Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

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…

We are beginning with this posting of a new webisode story arc featuring our friends at Basta, the wonderful wood-fired restaurant in Boulder that we’ve featured here in the past. This short opening segment re-introduces you to Kelly Whitaker, the visionary chef/owner of Basta and, in later segments we’ll meet other members of his team and then, over time, we’ll follow his trail all the way to Southern California and…Read More…

Just a few quick notes this week: –We’ve had some great response to John Arena’s new series on what it takes to open your own pizza restaurant. A very valid question has been raised: how can he tell us to get fast while he (and Brad English, our intrepid pizza quester) also extoll the virtues of super slow pizzaiolo Dom DeMarco of Brooklyn (see Brad’s recent journey, further down the…Read More…

Di Fara Pizza – Part I of a 3 stop pizza quest: Dave Wilson (our very own Pizza Quest Director of Photography and Co-Director on our various webisodes) and I were working in New York together and realized that it looked like we were going to actually have a Saturday afternoon off.  Time for ourselves!  The wheels were spinning.  What to do?  Where to go?  NY is limitless after all!…Read More…

Note from Peter: Don’t forget to scroll down the home page for Part One of this new series from our friend John Arena, owner of the hugely popular Metro Pizza in Las Vegas. We’ve been getting some great response to this. Thanks John!!) There are many components to opening and sustaining a successful pizzeria, but for now let’s focus on essential pizza making skills.  So here is lesson number one:…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…

Part I OK, you’ve been making pizzas at home now for years. You invested in a great oven. You source the best ingredients. You stay up all night arguing on the internet about water sources and fermentation times. You obsess over every detail.  Everyone tells you that your pizza is better than what they can get in any pizzeria. Well… even if no one else says it, you know that…Read More…

  This is not a restaurant review! This is a selfish blog posting about being on my own little pizza quest and running into one of the masters in the world of artisan pizza.  I had been trying all week, while I was working in NYC a while back, to fit in some pizza questing and I had the opportunity to visit one of New York’s newest ventures. Don Antonio…Read More…

Here’s the first question that came, from Doc.Dough. He must be a doc, for sure, as it takes a little study to understand the question — but I’ll take a stab at it and then all of you can chime in with comments. Over on TFL I see lots of people slavishly following very exacting instructions without understanding what the instructions are intended to convey. Perhaps Peter could attempt to…Read More…

Two quick things: The home page here is getting kind of long so I will soon be trimming it and sending some of the older pieces into their respective archives, which you are always welcome to open with the buttons at the top of the page. I’ll also be shortening some of them with a “continue reading” tag at the end. But util I do that, for those of you…Read More…