Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

It’s mid-summer now, the tomatoes are coming in like crazy, baseball has started its second season, football pre-season practice might actually get the green light this week, and everybody is trying to get some R&R. This week, I’m taking some time off from Pizza Quest and calling in to the bullpen for relief. Brad English will be doing a Brad’s Blog this week in place of the Peter’s Blog, and…Read More…

On my last couple of visits to Minnesota, I had been hearing about a unique and must see‚ pizza place in Stockholm, Wisconsin, about 90 minutes from the Twin Cities. So this year, during our annual summer visit to see my wife’s family, we decided it was time to make the trip out there.  On our 14th wedding anniversary, my wife, Julie, and I packed up the car with our…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…

It’s officially Fish Taco season here at Pizza Quest.  Why not?  It’s summer and there isn’t a better time to enjoy the fresh summery flavors than in a great fish taco!  As you’ve seen in recent webisodes, we stumbled onto two incredible fish taco places while visiting The Cass House Inn in Cayucos, CA.  Both the Taco Temple and Ruddell’s Smokehouse create some of the most delicious fish tacos I…Read More…

Today (Monday) we made pizza dough during the first day of our week long Kid’s Baking Camp at Johnson & Wales. I’m jazzed, because tomorrow we’re going to actually make the pizzas with my 14 campers, all between 13 and 15 years of age. These are great kids and today, on Day One, we made killer chocolate chip cookies, wonderful soft dinner rolls, and flaky blitz biscuits. Tomorrow (Tuesday) we…Read More…

Welcome Back Everyone!  We have a full week of wonderful new content for you. In order, here’s what’s coming your way: Tuesday: Peter’s Blog, with some ruminations on the kid’s baking camp I’m teaching all this week at Johnson & Wales (including a big day of pizza baking). Wed: Fish tacos have been popping up on the site a lot these past few weeks, so Brad English has prepared a…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…

A Primer on Flour Hi Everybody, I’ve been getting a lot e-mails asking about flour and how all the different types work for pizza. Here’s a quick, and by no means comprehensive look at some of your options. There is so much good flour available that you can’t go wrong, but with all the interest in Italian style flour as well as the various types of American flour, it might…Read More…

Happy Independence Day week!!!  I hope some of you are making grilled pizzas this year — let us know if you do. This week, on Thursday, we’ll be posting the next in our webisode series filmed in Cayucos, California.  Chef Jensen Lorenzen and his wife Grace, owners of the Cass House Inn, took me to the nearby Ruddell’s Smokehouse, where we had a great visit with Jim Ruddell and learned…Read More…

My love for Pizza Napoletana started the first time I ever tasted a pizza straight from a wood burning oven in Napoli. I had only been in Italy a couple of days and was not prepared for what I was about to eat. These were the early 90’s, before food blogs or the internet. While I knew that Italy was the birthplace of pizza, I was uneducated when it came…Read More…