My Pizza

January 2, 2012
Lahey rose to fame with his recipe for a no-knead dough that bakes up both chewy and crisp. Via his Sullivan Street Bakery, he has been providing rustic breads to the best Manhattan restaurants for more than a decade and, for the past three years, his pizzeria called Co. has been rolling out the crust to create Roman-style pies both traditional and fantastical. In this follow-up to his 2009 My Bread, he borrows from his eatery’s menu to offer a variety of red sauce, white sauce, and no sauce pizza in a manner that treads the fine line between clever and pretentious. His pepperoni pie is the most obvious example of this approach. It contains no pepperoni. The term, he points out, is the Italian plural for pepper, thus the recipe calls for red pepper sauce and is topped with merguez, a North African lamb sausage.. Bird’s nest pie calls for quail eggs nestled among asparagus spears, and honshimeji and guanciale pie translates as pizza topped with Asian mushrooms and sliced pig jowl. Seventy-five color photos bring each slice to mouth-watering life, though a better editorial design could have eliminated the need for nearly every recipe to repeat instructions such as to preheat the oven to 500 degrees and to use “quick, jerking motions” to slide the pizza onto the pizza stone. Agent: Janis Donnaud.

Starred review from January 1, 2012

In his second cookbook, Lahey (My Bread) extends his wildly popular no-knead bread technique to artisan pizzas. The easy base dough sits unattended for 18 hours, after which readers can use it to produce gorgeous, restaurant-worthy pies like Margherita, Pepperoni, and Three-Mushroom (all cook in about five minutes under a conventional broiler). Readers looking to round out their pizza dinner can also try recipes for starters like Salt-Crusted Beet Salad and desserts like Banoffee Pie. This fantastic book truly delivers on the promise of crusty, artisan breads with minimal effort. Essential for pizza lovers.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.