was a part of the creation of the question, and the following ideas, that ultimately came together to become it.  I think how lucky we were to have Peter come up with a brand new dough that brought beer into the pizza – a pizza being designed to be paired with a beer that was to…Read More…

Normally I try to post a new Peter’s Blog every Tuesday, and I plan to do another one this week, but not till Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, because I want to wait until I return from the ribbon cutting ceremony at Charlotte’s new 7th Street Public Market. It’s a project that has been two years in the making and, I hope, will signify a major shift in the cultural…Read More…

Recently I was asked to talk about bread and baking to a group of Transition Town activists here in the UK. It got me thinking about the importance of bread in creating and shaping  society and community.  I had much to say, the difficulty was in what to leave out.  I came up with the title, “Bread as a Ferment for Social Change.”  I believe Jesus would have known exactly…Read More…

This is one of my favorite webisodes of all time. Tony Gemignani took us on a field trip to Stanislaus County, to the town of Westley (near Modesto, CA), where we met Steve Rouse, the marketing director for the world famous Stanislaus Food Products company. We arrived just a week or so before the peak of the harvest, but found a few vines that were, nevertheless ripe and ready, as…Read More…

Pizza Quest was an idea that popped into my mind a couple of years ago.  I called my buddy Jeff about the book I just read  – Peter’s “American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza”.  Not long after I was corresponding with Peter and Jeff about how we could make this idea a show.  It still isn’t a show on TV, but we have launched the website and if…Read More…

Thank you all for coming back! It was wonderful to have a short break, the latest diet has begun in my never ending “quest” to work off all that turkey and gravy, and yet it’s time to get back on the Pizza Quest bus. My calendar suddenly filled up this week with unexpected projects and deadlines, so I’m a little behind on my weekly Tuesday blog posting, so will write…Read More…