Pizza Quest Webisodes

You are about to see a big ol’ wedge of moist carroty goodness, the carrot cake from Morro Bay’s Taco Temple, made by their pastry queen, Donelle Pollard. This is a short little dessert of a video, a fun, happy transition piece between our visit to California’s Central Coast and our upcoming series in San Francisco with Tony Gemignani (which begins on September 1st). As I say on the video,…Read More…

So, how did we end up at The Cass House Inn? After all, it’s not a pizzeria, it’s far from big population centers, and we’re ending this series not with a pizza but with a fancy lamb dish and a plush wine. To answer this question let me reiterate what Pizza Quest is beyond the search for the perfect pizza: a celebration of artisans and artisanship (or, as noted in…Read More…

Traci Nixon and Christa Hozie had an idea and they went for it. Somehow, they have managed to make a style of cookies so tasty that, even hidden away in the small town of Cayucos, people from all over the country have found them. They told me that a lot of their business is by mail order, so feel free to check out their website and give them a shout….Read More…

One of the great joys in being on the quest for perfect pizza is that it truly is a discovery process. As Chef Jensen Lorenzen and I played in his outdoor kitchen at the Cass House Inn I think we both felt that we were stepping into exciting, new territory. He knows food and ingredients and how flavors come together; I know dough; he had a brand new wood-fired oven…Read More…

Okay, so we picked up our smoked albacore at Ruddell’s Smoke House and now what?  Time to make a pizza, of course. Chef Jensen is an inventive cook and has a great eye for presentation as well as a firm grasp on how to use fresh, locally sourced ingredients.  And I’m big on the use of acidity — this time in the form of both hot an cold heirloom tomatoes…Read More…

I love smoked fish of all types. As a child, nearly every Sunday morning in our family we had some kind of smoked fish platter for brunch, usually lox and bagels but often sturgeon, kippers (hot-smoked salmon as opposed to the cold-smoked Nova Scotia and belly lox), white fish, or whatever else my folks were able to find at the local deli. That’s probably where my fascination with smoked foods…Read More…

Following our welcome and introduction to the Cass House, and a little local shopping and foraging, Chef Jensen and I finally got to that new oven of his and decided to create an improvisational pizza based on some of the ingredients we had gathered and that Jensen already had on hand. The result is this beautiful mulberry pizza with two different kinds of cheese (we made one side with each…Read More…

Our webisode series moves into new territory with our visit to Cayucos and the Cass House Inn. As Brad English writes in his “Road Trip” posting, located just below this one on our Home Page, this is one of those unexpected discoveries that helps illustrate the spirit of what our site is all about. Brad discovered The Cass House Inn during one of his own personal quest outings before we…Read More…

Here it is, our first detour off the pizza trail to The Taco Temple in Morro Bay, California, the culinary altar of Chef Adam Pollard and his hard working team of, well, tacaiolos.  We stopped here mainly because Brad English, who is the producer and director of our webisodes (who, along with Jeff Michael dreamed up Pizza Quest in the first place), had been there before on one of his…Read More…

This week marks the end of our visit to San Francisco’s Gastro District, which is really just one block long, between Guerrero and Valencia on 18th St.  In previous segments we spent time at Pizzeria Delfina, Bi-Rite Market, Bi-Rite Creamery, and Tartine Bakery Cafe, and now we head upstairs from the bakery to the apartment of baker Eric Wolfinger, who makes us a wonderful pizza on Tartine’s Country French dough…Read More…