Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

This week marks the final segment of the Cass House Inn webisode series, featuring a spectacular lamb loin, with ratatouille and raitta prepared by Chef Jensen that evokes all the flavors of the lamb pizza shown in an earlier episode. In other words, an upscale version, the papa bear, of what we experienced in its offspring downscale baby bear version in the earlier video segment. It brought our visit with…Read More…

Traci Nixon and Christa Hozie had an idea and they went for it. Somehow, they have managed to make a style of cookies so tasty that, even hidden away in the small town of Cayucos, people from all over the country have found them. They told me that a lot of their business is by mail order, so feel free to check out their website and give them a shout….Read More…

Note from Peter: Wes Bailey, a good friend of Brad and Jeff’s, was on his way to a long vacation with his family to Napa Valley.  After hearing about these plans, Brad suggested that Wes keep an eye out for a quest-worthy story or two.  Wes sent us this reflective essay that seems to capture the essence of the dichotomy of living the quest, as opposed to the idea of…Read More…

This is one of my favorite salads to make in one variation or another.  If I don’t have fresh mozzarella on hand, I’ll just make this as a tomato and basil salad with a little oil, balsamic and salt and pepper.  I am always happy with a tomato salad.   If you can’t get an heirloom tomato any quality tomato will work.  It’s a very flexible platform for pure goodness!…Read More…

Susan and I spent the weekend in Philadelphia for a Reinhart family reunion and to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday, and I had chance to revisit some of my childhood haunts and spend time with old friends prior to the big event. I had planned to stop at Mama’s to pick up a cheese steak (the best!) on our way in from the airport, but our flight got delayed and…Read More…

Wow–it’s August already, which is really hard to believe (other than by this relentless cross country heat wave, which confirms that it is, indeed, August). So, this week we have some fun new material to post, including a Peter’s Blog on Tuesday about my trip to Philadelphia and the incredible pizza I had at Osteria. Brad English is also lending me a photo or two of his recent visit to…Read More…

One of the great joys in being on the quest for perfect pizza is that it truly is a discovery process. As Chef Jensen Lorenzen and I played in his outdoor kitchen at the Cass House Inn I think we both felt that we were stepping into exciting, new territory. He knows food and ingredients and how flavors come together; I know dough; he had a brand new wood-fired oven…Read More…

One of our Guest Columns by Tom Carrig was called “BBQ Pizza–Not”.  It got me thinking about, what else, barbecue pizza.  My first introduction to this type of pizza was back in the 90’s when the BBQ Chicken Pizza became all the rage at California Pizza Kitchen, and also at Louise’s Trattoria here in Los Angeles, CA.  We could talk a lot about this explosion of “new” pizza ingredients that…Read More…

Lately, like many of us across the country I’ve been thinking about heat. Now, I’m no stranger to intense heat. I’ve been working in front of a pizza oven for over 40 years and I live in Las Vegas where, one day last week, the temperature topped out at 119 degrees. So, let’s just say heat is a big part of my life. As pizza makers and bread bakers, we…Read More…

A week away from pizza–it was hard. Every time I passed a pizza place on the island of St. Martin I had to fight the desire to check it out as an act of PQ duty. But it was our vacation, Susan and I, and that included a vacation from anything that would draw us back into the things we were vacating. Let’s face it, sometimes you just have to…Read More…