Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

Hi everyone, I’m Peter Reinhart, your Pizza Quest guide, and this is our first ever webisode. We’re going to leave this opening segment on the front page for all newcomers to the site, but please feel free to navigate over to the Webisode page if you really want to catch up on all the webisode segments. We’ll continue posting additional webisodes that will take us to some of the stops…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…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! There is no question that Ooni Ovens have taken the world by storm, even eclipsing their worthy competitor RoccBox, which had a nice head start. How have they done it? Fortunately, we have Scott Deley with us, who just published a book called, The Ooni Pizza Project. The book is loaded with inspiring recipes created by Scott (but inspired by his many pizza heroes), who has…Read More…

Hi Folks, Here’s the link to my upcoming Pizza Brunch and book signing on Sept. 10, at Peyton Smith’s wonderful Mission Pizza Napoletana in Winston Salem (listen to the recent audio Pizza Quest podcast of our conversation here).  I hope to see some of you there. https://www.exploretock.com/missionpizzanapoletana/event/431227/pizza-quest-brunch-with-peter-reinhart

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! This episode features a conversation with Chef John Ash, who for the past 40 years has been known in Sonoma and Napa as the Godfather of Wine Country Cuisine. His restaurant, John Ash & Company, helped to define that regional aspect of what later became known as California Cuisine back in the 1980’s and 1990’s. He, along with chefs like Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, Joyce…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart. In this episode, we catch up with the biggest rock star in the pizza universe, multi-time world pizza champion Tony Gemignani, owner of Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in SF, Pizza Rock in Las Vegas, and many other restaurants, bakeries, pizza schools, and even a new bagel shop, Dago’s Bagels.  In today’s episode, he also tells us about his biggest project ever, the launch…Read More…

Welcome Back to Pizza Quest. In this episode of Pizza Quest we take a tangential detour away from pizza (as we often do in our ever-expanding celebration of artisanship wherever we find it) with one of our longtime, favorite guests, Meathead Goldwyn.  Meathead (yes, that’s his name, the origins of which he explains in this conversation), is the creator and host of the hugely popular website, AmazingRibs.com, where for many…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Chef Ryan Hardy has been killing it in the Lower East Side of New York City with his wood-fired Neapolitan pizzas and other fire-cooked menu items at Pasquale Jones. And now, a few yards away, he has opened a hot new Sicilian-themed cafe called Bar Pasquale, where sficione-style pan pizzas reign. Ryan describes his vision for both places and shows us the difference between these…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! We recently did a show that we called Bourbon 101 (June  ), and have done other shows that celebrate artisanship in subjects adjacent to our usual focus on pizza (olive oil, mezcal, tomatoes, and various types of cheeses). But, when Joe Salonia, co-host of HRN’s podcast series, Cutting the Curd, offered to take me on a journey of his personal specialty cheese category, Swiss, it…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Over twenty years ago, after Jonathan Goldsmith fell in love with traditional Napoletana wood-fired pizza while living in Italy and became a mid-life apprentice to the local masters, he decided to bring it back to his hometown of Chicago, where it was still a new thing. Spacca Napoli was thus born on the North Side, and has become a pizza pilgrimage destination site ever since,…Read More…

Note from Peter: Bob Radcliffe was one of our first guest columnists, way back from when we were still out on the road making fun videos with famous pizza makers. At Bob’s Lynch Creek Farm, located deep in the Rocky Ford countryside of North Carolina, he established the non-profit Ben Franklin Society and supports it with freshly baked breads and special pizza events featuring his signature Wood-Fired Oven Tomato Pies.  The development of the…Read More…