Pizza Training

[nysauce]

James,
New to the site! Great site by the way, I'm looking into purchasing and putting together an oven with my father. In one of your previous threads you mentioned that their were schools for pizza training here in the US. I live near NY city, can you make any recommendations or give me any information about this.

Thanks

[james]

Sauce,

Welcome aboard. You are definitely going to enjoy the whole process -- the oven, the cooking, the fire and the food. It's great.

Here's what I know about brick oven cooking schools.

You can go to Italy:

Enzo Coccia
Pizza Consulting.it
Naples
The trainers' trainer. Everyone says Enzo is excellent.

Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli
Via Sansonessa, 49
30021 Caorle (VE)
Tel. 0421 83178
Email info@scuolapizza.
I talked with Tony Gemingnani, who took classes there and said it was good.

Pamela Sheldon Johns has a school in Montepuciano for homeowners and has a brick oven.

There is a school in Paestum, an hour south of Naples that has brick oven cooking lessons as part of their regular school. They produce buffalo milk for cheese. I have heard good things about the classes.

In California, there is the VPN school in Southern California. I know someone who attended and can answer questions on that off-line.

In NorCal, we will be running cooking class from our demo kitchen in Healdsburg starting this spring. The classes are targeted at home owners, not professional chefs.

Does anyone else know of a good school on the east coast?

Perhaps someone can contact us about setting one up.

James

[dbell]

Originally Posted by james

In NorCal, we will be running cooking class from our demo kitchen in Healdsburg starting this spring. The classes are targeted at home owners, not professional chefs.

James

Any more information on the NorCal classes, yet?
I grew up in Santa Rosa, and my Mom was from an old Italian family in Healdsburg!
I'm not to far away, in the San Jose area...

Dave

[james]

Dave,

It's a small world. We went the other way, moving to Healdsburg from Palo Alto. Many of the Healdsburg Italian families came from Lucca and still have relatives they meet there.

We will be ready to host people for cooking in about four weeks. The oven is functioning wonderfully, and we are finishing up the outdoor cabinets, work surfaces, etc. The rain isn't helping. A number of people have come by to see the installation work in progress. We have a Casa90, a Calore fireplace and nice new poured concrete work surfaces. The outdoor kitchen is set in a small vineyard.

Drop me a private email and we can talk about dates. You can come up and see family and cook some great pizza.

James