Anderson Edward Charles - Mastering pizza: the art and practice of handmade pizza, focaccia and calzone

In my Philadelphia neighborhood, everyone ended up at Rizzos. They had the best pizza. It was your typical round American pie, and everybody in Abington loved it. Even the big, plain cheese pizza matched the restaurants family atmosphere perfectly. On weekend nights, all the families went to Rizzos for pizza. After Little League games, all the kids gathered at Rizzos. Sometimes, after pizza, my mom would even take me to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee! Those were the days!

Ive always loved pizza. After cooking pizzas for more than thirty years, Ive also learned that people get very passionate about their own love for pizza. Everyone has a particular favorite, from thin crust or thick crust to Naples style, Roman style, New York style, and Sicilian style. Some people want only the classic margherita pizza of crushed tomatoes with mozzarella and basil, while meat lovers prefer sauce, mozzarella, sausage, pepperoni, and ham. Well, this book is for everyone who loves pizza. I give you a variety of different dough recipes so you can make a variety of different pizzas with a variety of different toppings. I show you how to make better pizza in whatever oven youre working withfrom home ovens to wood ovens to grills. The recipes start with the pizza doughs and then move on to all the different pizzas you can make with them, including dozens of toppings. The doughs, shapes, and toppings are all interchangeable so you can choose any pizza style and any pizza topping to go with it. Experiment with different combinations to find your favorites.

Even though I fell in love with pizza in Philadelphia, I started baking them in California. In my twenties, I moved to Los Angeles, and sometime around 1991, I started working for Wolfgang Puck at Granita. Thats where I first learned to make pizza. A guy named Danny Farr showed me how to mix up dough, shape it, and work the wood oven. Danny got me totally hooked on making pizza. I fell in love with the whole process. L.A. celebrities would come into the restaurant and just stare at us making pizzas by hand. Thats where I learned how to handle the dough, and I got pretty goodso good that I once made a guitar-shaped pizza for Neil Young. But somehow Dannys dough always came out better. We made the exact same recipe and mixed it the exact same way every time, but his dough looked nicer, rose better, and stretched easier. It took me a while to figure out why.

I eventually went to Italy for a few years to become a better chef, and thats when I really dug my hands into Italian cooking. I made bread, pasta, dessertsyou name it. And I tried all kinds of pizza. Those were some of the most formative years of my life, and I still return to Italy every chance I get. When I got back to the States after that first trip, I started working at Bella Blu in New York City. They had a big wood oven in the middle of the restaurant just like at Granita. New Yorkers would come in and watch us stoke the fire and make pizza for them. Being New Yorkers, they pretended not to care, but I knew they did. They kept staring at us, at the oven, at the dough, and at the bubbling pizzas. The pizza chef, Matteo Pupillo, was from Puglia, and he taught me that you must have a relationship with your pizza dough. He said, The dough is the star of the show. Matteo helped me understand that the person behind the dough is as important as the dough itself. Its the relationship between you and your dough that really matters. Thats what was missing from my dough compared to Danny Farrs dough. You have to get a feel for your dough. Anyone can follow a recipe, but observing the dough and sensing what it needs is the key to making it better. As with any relationship, sometimesno matter how hard you trythings just dont work out. You can always try again by making another batch, but without good dough, there isnt a single topping in the world that will make your pizza taste any better. Great dough is what makes great pizza.

After working with Matteo, I paid more attention to the dough every time I made pizza. I also paid more attention to the people eating it. Even though Bella Blu was wildly different from either Rizzos or Granita, all three restaurants drew huge crowds of people for their pizzas. The pizza was just that good. After working at Bella Blu, I knew that one day I would open up my own place. I started imagining Pizzeria Vetri, and it dawned on me that a pizzeria is not only a place where people go to eat pizza but also a place where people go to experience something incredible together. The relationship that you develop with your dough is something you also share with everyone who eats your pizza. Its the care and attention that draw people in. Theres just something special about handmade food. People travel for hours or even days to obscure little corners of the world just to marvel over a pizza that someone has created. Children get so excited when you ask them if they want pizza tonight. Neighborhood families have the times of their lives grazing on the local tomato pie made by hand. Pizza is not just a plate of delicious food. Its meant to be shared; its an invitation to gather around the table for community and conviviality. Pizza brings people together. Thats why I put communal tables in my pizzeria. When people are enjoying a slice near each other, they say things like Ooh, that looks good. What is it? and Here; try a slice. I love that. Its something you dont see enough in restaurants.