PizzaExpress From Italy With Love: 100 Favourite Recipes to Make at Home

Product Information

At 12 stamps, loyal customers become a VIP gold member meaning every time they visit PizzaExpress for an entire year, they are automatically entitled to free Dough Balls, a free soft drink, a free large water, a free hot drink and a free Romana upgrade - as well as other seasonal offers. Gold members' kids also eat free from Monday to Thursday. This is a bread book primarily – but focuses on sourdough and does have some pizza recipes. It is perhaps the most famous sourdough cookbook from the detailed instructions on forming a sourdough culture and fermenting a dough. He then has detailed instructions on how to stretch and cook many different styles, like wood-fired Naples, home oven Naples, cast iron pizza, grilled pizza, wood-fired and home oven Romana, personal pizzas… the list goes on – it’s very thorough.

This is a newer book, first published in 2020, but I thought it was a great addition to my collection. The first few times I fired up my Ooni I often found that the pizzas were a bit mediocre. It didn't take me long to realize that the problem was the oven not getting hot enough. It also has detailed instructions on pizza-making methods to take the dough from a dough ball and into a stretched pizza ready for the oven. What I like about this book is its unpretentious nature. Marc wants to help you make better pizza with whatever oven and tools you have available. Rather than listing every pizza style known, it focuses on the important bits of dough – the flour, fermentation, different ovens, and tools.

A home oven is cooler and needs more water in the dough – so he accounts for this by specifying doughs with different hydration percentages. Great insights from a genuine pizza expert who grew a restaurant and then consulted around the world. The book is based around this one recipe, and Jim’s tips for stretching and loading a pizza. This is then followed by an extensive list of recipes split into tomato sauce based, white sauce based, or with no sauce.

After the American styles (half the book), we have the Italian. Wood-fired Napoletana pizza has a detailed section on dough, sauce, and mozzarella before diving into the other Italian styles like from Rome. If I was to buy one pizza cookbook then this would be it. This book really does look into every element of pizza dough and leaves no stone unturned.What I like about this book is that it’s from an actual New York-rooted pizza expert. A lot of the other pizza books are from Italians or US bread bakers with an interest in pizza. So it’s good to have a proper NY one too, naturally, it focuses on more American styles of pizza. It has a good section on making Neapolitan pizza dough and making pizza in their preferred method – using a frying pan (skillet) and placing it under the broiler to mimic a hot pizza oven. This information is absolute gold dust for any beginner pizza maker, and I consider this some of the most useful information I’ve learned in the craft. While many recipes will skip over the finer details, this guide tells you EXACTLY what to do at each step. It covers buying the right ingredients and equipment, some short theory, mixing and shaping dough balls, and finally the stretching, topping, and baking of the pizza. Sicilian style has a chapter and covers how to cook the dough in a sheet pan instead of stretching. It has some tasty recipe ideas like the Purple Potato and Pancetta and the Grandma Pie.

Most of them don’t follow normal preparations, so it’s quite refreshing to read all the unusual combinations. Like his spinach-based “Popeye Pie”. This is the latest pizza cookbook to my collection as it’s fairly new, printed in 2021. It is written by Anthony Falco who was the chef who popularized Roberta’s in Brooklyn, New York. That being said, it’s a great book for its insights. As Falco now consults restaurants, this book would also be ideal for someone looking to start a business. Pros

It has chapters on the history, all the different styles, the ingredients, methods, and equipment, all before going into the dough recipes and the actual pizza topping recipes themselves. The first chapter is a “Masterclass” on making pizza and goes through step by step each part of the pizza-making process. Overall this book is a complete mastery of pizza. It leaves no stone unturned for making great pizza either at home or in a wood-fired oven. I would recommend it to anyone – it’s definitely one of the best pizza books ever. Pros