Pizza

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Summary: Top-quality, authentic recipes for pizza and much more!
Review: I absolutely recommend this book to any and all pizza lovers. The recipes are extremely authentic, calling for only the freshest ingredients. They are introduced by individual narratives discussing the region each recipe comes from. Plus, the authors have included specific recommendations for turning out superb doughs, from the type of salt and water to use to techniques for rolling the dough. I have given this book as a gift to all my friends and family who are true aficionados of Italian flatbreads--and that is the ultimate compliment!

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Summary: it won't produce your ordinary pizza
Review: The recipes in this book won't produce the type of pizza you are used to seeing and tasting from Pizza Hut. If you are looking for a healthier, more authentic version, you will enjoy and use this book. Yes, you will need a pizza stone. I bought this book and a pizza stone at the same time, excited about what my results would produce. The crust turned out perfectly on my very first try. The recipes are easy to follow and the results leave you with a beautiful creation. The book's chapters include, ingredients and equipment you will need, pizza dough, neapolitan pizza, american pizza, filled pizzas, calzoni and turnovers, regional italian pizzas and flat breads, focaccia, antipasti and accompaniments, what wines to serve with pizza, a list of the author's favorite pizzerias, and mail sources for those items you may not be able to find in your area. Try the margherita pizza, the focaccio and the deep dishes. They're fantastic. Our particular favorites are follonico's summer seafood pizza and the pancetta and rosemary focaccia. The results are wonderful because the recipes call for the freshest ingredients you can find. Our favorite part of the book, however, is the trivia interspersed about the book filled with the history of pizza and the people who love it!

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Summary: I Love pizza
Review: This book is very easy to follow recipes such as pizza dough.Which was out this world.I was never able to master pizza dough.

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Summary: Delicious, Healthy Pizza From Your Oven
Review: This is a very accessible, thorough book on how to make great pizza (and other Italian breads) from scratch at home.

I echo the sentiments about American pizza in Bill Marsano's review; I grew up buying soggy, greasy pizza, and I swore off that kind of junk in order to eat more healthy. But when you make your own pizza, you can control how much cheese and meat you put on it. Using the recipes from this book, your pizza will taste better than anything you can buy and no pizza joint can deliver the feeling of accomplishment that comes when your efforts get better and better.

Every week I make pizza using the recipes for dough and sauce from this book. Friday has become homemade pizza night at our house, and even my notoriously picky 7 year old nephew devours our pizza. The "pizza maker's sauce" (p. 67) drew raves from our guests when we used it on pasta. The dough recipes are flexible: the pizzas in the pictures have thick crusts, which is the way my family likes it. If you want thinner, crispier crusts, simply roll the dough thinner.

The book contains recipes to approximate authentic Italian pizzas using American flour. Being brought up in the US I wouldn't know authentic Italian pizza any more than I'd know authentic Indian food, but the Scicolones traveled to Italy for a taste of the real thing. So if you're a purist, it's all here, including recommendations for quality pizza joints worldwide.

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Summary: Sensational Neapolitan pizza is easy to make at home.
Review: Though we visit Italy at least twice a year, we never gave much thought to pizza until we spent some time in Naples. It was there that we realized that what most of us think of as pizza is pretty ordinary compared to the original Neapolitan version. The classic pie has a crust that is thin, crisp yet chewy, bumpy, blistered, and not perfectly round. It looks and tastes homemade. To a Neapolitan, a pizza is only about 10 inches in diameter, a perfect single serving, and the test of a well made crust is that the pie can be folded into quarters without cracking. The toppings are simple, not too heavy and very, very fresh. The most typical is sweet, ripe tomatoes, creamy, just-made mozzarella, and a fresh basil leaf or two.

Back home we wanted to eat pizza just like we had in Naples, but couldn't find any that compared. We decided to make our own and devised techniques for making excellent pizza in our home oven. We interviewed pizzamakers and learned their secrets, adapting them to our home equipment and American ingredients. The results were spectacular and our friends and family loved them. What is more, making pizza is easy and quick. Now, even Charles, who is a wine expert and definitely not a cook, can make sensational pizza.

We hope you will enjoy our book and learn how much fun it is to make Neapolitan style pizza at home. Remember that if Charles can make great pizza, anybody can! Please write us if you have any questions or comments about pizza. We look forward to hearing from you.

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Summary: great cookbook
Review: very nice! I have purchased unglazed quarry tiles to bake on and it is wonderful!

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Summary: Pizza: Home-Made and Why It Should Be
Review: With pizza parlors strewn like confetti through even small American cities and several national chains offering home delivery, why would you make you own?

Because that's probably the only way you'll get a good one short of going to Italy. Most American pizza is awful--topped with tasteless "pepperoni," dotted with the synthetic glop the USDA calls "cheese-type food product."

So get Charles and Michele Scicolone's book and get to work. I only wish they'd written it sooner: I spent several years trying to figure out how to make a decent pizza without their help. Let me tell you it was a long, involved, expensive and frequently messy process. The results, in the end were excellent--except for the dough, which I could never get quite right. The Scicolones have solved that problem by doing real research in the field--by which I mean IN ITALY. As a result they recommend mixing regular flour witha certain amount of cake flour. Cake flour (the stuff used by pastry chefs, not the self-rising stuff) is softer than regular bread flour and the blend of the two types produces a soft, stretchy, easily worked dough that gives superb results.

Another reason for making your own pizza, by the way,is that it's a lot of fun. Get this book and try it.--Bill Marsano