The Joy of Pizza: Everything You Need To Know

Home cooks interested in learning how to make pizza from scratch will appreciate this cookbook by rising culinary star Richer (the award-winning chef and owner of Razza in Jersey City) and cowriter Parla. This guide covers all of the details of pizza-making, with particular attention to the dough: calculating the protein in the flour and the temperature of the water; fermentation; stretching and shaping the dough just right before sliding it into a blazing hot oven; how to know when a pizza is perfectly done. There are even instructions for using a wood-fired masonry oven, and vivid photographs to guide readers through the steps. The recipes for different kinds of pizza dough (including sourdough) are worth the price of admission alone, but the book also helpfully includes rubrics for evaluating tomatoes, olive oil, and mozzarella.