Webisodes
Pizza Quest: Bagel’s Are Back! Featuring The Owner’s of Kismet Bagels
Welcome Back to Pizza Quest! Yes, bagels are back — with a vengeance! — as wonderful shops are bobbing up all over the country in much the same way as the proliferation of their “kissing cousin” –donut shops — seem to be everywhere (but rarely do we see a bagel and a donut shop combined in one operation — could this be the next big thing?) . The bagel cycle…Read More…
Pizza Quest with guest Blaine Parker, of “Free the Pizza”
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…
Pizza Quest, with guest Wylie Dufresne of Stretch Pizza in NYC
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…
A Conversation with Chef John Ash, The Godfather of Wine Country Cuisine, on His New Book
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…
New Webisode: Baking Mini Baguettes from Pizza Dough
Hi and welcome Back! Here’s a webisode we’ve been saving from the Forno Bravo Oven Expo where I get to bake my favorite thing (beside pizza): bread! And not just any bread but a remarkable mini-baguette made from a wet, ciabatta-like dough, that puffs up beautifully in a hot oven immediately after shaping (and this will work not just in wood-fired oven but even in a home oven set to…Read More…
New Webisode Series, Part One: Anthony Mangieri, “I Don’t Compromise”
Hi Again, Here’s the beginning of a new webisode series featuring the legendary Anthony Mangieri, founder of Una Pizza Napoletana. This segment is just a short teaser, but I promise to post Part Two next week, when we get into the heart of it all with Anthony. This series was shot in San Francisco, before he moved Una back to NYC, where he originally launched it about 15 years ago….Read More…
New Webisode: Brigit Binns, Wood-Fire Cooking Part 3
We’re back with Part 3 of our wood-fired mini-class with the talented Brigit Binns, and her equally talented “Cinder-Fella,” husband Casey Biggs. Here, at the Forno Bravo Wood-fired Expo, held at the beautiful Talbott Vineyards in Carmel Valley, CA, they demonstrate their own colorful version of a Mediterranean-inspired chorizo-fennel pizza. Brigit always has lots of cooking tips for us, and Casey has figured out a few things, too, regarding how…Read More…
New Webisode: Pinot Noir Master Class, part 2
We’re back with another installment of our master wine class with wine maker extraordinaire, Dan Karlsen of Talbott Vineyards. If you haven’t been following along scroll down the home page or head over to the Webisodes section and watch the previous segments in which we get to meet Dan and talk about food and wine pairing (and lots of tasting, of course). I have to say, in these simple, fun…Read More…
New Webisode, Marco’s Coal-Fired Pizza, Part 1
I’m on my way to Denver as you read this, and am planning to have dinner at Racca’s, one of the most highly praised pizzerias in town. Had I not run into Mark Dym, the owner and patron of Racca’s, in NYC at the World Pizza Summit a few months ago, I would not have discovered that I’d already eaten at Racca’s a couple of years ago, except it was…Read More…
Peppe Miele, Part 9, Pizza Bianca
White pizza can take on many forms, whether with ricotta cheese and spinach, as we often find in the popular New York-style version, or simply any pizza without tomato sauce. In this classic Neapolitan version, Peppe shows how he builds his bianca by first making, essentially, a Margherita without sauce, and then layering on the flavors after it comes out of the oven. In this instance, fresh prosciutto crudo (raw,…Read More…