Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza [Paperback]

Curtis Ide (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2009

Have you tried making pizza before, but were unsatisfied with the outcome? Do you have trouble achieving that wonderful, chewy-crunchy crust that you get at a pizzeria? Have you made good pizza, but find that you are unable to do it consistently? Have you looked at pizza cookbooks and baking stones in the store, but did not have the guts to try making pizza, yourself? Worse yet, do you have a pizza pan or a pizza stone that is sitting in your cupboard gathering dust because you have never made a pizza that is good enough to justify all the effort. Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza is what you need!

Think of the best pizza you ever had. Do you wish that you could have that pizza again, maybe even all the time? If you are lucky, you can get great pizza locally. However, if you are like most people, you just cannot seem to find the memorable pizza you want. If you live on the east coast, there are not very many Chicago-style or California-style pizzerias around. If you have moved away from New York City (or even upstate New York), you can only find great New York-style pizza in your memories. Well, if you cannot buy it, you can certainly make it. If you can buy it, you can certainly make one that is better!

With a little practice and some guidance from this book, you can make pizza better than any pizza you have made before. It can be better than any store-bought or restaurant pizza you will ever find. Moreover, your homemade pizza will be great, every time.

This comprehensive pizza cookbook will ignite your passion and help you make great homemade pizza!

- contains 256 full color pages
- over 300 color pictures guide you each step of the way
- 14 dough recipes
- 10 sauce recipes
- learn to make 17 different styles of pizza
- 35 easy-to-follow pizza-making techniques
- 65 recipes in all!
- helps you consistently make great pizza every time
- tips on Having a Pizza Party
- Troubleshooting Guide with simple solutions to common problems

Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza has three parts to encourage you along the journey of becoming a better pizza maker.

Part One starts walking you through a systematic approach to making consistently good pizza by introducing the Passionate About Pizza System, and then further develops the system in subsequent chapters focused on detailed discussions of every aspect of making a pizza. Even the most practiced pizza chef will get some benefit (and enjoyment, I hope) from reading the chapters in part one.

Part Two covers recipes and has chapters listing dough and sauce recipes that you can use for any type of pizza. One chapter for each of the major types of pizza follows. Each of these chapters has detailed recipes for each of the common styles of one type. There is even a compendium of different pizza recipes so that you can always find a pizza recipe that suits your taste.

Part Three expands the Passionate About Pizza System into advanced pizza-making topics including a chapter on having a pizza party. For those with visions of making pizza professionally there is a brief introduction to advanced pizza making topics. The book ends with a chapter covering common mistakes and solutions to those problems called the Troubleshooting Guide . This guide gives a quick view of the problems that are likely to happen when a neophyte makes pizza the first few times. If you are new to making pizza, check out the troubleshooting guide.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza earns five stars and my best of the best rating:

This cookbook covers homemade pizza like you always wished you knew. It s like having an expert pizza chef looking over your shoulder and helping in your kitchen! The author s unique approach is to treat making homemade pizza as a system with repeatable successful results. Overall, this is the most thorough pizza cookbook available on the subject of homemade pizza and reflects the author s dedication to making excellent pizza at home!

Check out my Homemade Gourmet Pizza web site for more details. --Coye Mac Jones, creator of the award winning Homemade Gourmet Pizza web site

About the Author

Curtis Ide began making Chicago-style pizza soon after he got married over 20 years ago. He and his wife received a Chicago-style pizza set as a wedding shower gift. The kit had a deep-dish pizza pan, pizza cutter, pan lifter, and a pizza cookbook specializing in Chicago-style pizza. He used the kit to make pizza quite frequently and kept practicing until he could make a better pizza than most of the local pizzerias in the suburbs of Chicago where we lived at that time. After a while, he missed the New York-style thin crust pizza that he grew up with; you just could not buy that kind of pizza in Chicago at that time. After another intense period of practice, he was able to duplicate and even improve on the New York-style pizza he remembered from his youth.

Curtis practiced making pizza whenever he could. He made and served many hundreds of pizzas to family and friends over the years. His pizzas became more and more consistent and kept getting rave reviews; that is, when they were not begging him to make something other than pizza! Many of my friends said, You should open a pizzeria. Others said, Can you teach me to make pizza like that.

As Curtis began broadening the pizzas he made and started writing about making pizza, he became more aware of the different types of pizzas. He started observing everything about pizza and started a kind of catalog in my mind. The pizzas Curtis ate at many a pizzeria as well as by the pizza cookbooks he read shaped this book. He began to see each type of pizza as something to explore, understand, and experience. Curtis also saw each type of pizza as something that was different and unique. He could categorize, study, and duplicate each one. It became Curtis' passion to understand these different types of pizzas as well as to describe them in a way that anyone could duplicate them.

He wrote this book to capture the techniques that he had learned and developed so that you can make great pizza, too!

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Twin Minds; Mass Market edition (July 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0615258603
• ISBN-13: 978-0615258607
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,075,383 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Curtis Ide (born 1963) grew up in the Southern Tier of New York. He experienced excellent New York Style pizza in the family-run pizzerias in the area. Curtis spent many hours watching pizza being made at the Grande Pizzeria in Endwell, New York. Brozetti's Pizzeria, in Binghamton, New York, made the best Sicilian-style pizza. Curtis used to buy individual pieces of their pizza cold, topped with just sauce and cheese. The sauce had a sweet, rich taste that was wonderfully satisfying. Whenever anyone had a large party, the pizza of choice was Nirchi's Pizza. They made big, rectangular Sicilian-style pizzas; you could buy either a half or a full "sheet." These pizzas had a thick crust and an uneven surface. The cheese would be dark brown, and when you bit into the pizza, you never knew whether you were going to get more dough, sauce, or cheese. Curtis was inspired to make pizza that was as distinctive and as satisfying as the pizzas these pizzerias made.

Curtis began making Chicago-style pizza soon after he got married. He received a Chicago-style pizza set as a wedding shower gift. The kit had a deep-dish pizza pan, pizza cutter, pan lifter, and a pizza cookbook specializing in Chicago-style pizza. One day he asked his wife if she was ever going to make pizza; she said, "You go ahead." So, he made a pizza and then used the kit to make deep-dish pizza quite frequently. Curtis kept practicing until he could make a better pizza than most of the local pizzerias in the suburbs of Chicago where he lived at that time.

After a while, Curtis missed the New York-style thin crust pizza that he had grown up with; you just could not buy that kind of pizza in Chicago at that time. Therefore, Curtis decided to try his hand at making New York-style pizza. After another intense period of practice, he was able to duplicate and even improve on the New York-style pizza he remembered from his youth.

Curtis practiced making pizza whenever he could. He made and served many hundreds of pizzas to family and friends over the years. Curtis' pizzas became more and more consistent and he kept getting rave reviews; that is, when they were not begging me to make something other than pizza! Many of his friends said, "You should open a pizzeria!" Others said, "Can you teach me to make pizza like that?" Curtis wrote this book to capture the techniques that he had learned and developed so that you can make great pizza, too!

Curtis grew up to be particularly open-minded to new and different flavors on a pizza. His father was allergic to tomatoes; as a result, they were always ordering a "white" pizza for him. A white pizza is a pizza made without tomato sauce and with some kind of toppings to give it flavor. Although they did get many strange looks at many a pizzeria, they ended up having some great (and unique) pizzas.

Curtis also moved a few times. By the time he started making his own pizza, he had lived in up-state New York, the mountains of Virginia, and the cities of Atlanta and Chicago. Curtis' mother was a wonderful cook and she always experimented with different types of recipes and ethnic foods. This gave him an early initiation to some interesting foods. She was also very progressive and health-conscious so they had many healthy (and strange) ingredients in the foods she made. I think all of these experiences opened Curtis' eyes to the wonderful variety of tastes, which one can make into pizza!

As Curtis began broadening the pizzas he made and started writing about making pizza, he became more aware of the different types of pizzas. Curtis started observing everything about pizza and started a kind of catalog in his mind. The pizzas he ate at many a pizzeria as well as by the pizza cookbooks heI read shaped this catalog. Curtis began to see each type of pizza as something to explore, understand, and experience. He also saw each type of pizza as something that was different and unique. Curtis would categorize, study, and duplicate each one. It became Curtis' passion to understand these different types of pizzas as well as to describe them in a way that anyone could duplicate them.

Curtis is an engineer with a Bachelor's and Master's Degree from Georgia Tech and he is descended from several generations of engineers. This background brought a unique, systematic perspective to making pizza and writing about how to make pizza. Curtis developed the Passionate About Pizza System to help guide the reader to successful pizza-making. What Curtis calls the Passionate About Pizza System are the habits that he uses for making pizza. Curtis developed these habits over many years of pizza making and wrote them down as a system for a number of reasons. Curtis' system helps you to learn systematically in order to shorten the time it takes you to learn and so that you learn better fundamentals for making better pizza. If you look carefully at what great pizzerias do, you will see that they use their own system to help keep things running smoothly and to turn out consistently good pizza. Don't let Curtis' engineering background scare you away. His book is fun and easy to read and the Passionate About Pizza System is easy to learn and use.

Curtis hopes that his book will help others learn to let their Pizza Passion flow!

Learn more about Curtis Ide and his passion for pizza at www.passionateaboutpizzabook.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Your Ordinary Cookbook, July 25, 2009

By 

H. W. Council III "Ward Council" (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza (Paperback)

Apparently engineers make great chefs! The author has an engineering background that comes through clearly in this book. It is clear that the author has systematically examined what makes good pizza in every aspect and from every angle, and has assembled that knowledge in a clear and organized manner in this book.

The result is that not only does the book provide fantastic recipes to follow, but it provides you with the principles and techniques that you can use to customize the recipes to produce pizzas that are ideal for your personal taste. The ideas are presented in such an orderly and logical manner that it is easy to do.

The pizzas are so good and the process of designing them and making them is so fun that making pizzas using the book is a fun family event that occurs about once a week in our household. The pizzas we make using the recipes and principles in Passionate About Pizza are so much better than any other pizzas we have ever bought or made that it doesn't even seem right to use the same word to refer to the bland, circular chewy things that we used to eat before we bought Passionate About Pizza.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Pizza Book!!, September 2, 2009

By 

Paul C. Freeman (texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza (Paperback)

I am a divorced dad of 2 teenagers that has limited skill in the kitchen. This book is so well written and put together that it was simple for me to on the first attempt have success. I made a batch of the basic sauce and dough exactly how it was described in the book. I was expecting to fill a trash can with my first few attempts but to my surprise the first was as good as the sixth. My kids and their friends eat every bite and one even said it was the best pizza he had ever had. This book is a life saver it will allow me to serve my teenagers pizza when they want it now because before it was out of my budget. I can't wait to work my way thru and learn as I go trying the different types. Thank You for a remarkable book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome book, August 14, 2010

By 

lemmr - See all my reviews

This review is from: Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza (Paperback)

Great, creative book. The title says it all. If you enjoy making pizza, this book makes it fun and the pizza is delicious. I taught my nine year old son what I've learned and he enjoys helping me. He loves telling people he knows how to make pizza and sauce! I highly recommend this book for learning pizza making.