EzineArticles.com, January 11, 2007

Best selling novels and tell-alls stay on the bestseller list for weeks if they are really good or topical. Most new books disappear from the public eye in days. The exceptions are cookbooks. A good cookbook can keep its buzz for years. Some cookbooks are treated like family heirlooms and get passed from generation to generation. The Art of Pizza Making by Dominick A. DeAngelis has been around since 1991 and it shows no signs of slowing down. People who bought it, or were lucky enough to get it as a gift, a month or so ago have tried the methods and the recipes and now cannot wait to write their review on Amazon. Maybe the Art of Pizza Making is working its way into heirloom status.

Almost everybody likes pizza. Anybody who has had an exceptionally good pizza loves it, and the sensation of taste of that one pizza slice has been permanently implanted into the nether regions of their brain. Pizza ingredients are salty, sweet and acidic, so maybe a good pizza is like red wine that unlocks every taste receptor in your body and keeps you wanting more. The Art of Pizza Making is the real deal. The author covers every step of the pizza making process and tells you exactly what you have to do to make exceptional tasting pizza with just the right crispness and texture.

This book not only tells you what type of flour, cheese, and tomato base to use, but how to knead the dough, how long to let it rise, and what preparation temperature you need the dough at to make the perfect crust. If you follow the directions in the book and use the same ingredients, or as close as you can get to the right ingredients, you will make a pizza as good as or better than any franchise pizza store. If you love pizza you need this book. See full review by Peter Boston --EzineArticles.com, January 11, 2007.

Now shipping is the updated 20thAnniversary (1991-2011) updated and expanded edition of this best-selling pizza cookbook. As an added bonus, this new edition contains 10 new pizza recipes such as Figgy, Foccacia di Recco (“the crown jewel”), Jamaican jerk, pear, Persian, Portobello, satay, shish kabob, stuffed meatloaf and Thanksgiving. Of course, it also contains all of Dominick’s latest pizza expertise developed since the year 2009 printing, including new sections on the food science of pizza dough (e.g., amylase enzymes, oxidation effects, Mailliard reactions, etc.), comparisons to Italian “00” type pizza flours, and the use of baker’s percentages. So even if you own any of the previous editions, this one is well worth the upgrade to your collection just for the new recipes alone!

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-nine 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 due to 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.

Dominick DeAngelis was born and raised in a small working-class town of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area of northeastern Pennsylvania. His mother was an Italian immigrant who journeyed to the United States at the age of seventeen. His father is a second generation Italian-American. There is probably no place in the country, or maybe the world, where there are more pizza places per capita than the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area; on just one street over from where Dominick grew up, there were four pizzerias on the same road within a one mile stretch. They all had a successful business because each pizzeria made their own distinctive style of pizza.

Dominick’s obsession with pizza is life long, and the area where he grew up exposed him to a vast array of different types of pizza. For the past twenty-nine years since his childhood, he has taken that experience to develop a collection of his own original recipes, with emphasis on the development of his master dough recipe.

Dominick’s formal training is not in the culinary field, but in engineering. However, anyone who knows him will tell you that he is a bona-fide pizza maker. He holds a bachelor’s degree from The Pennsylvania State University, a master’s degree from Villanova University, and a Ph.D. from The University of Pennsylvania, all in mechanical engineering. He has mechanical design experience from the aerospace, medical, semiconductor and metrology industries, and is also a licensed professional engineer. He resides in the suburban Main Line area of Philadelphia with his wife, two daughters and son.

"To do a cookbook on pizza making the-right-way, requires a dedication to pizza as intense as a Ph.D. degree in engineering"

Dominick DeAngelis

2011