Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

Thanks to our intrepid producer, Brad English, we’re about to get a sneak peek at the Challenge Beer created by our friends at The Bruery. Brad only got to taste the unfermented wort, as the finished beer won’t be ready till it’s unveiled at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) on Sept. 30th. We’ll all be there, making the Challenge Pizza created by Kelly Whitaker and Alan Henin of Pizzeria…Read More…

As many of you saw in a recent Guest Column, my sister finally made the trip to Pizzeria Bianco last month (a trip, I have yet to make)!  If you read her story, you can see how she tortured me for years – teasing me about her trips to visit family in Phoenix and the possibility of going, and then after, baiting me with texts and emails; or her plans…Read More…

Lots of new things this week, including Part Three of the Tony Gemignani webisode series on Thursday. If you haven’t seen last week’s webisode, check it out, as Tony shows how he makes his World Championship Margherita Pizza. This week, he shows us some new tricks. Also, on Tuesday We’ll continue exploring the beer/pizza parallels in Peter’s Blog, which will include a report from Brad about his first taste of…Read More…

As many of you know, Chris Bianco has joined forces with Rob DiNapoli of DiNapoli Specialty Foods.  They have come up with a new product that Chris had been nudging Rob to create for some time.  There has been a limited supply of their new Bianco DiNapoli Organic Tomatoes available at some select pizzerias and restaurants and we have been lucky enough to be “in the loop”!  I happen to…Read More…

In this webisode, Tony teaches me (and you) how he makes the Margherita pizza that won him the world championship. You’ll notice a few great tips, things that aren’t commonly known even by professional pizza makers, such as: the traditional Napoletana way to load the pizza onto the peel; shaping the dough on the marble slab as opposed to lifting or spinning it; when to put the basil on; and…Read More…

Hi Everyone, It was a long, wet, windy Labor Day Weekend down here in Charlotte, so I’m a little behind with my posts (we’re still technically under a tornado watch). Didn’t even get to post a Coming Attractions box so I’ll do that here at the end of this post. I’m going to take a little breather from the recent pizza/beer reflections and just write a short blog this week….Read More…

I am not the first to venture into how to bring fire and wood together to cook a pizza.  So, while making great pizza is all about balancing time, temperature and ingredients, it is also about the type of heat to a great extent. You can bake a pizza with a brick floor (brick oven), cook it in a live fired wood burning oven, which brings smoke and a more…Read More…

Note from Peter: Alan Henkin is a partner at Pizzeria Basta and is also the restaurant’s beverage director. We were so impressed with his knowledge of both wine and beer, and his thoughtful list, that we filmed some special webisode segments with him, which we will show in the future when we run the Bruery Beer and Pizza Challenge series. But, as the time draws near for the Great American…Read More…

I love North Beach, the legendary Little Italy of San Francisco, where the beatniks ruled during my youth, Carol Doda launched a whole new kind of soul baring, and some of the best Italian restaurants and espresso cafes have ruled for decades (and now lots of great Chinese and pretty much something from every ethnicity). It was especially fun to return just after local boy, Tony Gemignani, opened Tony’s Pizza…Read More…

We’re going to be visiting with Tony Gemignani at Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco over the coming weeks.  As I was building this Photo Gallery I thought back to when we first arrived and met Tony.  We were walking around with him as our crew was setting up while he showed us around his new pizzeria.  He took us in to see the wood fired oven that he brought…Read More…