Mastering Pizza: The Art and Practice of Handmade Pizza, Focaccia, and Calzone [A Cookbook] Hardcover – August 28, 2018

I have pizza cookbooks, good ones. but when I saw Marc Vetri was coming out with a cookbooks I had to have it. I love Mastering Pasta and Rustic Italian food so much. Mastering Pizza is wonderful. So many crusts, the same crust with different hydration for a different bake and chew, so many options for grill, oven, fire, so many innovative topping ideas, and old favorites that stand the test of time.However, this book is more than recipes, it's explanations and lots of how to pictures that are really helpful. for example, on page 36 there is a chart of flours, with their protein percent by weight, gluten strength, and elasticity. There is an equipment section, explanation of hydration.Then the recipes. they are divided by doughs, First the pizza doughs, Naples, Roman, Al Taglio, Whole grain sourdough. The recipes are well laid out, the ingredients, then the directions. There are beautiful drool inducing pictures of the finished products, but also pictures of steps along the way so you know what it should look like at various stages.This is one of the cookbooks that send you to other recipes, for example, the wood oven pepperoni you go back to the dough at the beginning of the chapter, then the sauce on page 111. It doesn't bother me. I just put stickies where the common references are, dough pages, sauce pages, so it's easy to flip back and forth.The home oven stuffed pizza was amazing. So was the Parmesan fried dough balls.. no more store bought pizza bread for us.We really like the al taglio dough. the sheet pan full of amazing deliciousness topped with more amazing deliciousness. the potato and mozzarella was just so good.The fried mini calzones were so good. Fried pizza dough with hot melty fillings..and do make the home oven dolci rotolo.. because it's truly amazing. ricotto sugar cream rolled dough with a caramel sauce poured over top.. this will be one I make a lot, probably too much!There are so many recipes I've marked to try, but the crusts I've tried have turned out so well, and that is a big part.

I purchased this book when I got an Ooni Pizza Oven. I always appreciated Marc Vetri’s style from other books but was especially drawn to this volume because, unlike nearly every other pizza book available, he includes options for using high heat ovens like the Ooni. Most books assume you will be making pizza in a home kitchen oven but Vetri explains the higher temperature ovens like Ooni cook so quickly you need a lower hydration dough - a dedicated pizza oven hits 900 degrees Fahrenheit while home oven top out at 550 degrees.Vetri’s advice goes far beyond providing options for different ovens. He is a wonderful armchair traveling companion with intriguing stories. He has great recipes for dough (all of which worked first time I tried them) and intriguing saucing options. He also includes information on all the major styles of pizza - in short, this is a truly complete guide to making pizzas simply and deliciously (the same is true of Vetri’s Mastering Bread and Mastering Pasta). If I were only allowed one guide to pizza, this is definitely it. Superb and well-tested, every recipe is a gem.

I think I've purchased almost every pizza recipe book out there looking for a crust recipe with the right amount of chew and crunch. THIS IS IT. So good.

It’s literally a Pizza Bible. The explanation are detailed without being dense or boring. Absolutely love this book

I’ve been working my way thru each recipe as I can. You can see a picture of the 86% focaccia recipe that turned out really well. Was delicious. Each pizza I’ve made has turned out great too. Love the sauces and the Italian inspired toppings. I plan on trying every single thing in here. There is some great knowledge and inspiration for pizza. It would definitely be worth buying this book if you want to learn about Italian pizza / bread.Only a few things I’ve noticed that are “strange” to me. I’m not an expert baker like the author, but I’ve been baking pizza and bread consistently for 2 years now. Some recipes call for very strange measurements like 1/32 tsp (0.4 grams) of yeast, or 1/8tsp (0.8 grams). In these cases, I think it would be okay to use 1 gram to make it simpler… you would be fine. Or just use a tiny pinch, there’s no need to be THAT specific, IMO. I also ran into an issue with the Al taglio pizza recipe. It wanted me to mix the flour, water, yeast, and olive oil together, and then add the salt with 50g of water half an hour later. Well, when I added the water the dough just became a soupy mess. I think it would be fine just to mix all the ingredients together at once and not deal with that fuss. But that’s just me. So adapt the recipes as you see fit with your experience.

This book has been particularly good for sourdough pizza. It has been difficult to find a sourdough recipe that stands the tests, or that is easy to make. This book has it and has been a wonderful resource.This book is filled with history and gives broad understanding of ingredients, teaching what, why, and how to use them. It has allowed us to make gourmet pizzas at home with the simplest of ingredients. I grew up thinking that a good pizza required more ingredients (specifically, meat), but now realize that a homemade pizza with just a few ingredients can be far superior and more flavorful, when properly made.There have been some big complaints about some of the dough recipes in this book. Just remember that this is not just a "recipe book." If you want that, go to Betty Crocker. This book is much deeper, imparting a much deeper understanding of pizza to those who will appreciate it. If there are some dough recipes that don't work for you, don't use them. But seriously... try the sourdough. It is amazing!