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| American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Reinhart
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $17.53
You Save: $10.42 (37%)
New (34) Used (12) Collectible (1) from $17.04
Avg. Customer Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 7230
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 1580084222
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.8248
EAN: 9781580084222
ASIN: 1580084222
Publication Date: November 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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| Customer Reviews:
 perfect THIN CRUST pizza January 3, 2006
28 out of 30 found this review helpful
Other reviewers have gone into details about what a great book this is and I don't disagree with most of those positive comments. There are a few things to realize about this book though.
First, Peter Reinhart is a bread expert. Therefore he openly states that, for him, the crust is by far the most important aspect of any pizza. So most of the book focuses on the crust.
Second, the book is all about thin crust pizzas. Reinhart travels the world sampling every kind of thin crust pizza you could imagine, waxing poetic every step of the way. But Reinhart's treatment of Chicago style deep dish pizza is both brief and inaccurate.
After admitting that he doesn't much care for it ("it just doesn't do it for me"), he recounts his vists to a few popular Chicago pizzerias, including a trip to Lou Malnatti's with Kathleen Kennedy and Gino's East with Rick Bayless. Amongst the discussions of the finer points of the "cornmeal-flavored doughs" all these supposed experts apparently missed a key point. There is no cornmeal in the crust from either of these pizzerias! No wonder Reinhart's recipe for Chicago deep-dish pizza dough bears no resemblence to the real thing.
You might wonder whether to believe some random reviewer on Amazon over Peter Reinhart. How could I know more about the Gino's East and Lou Malnatti's crusts than the world class expert?
Easy. I ordered these pizzas through the mail, and read the ingredient lists that came with them. Neither includes cornmeal. It would have been nice if Reinhart had bothered to do the same before publishing his book.
What gives these crusts their characteristic flavor and texture is a substantial amount of corn oil. If you make these doughs with all that oil, you then need to let them dry out a bit before piling toppings on them and cooking them, or you will get a mushy crust. The drying can be done in the refrigerator overnight or at low temperature (150F) in the oven.
To summarize, this book is an authoritative guide for anyone interested in thin crust pizzas. But if your primary interest is deep dish pizza, beware that the topic gets short shrift here.
 The best pizza you'll ever make at home! October 9, 2005
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
I love pizza, period. I tried in vain for about 18 months to find a dough recipe that pleased both me and my husband. Finally, I broke down and asked about a cookbook to help me in my quest. This book was the recommendation.
Not only are the crusts delicious, but so are the other recipes. I LOVE the Crushed Tomato Sauce. It's so easy, but so tasty and different. I also make the Sweet & Sour Onion Marmalade on a regular basis, but eat it on top of crackers with cream cheese. It's awesome!
There are so many great recipes in this book (so many even besides pizza) that's it's worth every penny.
Simply the best!! September 20, 2005
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Since I am an avid bread baker, I have had two of Reinhart's bread books for a number of years. Both are excellent, so I bought his pizza book. It is great!! Being a bread baker, Reinhart spends a lot of time on recipes for pizza doughs; classic Neopolitan, New Haven, New York and Chicago deep dish, among others. Before I read his book, I didn't know they were different.
I was born and raised in New York City and now live in the midwest. Since moving here, I had missed the pizza I grew up on. No more!! Since getting Reinhart's book, I have been able to make excellent New York style pizza at home. I have also tried New Haven style pizza and it is really good.
Reinhart strikes a good balance between "classic" pizzas and innovative ones. By that, I mean that he gives recipes for classic pizza sauce and toppings as well as several innovative sauces and toppings. The classic pizza sauce is uncooked and is also excellent for Italian dishes such as lasagna.
Before getting American Pie, I had never made pizza at home. The book has inspired me to now make pizza almost every week.
Best Dough Recipes Hands Down July 1, 2005
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
Thanks to Peter Reinhart, I was able to make wonderful pizzas with the better crust and tastier sauce compared to the pizzerias in my area. I got other pizza cookbooks (Art of Pizza Making and Scicolone's Pizza) but American Pie has proved to be the winner.
Dough recipies are right on the money! June 3, 2005
26 out of 26 found this review helpful
I've made pizza from plain flour and yeast, commercial all-in-one packages, and even tried a bread machine recipe, but the taste and consistency were never as good as a real Pizzeria-made pizza. I beleive in the saying that crust is 80% of a pizza, so I bought this book and tried the first recipe for Neo-Neapolitan pizza dough. Because I'm lazy, I used a bread machine to knead the dough, and topped it with sauce and cheese I picked up off the shelf. To my pure delight, the dough was fantastic. It came out of the bread machine "sticky" just like the book says real pizza dough should be. I cut the ball in half, covered each piece with olive oil, and placed both in plastic bags to rise slowly overnight in the refrigerator, as indicated. The next evening I shaped the dough by applying flour to the backs of my hands as the book said, and baked it on a pizza stone in a conventional oven. The results were incredible. I repeated the feat at my girlfriend's house the next night with the second ball of dough, and she demanded that I leave the remaining pieces at her house for her to eat the next day.
I should mention that I divided the recipe in half because I don't need to make 4 balls of dough at once. And I did make two slight modifications to the recipe: 1) I dissolved the yeast in 105 water for 2 minutes before adding it to the bread machine, then added the olive oil followed by the dry ingredients; and 2) I added 2 tablespoons of gluten to the mix. I buy my flour and other supplies from a local baking store, and they recommend adding gluten to get a better rise. So I just do that out of habit, and it seemed to work perfectly for me. I followed this up with the New York-style crust, which also resulted in a perfectly sticky ball of dough. I may be making pizza every Friday night for the next 10 years, because you can whip this dough up on Thursday night in about 20 minutes, using a bread mixer on the Dough setting. I'm sure I could get gourmet-oriented and try some of the great sauce recipes, and buy some fresh mozzarella cheese, but the pizza tastes great with ordinary sauce and toppings, so for now I'm sticking with these dough recipes for their savory crusts.
As I mentioned above, I use a 15-inch pizza stone which I place in the oven and heat to 450 for 20 minutes while preparing the pizza. A Pizza Peel, the wooden paddle used for transporting the pizza to and from the oven, is essential if you want to bake the pizza directly on the stone. You need to place a generous amount of flour and corn meal on the peel beforehand, or the pizza will not slide off easily. If this happens, have a spatula handy to coax the pizza off the peel and onto the stone. The pizza will cook up quickly and be ready in 8 to 10 minutes.
My favorites are: Neo-Neapolitan, New York Style, Pizza Americana, and Chicago Deep Dish dough. One reviewer here gave the Chicago recipe a low score, but I liked mine. The problem wasn't with the crust, it was with all the ingredients in two layers of crust that produced a heavy and moist pizza. I prefer a thinner crust that results in a pizza that two people can polish off in one meal, but the Chicago Deep Dish is a good change of pace once in a while and leaves lots of leftovers for the next day or so!
Also, I finally got to Phoenix and visited Pizzeria Bianco in October 2008. As Reinhart promised, it was a GREAT crust, baked by the dough-maker in a wood-fired brick oven. I spoke briefly to Chef Bianco and gave him the Thumbs-Up, he was very humble and thanked me. When I mentioned I had read about PB in Peter Reinhart's book, he told me he had just spoken to Peter the day before. Good people, good food.
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