Written Recipes

Blog Post – Breakfast I’ve been gone from these pages a while!  I have been busy with my real life, not this fantasy pizza guy life.  I’ve been working out of town a bit and when available, racing around to my kid’s sporting events!  I thought life was busy when they were little!  It’s funny how your perspective changes to catch up to reality.  One day you look back and…Read More…

You may think I’ve gone off the rails here with my pepperoni-ing of everything, but realize this isn’t all I eat!  I sit around and come up with an idea and make a bunch of pizzas to try something out.  As you can see from the last few weeks, it takes some time to get these postings together.  It doesn’t take nearly the time to make and devour the actual…Read More…

This pizza dough is a sourdough variation of Peter Reinhart’s Neo Neapolitan Pizza dough. The dough uses a small amount of commercial yeast and sourdough starter at 100% hydration. The result of this high hydration dough is a bubbly crisp pizza crust, which is easy to stretch out once you allow it to proof long enough. 1 teaspoon active dry yeast (or 3/4 teaspoon instant yeast) 1 oz/28g hot water,…Read More…

This is my first follow up on my broccoli pepperoni experiment.  I think I’m onto something here. Pepperoni is so popular because it is a great topping for pizza.  It offers a spicy kick with concentrated salt accents. It has a deep flavor with spicy and salty exclamations! When I’m making pizzas at home I tend to use a good salami rather than a traditional pepperoni but, every once in…Read More…

Broccoli Pepperoni?  Broccoli and pepperoni don’t go together in a sentence very often. The pepperoni pizza is, by all accounts, the most popular pizza here in the USA. Picture your average 10 year old boy walking into his local pizza shop.  “Can I have a medium pepperoni pizza, uhmm…also with roasted broccoli?!!”  That just isn’t going to happen.  Maybe I’m wrong though.     I love broccoli.  Even my daughter…Read More…

The hardest part of making a great pizza at home is making and baking a great pizza dough.  I found Peter Reinhart because this otherwise simple task eluded me in my home pizza making endeavors for so long.  I now make what I consider to be a decent dough, or doughs as I keep trying to chase that perfect pizza experience here at home with my family. The next thing…Read More…

I was working in New York City this summer and went on some great little pizza quests.  When I got home, I found that a group of volunteer cherry tomato plants were about ready to burst in my back yard. I decided that things had gotten out of control, as the plants were crawling across my patio and it was time to clean things up. First, I had to pluck…Read More…

Living in Southern California, I use my grill more than I use my oven.  I love cooking with fire.  Fire roasting adds to the flavor complexity of almost anything you cook. There is something primal about it.  We’re spoiled with gas grills — mine is even connected to the house and is ever ready to be fired up with a simple turn of the dial, which is great and convenient,…Read More…

I was walking through one of my local markets and, in the produce section, a large oval green shape caught my eye.  As I turned to look closer and my eyes focused on what I was seeing, my smile grew at the same time.  My market had fresh cactus!  I had literally made my pickled cactus sauce, ode to the Nevada desert pizza, “The Hwy 15 Pizza,” a couple days…Read More…

A few months ago I went to Las Vegas for the Pizza Expo.  I wrote about visiting with John Arena of Metro Pizza.  While driving to Vegas I had been a little lost in thought.  No, I wasn’t on my phone, but I was drifting along somewhere out in there in the desert.  I was thinking about the email exchange I had with John and the fact that he mentioned…Read More…