The Pizza Bible
by Tony Gemignani

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! - Everyone loves pizza! From fluffy Sicilian pan pizza to classic Neapolitan margherita with authentic charred edges, and from Chicago deep-dish to cracker-thin, the pizza spectrum is wide and wonderful, with something to suit every mood and occasion. And with so many fabulous types of pie, why commit to just one style? The Pizza Bible is a complete master class in making delicious, perfect, pizzeria-style pizza at home, with more than seventy-five recipes covering every style you know and love, as well as those you've yet to fall in love with. Pizzaiolo and eleven-time world pizza champion Tony Gemignani shares all his insider secrets for making amazing pizza inhome kitchens. With The Pizza Bible, you'll learn the ins and outs of starters, making dough, assembly, toppings, and baking, how to rig your home oven to make pizza like the pros, and all the tips and tricks that elevate home pizza-making into a craft.

Tony Gemignani is the chef and owner of seven restaurants including Tony's Pizza Napoletana, Tony's Coal-Fired Pizza, Capo's in San Francisco, and Pizza Rock in Las Vegas and Sacramento. He's also the co-owner of the International School of Pizza in San Francisco. Gemignani has been making pizza for over twenty years and holds an impressive set of awards. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza
by Peter Reinhart

In the course of his extraordinary career as a baker, culinary instructor, and author, Peter Reinhart has dedicated himself to exploring the passions and techniques behind the great breads of the world. His most recent pursuit has been pizza—a seemingly simple food that has been hotly debated since Italian immigrants brought it to America more than a century ago. Allegiances run from the general (Chicago- versus New York-style, Neapolitan versus Sicilian) to the particular (Pepe's versus Sally's, Gino's East versus Pizzeria Uno), and newfangled versions like sushi pizza are extending the frontier. In American Pie, Reinhart follows the pizza trail from Italy to the States, capturing the stories behind the greatest artisanal pizzas of the Old World and the New.

Beginning his journey in Genoa, Reinhart scours the Italian countryside in search of the fabled focaccia col formaggio di Recco. After a stop in Florence for pizza vesuvio, with its black truffles and molten cheese, Peter heads to Rome to sample the famed seven-foot-long pizza bianca, and then Naples for the archetypal pizza napoletana. Back in America, the hunt for authentic pizza begins in the unlikely locale of Phoenix, Arizona, where Chris Bianco of Pizzeria Bianco has convinced many that his pie is the best in the country. Sardinian pizza in Dallas; the pizza epicenter of New Haven; grilled pizza in Providence; the deep-dish pies of Chicago; Yugoslavian pogacha in Bellevue, Washington—these are just a few of the stops on Reinhart's epic tour.

Reinhart then returns to the kitchen, where he gives a master class on pizza-making techniques and provides his interpretations of the most memorable pizzas from his journey. His insatiable curiosity—and appetite—and gift for storytelling make this a must-have book for the avid cook, as well as a great read for the armchair pizzaiolo.

The Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook
by Pasquale Bruno, Jr.

Known worldwide as the one-of-a-kind deep-dish concoction, Chicago-style pizza has long been the favorite choice for millions of pizza lovers. This mouth-watering thick-crusted dish, topped with savory tomatoes, cheese, mushrooms, green peppers, and other favorite ingredients, has been flown out on private planes and carried on commercial flights bound for everywhere.

The Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook reveals Chicago's authentic pizza recipes, complete with all the toppings, seasonings, and baking instructions you'll need to turn out the real thing in your own kitchen. While Chicago's pizza-in-the-pan is its most famous dish, this cookbook offers a host of other popular renditions also served at the more than 2,000 pizza parlors around town, including stuffed, thin crust, medium crust, whole wheat, Italian bakery, Sardinian, pesto, pizza-on-a-bun, and more. You'll discover the secrets of using the best equipment and ingredients, and you'll learn proper baking techniques, all of which are fully illustrated.

Chicago's most popular pizza makers and their restaurants are also featured along with beautiful color photographs of the famed pizza pies. With The Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook you can bring the pizza capital of the world into your own kitchen and make Chicago-style pizza like you've never tasted it before.

Pizza Napoletana!
by Pamela Sheldon Johns, Richard G. Jung
Review by Dana Jacob

Pamela Sheldon Johns is a connoisseur of the best Italian foods. Following up on her definitive books, Parmigiano!, about the queen of cheeses, and Balsamico!, about the artisanal vinegar that has enchanted cooks everywhere, Johns has written Pizza Napoletana! to tempt us with what is arguably the most authentic and best pizza in the world.

Neapolitans claim pizza was created in Naples during the 18th century. While it had plenty of forerunners (since every civilization growing wheat had some kind of hearth-baked flat bread), it is indeed a recorded fact that Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba, the first pizzeria, opened in the heart of Naples in 1830. Neapolitans are so fiercely protective of the quality of their pizza that, as Johns explains, a university professor assembled a 42-page document precisely detailing every requirement for making this specialty. He then spearheaded the movement which achieved a D.O.C., an official, government definition of what this pizza must be. Happily, la vera pizza Napolitana can made anywhere in the world, provided one meets these specifications for the flour, cheese, tomatoes, and techniques to be used.

Following a detailed history, and the explanation of the D.O.C. requirements, Johns describes how to make both the classic Marinara pizza, topped with tomatoes, oil, oregano, and garlic, and the true Margherita, a pie garnished with tomatoes, oil, mozzarella, and basil. In all, she provides 50 pizza recipes. For authenticity, some require the mozzarella di bufala used in Naples and also exported, while others use fior di latte, what Italians call cow's milk mozzarella. Still others are pizza bianca, like the Pizza con Aglio Arrostito, topped with just-roasted garlic and fresh rosemary, and pies made in other regions of Italy, such as Schiacciata, the Tuscan flat bread often called focaccia.

The work of making an authentic Neapolitan pizza is simple. However, for best results, either a wood-burning oven or a pizza stone to place in a conventional oven is called for. Johns explains how to deal with this. The many tempting color photos in Pizza Napoletana! can persuade you that her suggestions are worth pursuing.

The Art of Pizza Making: Trade Secrets and Recipes
by Dominick A. DeAngelis

Pizza is America's favorite food. I've yet to meet anyone who doesn't like it. This coalition of dough and toppings can be as diverse as any ethnic cuisine; it's not just a round pie with sauce and cheese. If ten people followed the same pizza recipe, each would get different results, reflecting his or her own individuality. So it must be concluded that pizza making is an art, and not just an assemblage of ingredients.

This book is the culmination of over twenty-two years of research and development. During this period, numerous interviews were conducted with retired pizzeria owners, active owners would never divulge their trade secrets, and artisans in the commercial baking industry. As with any artist, some of my creations were influenced by other artists, from pizzerias in the U.S. and in Italy (my mother was born and raised in Italy).

Although I am an engineer by trade, pizza making is my passion. Each year I go through hundreds of pounds of flour, sharing my pizzas with friends and family, while accumulating valuable feedback on each new recipe. My inspiration to write this book was the lack of availability of an adequate pizza cookbook; I've yet to see a cookbook on the market that contains even the basic fundamentals about making professional quality pizza. In 1686, Sir Isaac Newton presented his three fundamental laws of motion: A body in motion tends to stay in motion, the acceleration of a body is proportional to the force acting on it, and to every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction.

As fundamental as are Newton's laws of motion, here are my three fundamental laws for making professional quality pizza: Only high gluten flour can be used for making pizza dough, only shortening should be used to grease pizza pans, and only dough kneaded by a mixing machine will yield a baked crust of proper texture, tenderness and consistency.

The Pizza Book: Everything There Is to Know About the World's Greatest Pie
by Evelyne Slomon

The average American loves pizza, but most people think of it as something you go out for, or have delivered in, or buy in your supermarket freezer. But now the average American is in for a surprise—and a treat—thanks to The Pizza Book.

Evelyne Slomon loves pizza too, and she has made it her business (and her pleasure) to discover all there is to know about it. In her quest for the perfect pie, she has found that the broad category of pizza includes a repertoire of fabulous dishes with a fascinating history to match.

As it moved from the Etruscans to the Italians to us Americans, pizza has been served flat, rolled, stuffed, filled, even upside down. It's been fried and baked and topped with everything from mozzarella and tomatoes to broccoli and goat cheese. It's been served at everything from black-tie dinners to picnics.

The really good news is that all of the recipes Slomon unearthed and invented—including ones from the best pizzerias in the country—can be made in your own kitchen. The more than 200 easy-to-follow recipes in The Pizza Book range from classic Italian, Neapolitan, and Sicilian pizzas to Calzoni and Stromboli Rolls, Chicago-Style, New York-Style, Tex-Mex-Style, New England-Style, and California-Style pizza. And for the pizza lover in a hurry, Slomon has invented the 30-Minute Pizza.

Supplementing the recipes is advice about ingredients (there's mozzarella and then there's mozzarella), equipment (you don't need a special oven), and technique (they only flip the dough in the movies). With The Pizza Book you'll never have to defrost or order out again.

Pizza: From Its Italian Origins to the Modern Table
by Rosario Buonassisi

Excerpt from book:

When trying to define pizza, one sets out on a sea of troubles. And though these apparently idle musings on the exact definition of pizza may seem insignificant compared with deeper questions about existence, to food-loving persons such as myself they are of crucial importance. The history of food is and integral part of the history of humanity. So let's give pizza its due. Let us look for its humble beginnings and trace its long life to the present, where it has almost become its own food group. But that is rushing ahead. We shall begin humbly. And what's more humble than a rather acrid and technical definition? It will help us discuss both the Neapolitan pizza—pizza par excellence—and its lesser but still delicious cousins scattered all over the world. My definition runs as follows:

Pizza: a thin layer of leavened dough, ideally disk-shaped, made by thoroughly kneading wheat flour, yeast, salt, olive oil, and water and then covering with various ingredients before being baked in an oven. The different ingredients employed determine the taste and smell—and the name—of the various kinds of pizza.

Pizza: More Than 60 Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pizza
by Diane Morgan, Tony Gemignani, Scott Peterson (Photographer)

Team five-time world pizza-throwing champion Tony Gemignani with acclaimed cookbook author Diane Morgan and the result is a cookbook that will turn any home kitchen into the best pizzeria in town. 

There are over 60 selections on the menu, including the thick, rounded-edge crust of classic Neapolitan pizza Margherita, the thin crust New York–style Italian Sausage and Three Pepper Pizza, and the stick-to-your-ribs, deep-dish kind, smothered in spinach and mozzarella. There are also plenty of new-fangled pizzas: layered with Thai curry flavored chicken or pineapple; cooked on the grill; even quick and easy versions using store-bought crust.

Aficionados will find six pizza dough recipes ready to suit anyone's crust preferences. Tips for proper use of such related gear as peels, stones, tiles, pans, grills, and ovens make this a complete pizza package. And with step-by-step dough tossing instructions from Tony himself, it's clear: When it comes to pizza—Pizza delivers.

"Pizza… blew me away! This book could only have been co-written by a real-world, in the trenches, pizza man and pizza aficionado. This read rips down the veil of secrecy on how to make some of the best pizza in the world. The authors have captured the essence of the best of the best recipes from coast to coast. Their easy-to-follow recipes, photos, and procedures make this a must read for amateur and professional pizzaiolos alike. No serious pizza lover can hope to make and bake world-class pizza without this book. Diane and Tony's research will make your kitchen legendary and will be the gold standard for our industry. Pizza has my highest recommendation!" — Big Dave Ostrander, The Pizza Doctor, Author, Speaker.

Everybody Loves Pizza
by Penny Pollack and Jeff Ruby

Americans consume 350 slices of pizza every second, an amount equal to 100 acres a day. Everybody Loves Pizza celebrates this fanatical devotion to our favorite dish with a fascinating look at the origins of pizza in Italy and its evolution in American culture—plus delicious recipes from acclaimed pizza makers and tantalizing color photos. Take a look inside, and you'll be craving your next slice.

Everybody Loves Pizza also reveals where you can find more than 500 top-notch pizzerias across the United States, as judged by food writers, pizza insiders, and ordinary, pizza-loving Americans. The country's pizza loyalties are divided, but whether your region flies the flag of New York-style thin crust, New Haven white clam, Chicago deep-dish, or California healthy gourmet, a pizza joint near you is serving it up hot and delicious.

Dig into Everybody Loves Pizza for:

• The 10 best pizzas in the country

• Recipes from the familiar (Barbecue Chicken Pizza) to the exotic (Prosciutto Pear Pizza)

• Inside stories and personal interviews with big-name pizza personalities

• And much more!

Whether you stash a copy of the book in your car to guide you to your next pizza experience, leave a flour-covered copy in the kitchen open to your favorite recipe, or offer it up to your favorite foodie, Everybody Loves Pizza is sure to inspire new respect for that cheesy, doughy disk Americans adore.

Pizza: A Slice of Heaven: The Ultimate Pizza Guide and Companion
by Ed Levine, Nora Ephron, Roy Blount Jr., Calvin Trillin

Pizza is the single most popular food in the world, and wherever you go in America you can always find it. In fact,  we consume 33 billion dollars worth of pizza annually from the 63,873 pizzerias in America. That's a lot of slices.

This year's pizza centennial is a milestone laid claim to by Lombardi's Pizza, which opened its doors in New York in 1905. Celebrating this anniversary is Ed Levine's Pizza: A Slice of Heaven: The Ultimate Pizza Guide and Companion, in which Levine and some of America's best writers and cartoonists set out to answer every cosmic question involving this beloved food: Is Chicago pizza really more of a casserole? What makes New York pizza so good? Is the pizza in New Haven better than anything found in Naples? Is the best pizzeria in the world found in Phoenix, Arizona? What and where is the Pizza Belt? How good can homemade pizza be? Is there an American pizza aesthetic? How does one go about judging pizza? Is there such a thing as a good frozen pizza?

All these questions and more will be answered by Levine and Calvin Trillin, Ruth Reichl, Roy Blount, Jr., Arthur Schwartz, Mario Batali, Jeffrey Steingarten, and Eric Asimov, among others, who tackle the profound questions and never-ending debates that invariably arise whenever the subject of pizza is brought up in polite company.