Pizza Talk

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! In this episode, I talk with Blaine Parker, the creator and host of the website Free the Pizza, a site devoted to the unending quest to make pizza in a home oven as good as those from a pizzeria. Can it be done? Blaine says yes, and has written an entire book showing readers how, as well as posting humorous essays regularly on his site…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Ed Zimmerman is a name not many people outside the pizza and food service industry know (though those of in the pizza world all know him), but all of us, whether in or outside of the profession, are impacted by the creative work he does. His company, The Food Connector, organizes the annual Real California Pizza Competition, on behalf of their client, The California Milk…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Most culinary savants are familiar with Chef Wylie Dufresne who, at his groundbreaking Manhattan restaurant, WD 50, brought modernist molecular gastronomy in the style and spirit of Heston Blumenthal, Grant Achatz, and Ferran Adria  to NYC about 10 years ago. Since then, like so many other great fine dining chefs, Wiley has fallen under the spell of pizza and is now expressing his creative genius…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! In this episode, Peter talks with Kyle Ahlgren, the producer/director of the Artisan Baking Center (ABC) Online streaming classes. A year ago, Peter and Kyle collaborated at the Artisan Baking Center, the educational component of Central Milling, in Petaluma, CA, where they video recorded a pizza course based on Peter’s most recent book, Pizza Quest. The book is a direct result of the many interviews…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…

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. 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…