Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

Hi All, The Milk Street Cooking School has invited me back for a third time, and we’ve decided to make it a class on pan pizza — specifically, focaccia and a new Detroit-style variation featuring my signature “embedded cheese technique.” Here’s the link to the class if you’d like to sign up. The date is June 20th at 6:00 PM Eastern. It will be a live, 75-minute Zoom session, including…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest. In this episode we welcome back Paul Tiffany, director of product engineering at Lloyd Pans, to update us on the latest new pan pizza products and to explain the unique manufacturing process that allows Lloyd Pans to respond and customize pans so quickly for the pizza and other food service industries. He also shows us a very cool new product for making handheld Detroit-style pizzas,…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Our guest in this episode is long-time world pizza champion, Joe Carlucci. So, you might ask, how did a nice New York area kid end up running an iconic, destination pizzeria in Madison, Alabama?  It’s a long story and one best told by Joe himself, including the many life lessons that allowed him to crash and burn (and rise from the ashes) many times on…Read More…

Hi All, As many of you have already figured out, not all of the interviews we do here on Pizza Quest make it onto this website. We only post the Zoom video interviews here (and also on YouTube) because they are, well, videos.  But many of our shows are conducted on audio tape only, such as when we go to Pizza Expo and the Atlantic City Northeast Pizza and Pasta…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Chef Michael Friedman grew up in a New York area Jewish American household (in Westfield, NJ, to be specific) and, like me, was nourished by lots of Chinese and Italian food. Also like me, he attended Boston University’s School of Communications, so we share a kindred spirit connectivity. After paying his dues in fine dining restaurants around the world (including stints with Rich Melman’s Lettuce…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest!     Our guest this week is Inja Radman, co-founder of New Culture Food, a company with a mission to provide the world with animal-free cheese, beginning with mozzarella, that actually tastes and performs like the milk-based originals. Even those with lactose or dairy sensitivities have a love-hate relationship with the current options of faux cheese, usually made with nut and seed milks. New Culture’s…Read More…

Welcome Back to Pizza Quest! This week’s episode features Jillana Miller and Ahmad Butler who, together, are Miller-Butler, a sizzling-hot mobile pizza and catering company, based in San Pedro, California.  Ahmad competed against me and 10 other finalists at the Real California Pizza Contest in Napa back in August, where we met and became friends. That’s where I first learned how Miller-Butler took on the competitive Los Angeles marketplace, survived…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest!         Sometimes it just takes moxie. Shannon Mangini (aka @ThePizzaiola on Instagram)  is living proof of that. In just a few short years since graduating from college in 2018 with a degree in economics, entrepreneurship, and finance (Univ. of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where she was also a lacrosse star) Shannon has, among other things, brought DiFara Pizza to the North Fork of…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Anthony Mangieri is one of our favorite guests and now that his NYC restaurant, Una Pizza Napoletana, has been recently anointed by one poll as the “best pizzeria in the world,” this is a timely return visit. In this episode, Anthony tells us all about his new line of frozen pizzas under the name Genio Della Pizza, and how he managed to create and package…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! I haven’t seen Ronnie Costello in 53 years, since he was the catcher on our high school baseball team, and 60 years since we attended Belmont Hills Elementary School as kids. We lived on different sides of Mary Watersford Road, the street that, like the Maginot Line, separated the mostly Irish and Italian kids of “The Hill,” from the mostly Jewish kids of Penn Valley….Read More…