Pizza Quest Webisodes

This time around David Bravdica shows us his award winning wild mushroom pizza, “The Fun Guy.”  This pizza is so tasty that I won’t say much here, but let you savor it yourself when you watch the video. However, I would like to point out that you pay attention to Dave’s dough shaping technique. We get e-mail requests all the time from folks wanting to know how to stretch a…Read More…

Hi Again, As we continue our visit with David Bravdica and his outdoor Brava Pizzeria della Strada, in Denver, Colorado, he takes us a little deeper into his process. In this segment we look at some of the ingredients, most of them locally grown and sourced (including his flour), that he preps and keeps chilled in his refrigerated rig. As he mentioned in the opening segment, David typically bakes about…Read More…

A few years ago, while exploring the Denver pizza scene (see our recent webisode series on Marco’s Coal-Fired Pizza), our friends at The Fire Within told us about a pizzaiolo who was using one of their mobile pizza units (made with a Forno Bravo oven, of course), who was parked right on the famous 16th Street Mall in downtown Denver, just at the base of the iconic clock tower on…Read More…

In this final webisode in our series from Marco’s Coal-Fired Pizza (now known as Racca’s Pizzeria Napoletana), in Denver, CO, we turn our focus to one of their non-pizza signature dishes: wood-fired chicken wings glazed with house-made limoncello sauce. Samantha and Heather, who you’ve already met in the previous two segments, take us step by step through their process and, as a guy who loves oven-baked wings even more than…Read More…

When we last left Samantha Monterossa, Mark (Marco) Dym’s daughter, she walked us through their classic, VPN Margherita pizza. This time, she invites pizzaiola Heather Vetting to show us the Racca’s Abruzzo Pizza, a four-cheese beauty. (Note: if you read the intro to Part 1, you’ll recall that Marco’s is now called Racca’s, to avoid confusing it with a Florida pizza group also called Marco’s).  Because she says it rather…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…

So here we are, at the end of our 10-part series with pizza maestro Peppe Miele, finishing up with one of my favorites, the Calabrese pizza.  Here’s the bottom line about this pizza: Calabrese salami is not pepperoni — it’s way better!  Not that pepperoni is bad, after all, how bad can any spicy salami with paprika be (other than how greasy it gets but, hey, for some people this…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…