California Pizza Kitchen Family Cookbook [Hardcover]

Larry Flax (Author), Rick Rosenfield (Author), Lucy Schaeffer (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 11, 2008

Bring the California Pizza Kitchen experience to your home with nearly 50 recipes and inspiring color photographs found in the California Pizza Kitchen Family Cookbook, which shows you how to make popular dishes from the restaurant known for its eclectic pizzas. Crowd-pleasing recipes that are easy to make and appeal to both adults and children include pizza like Jamaican Jerk Chicken and other favorites like Thai Crunch Salad. This book will show you how to make three kinds of pizza dough with step-by-step instructions, and it even presents ideas for create-your-own pizza parties.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

California Pizza Kitchen has been a hit with families ever since the first restaurant opened back in 1985. Grown-ups love CPK's signature pizzas, which take favorite flavor combinations from around the globe and put them on a pizza. Children love the CPKids menu, which features kid-friendly pizzas and pastas. And everybody loves CPK's zesty appetizers, sandwiches, soups, salads, specialty entrées, and desserts.

Now, in their new cookbook, CPK co-founders and co-CEOs Larry Flax and Rick Rosenfield show you and your family how to prepare pizzas, kids' favorites, and other CPK specialties right in your own kitchen. These crowd-pleasing recipes bring the CPK experience home—and are perfect for relaxed family meals as well as special celebrations. Best of all, each of the nearly fifty recipes is a cinch to make, which means your whole family can have fun helping out in the kitchen.

Your kids will love the CPKids Pizza Party recipes, including a Create-Your-Own Pizza specially designed to help them unleash their pizza creativity. If you're a fan of CPK's signature pies, you'll find recipes for standouts like Jamaican Jerk Chicken Pizza and Chipotle Chicken Pizza. You also get special holiday-themed pizzas, like a Halloween Jack-o-Lantern Pizza, that are perfect for parties—plus fun desserts like S'mores "Pizza." And to top it all off, there are recipes for a whole range of other CPK family favorites, from Thai Crunch Salad and Curly Mac & Cheese to Grilled Chicken Pesto Panini and Chicken Piccata with Spaghettini.

And don't forget the dough! You'll find recipes for three kinds—Traditional, Honey-Wheat, and thin-crust Neapolitan—along with step-by-step instructions and photographs to help you roll, stretch, and shape dough like a pro.

Illustrated throughout with inspiring color photo-graphs, the California Pizza Kitchen Family Cookbook is just what you need to get your whole family involved with cooking, get creative in the kitchen—and serve up tasty pizzas and other favorite dishes that everyoneloves to eat.

From the Back Cover

California Pizza Kitchen Family Cookbook

"From the time we published our first cookbook in 1996, and probably from the time we opened the doors of the first CPK in 1985, we've known that a family cookbook was in our future. Our customers have always included families; that was our hope from the start. Food is an art that appeals to all of our senses. Teaching our children that cooking is fun can only help develop their love for food as well as a sense of accomplishment for their artistic creation.

"We want to make our favorite—and your favorite—CPK specialties accessible to the whole family at home. So, we've taken care to make sure that all of the recipes in this book can be executed by anyone, regardless of age or culinary skill. Just as importantly, we want to inspire the whole family to create their own pizzas, panini sandwiches, salads, and desserts.

"We already know that people love to congregate in the kitchen. Whether it's because of the enticing smells or the anticipation of a great meal, that's where people like to be. Preparing CPK dishes has the added appeal of allowing all of the participants to be creative. This isn't work, it's fun!"
—Larry Flax and Rick Rosenfield

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (August 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 047022939X
• ISBN-13: 978-0470229392
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,699 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #10 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Baking > Pizza

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Pizza Book, March 16, 2010

By 

Steven Knaus (Golden, Colorado United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: California Pizza Kitchen Family Cookbook (Hardcover)

I have been making pizza using the thin crust recipe and the simple sauce recipe in this book and they have been outstanding. The key with any at home pizza is using a good quality pizza stone and an oven that can get high temps. I have an oven that goes to 550 and that combined with an 1 inch thick stone, this recipe works great with this setup. It is really a simple recipe and is ready in a couple of hours. The dough you can get very thin and is very flavorful. Overall, this book has lots of good pizza recipes that use a couple of different base crusts. I highly recommend this book if you want to start to make pizza at home that tastes like what you get at the restaurant.

12 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars If you don't want to give out your recipes - don't write a cookbook, November 23, 2008

By 

jalcruces (Las Cruces, NM) - See all my reviews

This review is from: California Pizza Kitchen Family Cookbook (Hardcover)

I have yet to find a recipe from a Restaurant that is not sabotaged in some way. So, I really can't complain because I rather expected it. I was looking for a simple pizza recipe to get me started, pretty much knowing I'd be left on my own common sense for what is missing from this recipe. All I can say is, don't trust the measurements, use your common sense. Upon initial perusal I could see that the pizza sauce recipe had no liquid content. The sauce recipe was about 5 ounces short on tomato paste and another cup or two short on liquid (water or tomato sauce).The dough recipe was about 2 cups short of flour. But it ticks me off when restaurants (this was the only book I could find, after checking several others, that had a pizza recipe in it) make cookbooks when they really don't want you to cook, they want you to go to their restaurant. Besides some interesting ideas on dessert pizzas, you are best off just surfing the web than wasting your money on this book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Very well designed book., May 18, 2011

By 

Z. Patel - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: California Pizza Kitchen Family Cookbook (Hardcover)

Book provides very useful receipe information. The stuff after cooking turns out very tastey. I recommend it very much.
I am a big fan of CPK and now a bigger fan of their receipe book