Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

Hi Everyone, When we were in Boulder, in October, to attend the Fire Within Conference we met a local chef with a big vision. Kelly Whitaker wowed us, not only with his pizzas, but with everything we tasted–and everything he serves at his popular Pizzeria Basta comes from of his wood-fired oven. In this video–and we have more of Kelly in future Instructionals and Webisodes– you will see how he…Read More…

When we launched our first official pizza quest in the summer of 2009, we began in Los Angeles at one of my absolute favorite restaurants, Pizzeria Mozza. It is the creation of Nancy Silverton (many time James Beard Award winner) and superstar chef Mario Batali, probably the most influential Italian chef in America today. Mario, who rarely allows filming in his restaurants, was kind enough to give us his okay…Read More…

Merry Christmas Everyone!! Just want to let you know we’ll be back with all new videos and features on Wednesday, December 29th, featuring the first of four webisode segments about Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, a  new Instructional video filmed at Boulder’s hot new restaurant, Pizzeria Basta, and a guest column by world pizza champion Tony Gemignani. Thanks for your tremendous support during our launch week, and feel free to…Read More…

  Classic Pizza Dough, Neo-Neapolitan Style (Makes five 8-ounce pizzas)   What makes this Neo-Neapolitan is that I use American bread flour instead of Italian -00- flour, but you can certainly use Italian flour, such as Caputo, if you want to make an authentic Napoletana dough. Just cut back on the water by about 2 ounces, since Italian flour does not absorb as much as the higher protein American flour….Read More…

Hi Everyone, We’re back with all new material, as we will every week. Sometimes it will be a new webisode, sometimes a new instructional, and always a new blog entry from me and a Guest Column from our invited Contributors. This week we have both a webisode (the first in a four part series on Pizzeria Mozza, which we will post on Thursday) and a new instructional video filmed at…Read More…

  Hi Everyone, This week we offer you the second in a weekly series of essays by the Pizza Quest Contributors (last week I got the ball rolling with an essay on food carts, but now I’m passing the baton to our esteemed group of contributors). This week, we’ll be hearing from world champion pizzaiolo, Tony Gemignani, of Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco. We have some great footage of…Read More…

Respect The Craft So many things about pizza run through my mind each day, but lately, I’ve been thinking about pizza as a craft.  I laugh when I see people, writers, critics, or bloggers comparing pizzas from different pizzerias when I believe that they should be celebrating pizza in it’s entirety. In the restaurant business we call it the uneducated palate. Understanding all the details of different styles is so…Read More…

  Here I am in Istanbul, sailing on the Bosphorus toward the Prince Islands, with the famous Hagia Sophia Church in the background. Look for this image of me in future “Where in the world is Peter” postings.

In this video you will see Joseph Pergolizzi making a wonderful, “white” pizza in one of own wood-fired oven rigs, using creamy ricotta cheese (reegoata, as he calls it) and fresh heirloom tomatoes, harvested that very day, as well as locally grown mushrooms. We loved it (it would be hard not to)!!!  We filmed this at the end of a three day “Fire Within Owners Conference,” for people who own and…Read More…

As Brad told you, these photos are from our very first quest, during the summer of 2009. We traveled from LA to San Francisco, with many stops in-between, and met quite number of interesting people, many of them not shown here in these photos (for instance, we had some great slices at the legendary Cheese Board in Berkeley, on their wonderful sourdough crust–we’ll have that for you in a subsequent…Read More…