Pizza Quest Webisodes

Welcome back, everybody.         Tommy Garnick is known and loved throughout the pizza world as the Grand Champion of the 2019 California Milk Board Pizza Competition, and as the former owner of Brava Pizza in Denver, and as an instructor at The Fire Within Wood-Fired University. More recently, however, Tommy has relocated to Tucson, Arizona, where he and his partners are building a multi-purpose artisan culinary and crafts…Read More…

Welcome Back to Pizza Quest, Once upon a time in New York City 1999, there was a restaurant created by Chef Frank DeCarlo, built around a wood-fired oven, called Peasant. Who knew then that this now iconic place would foreshadow a movement toward cooking with wood that has embedded itself throughout our food culture. Chef Marc Forgione, a friend of DeCarlo’s and a regular at Peasant, was on his own…Read More…

Hi Everyone, and welcome back to a new and different kind of season on Pizza Quest. For the past few years we referred to these interviews as Pizza Talk, but this season our focus is broadening and will be more about the quest than the pizza (but we won’t forget pizza, too!). In this new episode I’m catching up with Alan Cahn, one of my oldest and dearest friends —…Read More…

Welcome back everyone!  During the past year or so we posted a number of webisodes filmed at the Forno Bravo Oven Expo a few years ago. I had the chance to meet and cook with some great chefs and teachers, work side by side with the Obi Wan Kenobi of pizza, John Arena, and meet hundreds of kindred spirits who, in one of the episodes, we referred to as our…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, I’m back with Part Two of the dough making demo as well as the Bacon and Egg Pizza that we made with the dough during the Forno Bravo Wood-Fired Oven Expo in Salinas, CA. If you haven’t watched Part One, scroll down to the previous posting. Note, this is a very basic Neapolitan-style dough, with no sugar or oil added. However, in the recipe posted here, you will…Read More…

Hi Everyone, Here’s a never before shown webisode filmed during the Forno Bravo Wood-Fired Oven Expo in Salinas, CA. This is a two part series so, in Part One we’ll make a new dough from scratch but use a dough made the day before to prepare the pizza. All of this will come together in Part Two, which we’ll post next week, but this will definitely get you started for…Read More…

Welcome to the final segment of our visit with Anthony Mangieri, owner of the legendary Una Pizza Napoletana. I’ve mentioned in previous segments that when we filmed this, Anthony was in San Francisco, having moved the original Una from NYC to the west coast for about 6 years. However, as he told us, his wife is from Italy and it didn’t take long for them to realize that NYC is…Read More…

Welcome back! Anthony Mangieri has taken us through his process and his pizza philosophy in the previous webisodes but here we begin to get a taste of why I think of him as the “Chopin of pizza” — a minimalist, in the artistic sense, who finds depth and complexity in simplicity. He works on a very narrow pallet, not the broad styles of other pizza artists featured here, like John…Read More…

Hi Everyone, I’m still gathering photos and my notes from Pizza Expo so, while I continue to work on that, enjoy this latest in our Anthony Mangieri series. If you are just joining us, feel free to scroll down the home page to pick up the previous 3 segments (or you can always go to our “Webisodes” archive). Anthony, one of the most celebrated pizzaiolos in America, takes us through…Read More…