Reddit reviews American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza

American Pie, by Peter Reinhart. Half book, half recipes, and no one knows bread like Peter.

I've made pizza professionally for many years, and it's still taken me a long time to begin to figure out what I'm doing. Especially at home, it's important to let the dough rest during kneading, to allow autolysis and gluten formation. Also, moisture content is key.

Two of my favorite resources for learning about pizza are Peter Reinhart's American Pie, and Jeff Varasano's web page. Oh, yeah, also, Kenji-Alt's Pizza Lab column at Slice. His New York style dough is made using a processor, and is stretchy and great for tossing. If you have a processor, I highly recommend you give this a try.

A big thumbs up for Peter Reinhart. He also wrote American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza, arguably the best book ever for people who want to make great pizza at home.

EDIT: I just found out he has a website - Pizza Quest

I used a variety of dough recipes before, but settled on the Neo-Neopolitan recipe in this book: American Pie by Peter Reinhart. That dough recipe with the crushed tomato sauce recipe makes for a great pizza. I think one of the big tricks is finding the right yeast (I've had great luck with Bob's Red Mill Active Yeast and SAF Instant. On the east coast I used SAF, but replaced with the Bob's when I moved to the west coast.

Both yeasts will work well. The trick with both is to let your dough do a cold rise in the fridge. I will mix everything together to create the dough, then let it rise for somewhere between 15-60 min at room temp in whatever container I'm using to hold them (to keep moisture in the dough), then I let them sit and rise in the fridge for at least 24 hours, ideally 36-72 hours. Then when you're ready to make your pizza, bring the dough out two hours prior and let it rise.

This sounds complicated because you have to plan things in advance, but it's really not. It takes a combined amount of work that totals like 40 min and you have pizza dough for a week. It's also kind of fun to do, so there is that.

One your dough is ready, you need to cook it. During some point when the dough is rising, you should make some sauce. I like the crushed tomato sauce because it tastes awesome and is way easy. Get a can of crushed San Marzano tomatoes, put them in a blender and throw in oregeno, basil, maybe some garlic, salt, and that's basically it (please see recipe in book for detailed instructions). This sauce gets cooked when it's on the pizza, so I generally make the sauce about 30 min before I plan to put the sauce on the pie. That gives the flavors enough time to mix together when I have it sitting in the fridge, on-deck to go in the pizza. Keeping the sauce cool also has a nice effect on the dough when it's cooking (keeps the top of the crush soft while the bottom gets crispy.

Ok, so you're ready to combine it all. Grab a dough ball from the counter (that was rising for the past 2 hours), and flatten it out. People do different styles, but I like to flatten the doughball into a disk, and then toss that pizza dough like I work in a pizza place. This part is fun, but takes a couple times to learn, so expect that.

Once your pizza dough is all stretched out, put some toppings on it. I think it's great to do a plan cheese the first couple of times because it helps you figure out where to work on for improvement. Once you're ready, slide that pizza on to the pizza stone/steel/whatever you're using. Depending on the temp of your oven, that should be done in 6-10 min. If you have a brick oven (i want one so badly), you can finish a pizza in 90 seconds at 1000 degrees. For normal household ovens, you want to crank it as high as it will go, and if you're using a pizza stone or steel, let that heat up at the highest temp for at least 45 min so it can store the max amount of energy that will then be transformed into a perfect crust.

Ok, so those are the basics. You should buy that book because the instructions are way better than what I gave. Also, it has lots of dough, sauce, and topping recipes, in addition to the first half of the book being a story about a journey for the perfect pizzas.

Pizza is fucking awesome and once you begin to make your own and take pride in it, you will never be able to go back to shitty corporate pizza ever again.

Also, pic of most recently baked pizza. This was a good recipe, but I'd swap asparagus for romanescos next time and I think I got lazy with the oven heating and should have let it heat the steel up for more than 30 min. Tasted amazing though.

If he likes pizza and you guys like to cook you could get him all the tools and a cookbook to make pizza. It would be relatively inexpensive since pizza stones are cheap, pizza cutters are cheap, and all you really need beyond that is this incredible cookbook by Peter Reinhart. That's also another concrete and sentimental gift since there is a tangible aspect but it's also a precommitment to make pizza together.

This book is all you need for perfect pizza made at home. Worth every dollar.