Webisodes

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

I often say that pizza is just dough with something on it. But, when you think about it, it can also be dough with something in it (which means, a nicely made grilled cheese sandwich is a kind of pizza too!). In this week’s segment, Peppe shows us how easy it is to use pizza dough to make a classic calzone filled with salumi, ricotta and mozzarella (with a dash…Read More…

In bread baking, it is the simple baguette that is held as the benchmark of a baker’s skills. A Mexican restaurant better make a killer salsa or I’m out of there. Any ice cream artiste can make fanciful flavors but it is their vanilla or chocolate that proves if they have the golden touch.  For Neapolitan pizzas, it is the Margherita, for sure, but also the lesser known (in the…Read More…

Welcome back to our “Master Class” series from Peppe Miele. In each of these segments we’ve learned another golden nugget of pizza wisdom and this one is no exception. For instance, he mentions (so quickly that I almost missed it) that the”official” Vera Pizza Napoletana (VPN) Margherita Pizza is supposed to use a sprinkle of only Pecorino (sheep’s milk) cheese, even though most places (even his) now use mostly Parmesan….Read More…