Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza (5 page)

Serving
- After removing the pizza from the oven, let it stand for a few minutes on a trivet until the cheese stops bubbling and the pizza cools slightly. This allows the toppings and cheese to set prior to cutting. Cut the pizza into manageable size slices and serve while still warm.

If you have one, serve the pizza on a perforated pan. The holes in the pan let steam and sauce out so that the crust does not become soggy.

Next Steps

Well, you just made a pizza! I hope it was fantastic and exactly met your desires. If this is one of the first few pizzas you have made that is not entirely likely. That is not a problem at all. Everything you need to know about making pizza is easy to learn. The rest of this book is focused on helping you take what you already knew, what you have just learned, and the passion you have for getting better and channeling them so that you can quickly develop your pizza-making skills. This book will make you more successful, more quickly than any other cookbook I have found. The
Passionate About Pizza System
will help you consistently make great homemade pizza!

Introduction

Acknowledgements

I want to thank my wife Mariscela, my children Gabriella and Evan, and my brothers and sisters for eating so many pizzas! Mariscela has been especially supportive and helpful. She has given me solid confidence to continue. I must really thank my father Nick for taking some wonderful pictures and showing me that adding the pictures was an achievable goal. I am also grateful to my friends and their families who have eaten quite a few pizzas that I have made.

I have had help along the way. Mary Francis was the first person to read my entire first draft. It was a very rough draft, I must say. I really appreciated the effort and the feedback. Susan Dugan gave me some good editorial comments on my early work as well. Cindy Davis provided me with a very complete copy edit that gave me many good suggestions and spurred me on to make a complete editing pass through the book myself. I am indebted to Coye Mac Jones who runs an award-winning Homemade Gourmet Pizza web site. He read a draft of my book, gave me great encouragement, and was willing to give me a very nice endorsement. I gladly thank Solange Inghilleri for giving me guidance on the look, taste, and feel of real Italian pizza. Having never been to Italy I needed some consultative guidance to make the recipe authentic. Sharon von Gal gave me some good advice on cookbook formats based on her huge collection and broad knowledge. Recently, Rob Rushin performed a complete copy edit and helped smooth out some of the text.

I want to thank Adobe for continuing to develop the FrameMaker program for so many years; I have used versions 2 through 8 inclusive. I wrote iterations one through four of this book using FrameMaker and I found the program to be so very useful. Alas, I have switched to Microsoft Word for this last version. Word is not as easy for big books as FrameMaker is but it does the job if you are willing to work at it and Word was much less expensive.

Author’s Pizza-making Journey

You might wonder who I am and how I developed such a passion for making pizza and writing about making pizza.

I began making Chicago-style pizza soon after I got married. My wife and I received a Chicago-style pizza set as a wedding shower gift. The kit had a deep-dish pizza pan, pizza cutter, pan lifter, and a pizza cookbook specializing in Chicago-style pizza. One day I asked my wife if she was ever going to make pizza; she said, “You go ahead.” So, I did. I used the kit to make pizza quite frequently. I kept practicing until I could make a better pizza than most of the local pizzerias in the suburbs of Chicago where we lived at that time. After a while, I missed the New York-style thin crust pizza that I grew up with; you just could not buy that kind of pizza in Chicago when I lived there. Therefore, I decided to try my hand at making New York-style pizza. After another intense period of practice, I was able to duplicate and even improve on the New York-style pizza I remembered from my youth.

I practiced making pizza whenever I could. I made and served many hundreds of pizzas to my family and friends over the years. My pizzas became more and more consistent and I kept getting rave reviews; that is, when they were not begging me to make something other than pizza! Many of my friends said, “You should open a pizzeria!” Others said, “Can you teach me to make pizza like that?” I wrote this book to capture the techniques that I had learned and developed so that you can make great pizza, too!

I have fond memories of the three pizzerias that formed my personal vision of what pizza should be and influenced how I make it. I spent many hours watching the people make pizza at the Grande Pizzeria in Endwell, New York. It took me a couple of years of experimenting, reading pizza cookbooks, and picking my memory to duplicate their crust. Brozetti's Pizzeria, in Binghamton, New York, made the best Sicilian-style pizza. We used to buy individual pieces of it cold, topped with just sauce and cheese. Their sauce had a sweet, rich taste that I have come pretty close to duplicating. Whenever anyone had a large party, the pizza of choice was Nirchi’s Pizza, in Endicott, New York. They made big, rectangular Sicilian-style pizzas; you could buy either a half or a full “sheet.” These pizzas had a thick crust and an uneven surface. The cheese would be dark brown, and when you bit into the pizza, you never knew whether you were going to get more dough, sauce, or cheese. I was inspired to make pizza that was as distinctive and as satisfying as the pizzas these pizzerias made.

The flavors on the pizza we ate when I was growing up also shaped my vision of pizza. We almost never got toppings on our pizza. Therefore, when I started making pizza, I began the quest to find just the right dough, sauce, cheese, and herb combination for the “perfect”cheese pizza. In my opinion, the quintessential test for a pizza chef is the ability to make great cheese pizza. I believe that a cheese pizza should stand on its own without the need for additional toppings.

I grew up to be particularly open-minded to new and different flavors on a pizza. My father was allergic to tomatoes; as a result, we were always ordering a “white” pizza for him. A white pizza is a pizza made without tomato sauce and with some kind of toppings to give it flavor. Although we did get many strange looks at many a pizzeria, we ended up having some great (and unique) pizzas.

I also moved a few times. By the time I started making my own pizza, I had lived in upstate New York, the mountains of Virginia, and the cities of Atlanta and Chicago. My mother was a wonderful cook and she always experimented with different types of recipes and ethnic foods. This gave me an early initiation to some interesting foods. She was also very progressive and health-conscious so we had many healthy (and strange) ingredients in the foods she made. I think all of these experiences opened my eyes to the wonderful variety of tastes, which we can make into pizza!

As I began broadening the pizzas I made and started writing about making pizza, I became more aware of the different types of pizzas. I started observing everything about pizza and started a kind of catalog in my mind. The pizzas I ate at many a pizzeria as well as by the pizza cookbooks I read shaped this catalog. I began to see each type of pizza as something to explore, understand, and experience. I also saw each type of pizza as something that was different and unique. I could categorize, study, and duplicate each one. It became my passion to understand these different types of pizzas as well as to describe them in a way that anyone could duplicate them.

This cookbook has been a long time coming. In the beginning of my journey, I wrote a four page recipe for pizza to give to my Dad. I eventually expanded that to a pizza tutorial that had enough information to get started making basic pizza for anyone who wants to try making pizza but is not ready to buy a dedicated pizza cookbook. By then, I had been making three different types of pizza to duplicate the three types of pizza from my youth. After describing those three, I kept adding descriptions about another type of pizza then another. Soon I had quite a bit of material. It needed structure and form to make it easily accessible. I cooked up the idea of systematic pizza making and the organization of the cookbook along the lines of the system. It seemed to hang together well and it got good feedback from those who reviewed my drafts. Before I knew it, I had something that looked and read like a cookbook! That reenergized my passion and it has never stopped. I created four major iterations of the book before this published version. Getting a high-quality digital camera was another big step. With it, I could take pictures to help guide alongside the text. The pictures prove that you can do it. They show me making pizza in my home kitchen and are the real deal.

I hope that through this book I can help each of you make your own pizza-making journey successful!

Preface

Passionate About Pizza:
Making Great Homemade Pizza
has three parts to encourage you along the journey of becoming a better pizza maker.

You can use Passionate About Pizza:
Making Great Homemade Pizza
as a regular cookbook to make a specific type, style, or recipe of pizza. You can also use it as a kind of handbook for a practical study of pizza making. In either case, it is worth reading the first chapter to learn about the
Passionate About Pizza System
and then at least skimming the chapters on planning and preparation techniques before proceeding too far.

The
Quickstart guide
gives you an easy path towards your first pizza and is a great way to make our first pizza together. This is especially helpful if you have not made many (or any) pizzas before. If you are an experienced pizza-maker then you can bypass the Quickstart guide.

Part One
starts walking you through a systematic approach to making consistently good pizza by introducing the
Passionate About Pizza System
, and then further develops the system in subsequent chapters focused on detailed discussions of every aspect of making a pizza. Even the most practiced pizza chef will get some benefit (and enjoyment, I hope) from reading the chapters in part one.

Part Two
covers recipes and has chapters listing dough and sauce recipes that you can use for any type of pizza. One chapter for each of the major types of pizza follows. Each of these chapters has detailed recipes for each of the common styles of one type. There is even a compendium of different pizza recipes so that you can always find a pizza recipe that suits your taste.

Part Three
expands the
Passionate About Pizza System
into advanced pizza-making topics including a chapter on having a pizza party. For those with visions of making pizza professionally there is a brief introduction to advanced pizza making topics. The book ends with a chapter covering common mistakes and solutions to those problems called the “
Troubleshooting Guide
”. This guide gives a quick view of the problems that are likely to happen when a neophyte makes pizza the first few times. If you are new to making pizza, check out the troubleshooting guide.

I encourage you to write on this book to record your successes as well as to make notes about what works, your own experiences, and mistakes to avoid as you continue to make pizzas. Throughout the book, there are cook’s notes pages where you can write comments and notes to yourself to capture your experiences. Use them! You can certainly write anywhere in the book; I do that frequently (much to the chagrin of my wife).

Feel free to make adjustments and fine-tune any recipe or procedure to your own tastes. Most of all have fun!

Part One: Foundation