How To Cook Pizza, The Ultimate Pizza Cookbook For Making Pizza At Home [Kindle Edition]

As much as I would love to like How To Cook Pizza, The Ultimate Pizza Cookbook For Making Pizza At Home, formatting and editing issues are so prominent that I cannot ignore them.

First, the book is repetitive. A number of recipes appear in the chapter on crusts or sauces and are then again repeated later in the book. Author Lynn Dillenbeck either leaves too much space between ingredients & sections, or nowhere close to enough resulting in an ingredients list that reads:

"1 cup sunflower peeled sunflower seeds 1/2 oak groats 1 carrot 1
cup celery 2 cloves garlic 2 tablespoons onion 3/4 teaspoon
kosher salt 3/4 cup flax meal 1 1/3 cup water 1/4 cup sesame
seeds 1/3 cup whole flax seed"

Lynn has included two different Tables of Contents. The one that you access from the Kindle Navigation menu is very nicely done. The second Table of Contents appears directly after the Foreward as you page through. That one is a mess, with left aligned section titles and centered subsection listings, making it very hard to use.

Lynn states that you should acquire a pizza stone, but doesn't give any criteria for determining best value for the money. Her suggestion of which to buy consists entirely of "Get a good one, don't skimp on price, it'll cost you more in the long run." As the good folks at Cook's Magazine have proven over and over, price is often not the best indicator of value. She also specifies the use of special pizza flour - Antico Molino Caputo to be precise, stating that it has "just the right amount of gluten" without saying what the right amount is, just in case you have to substitute a different brand - but then does not call for pizza flour in any of the recipes that she provides. Let me also mention that she calls for a pizza peel and either a professional pizza cutter or rocking pizza knife. (This pizza is getting more and more expensive by the minute!)

At least one of the recipes contains a fairly substantial error. Her recipe for Greek Pizza Dough I specifies either self-rising flour or pizza flour. (The Greek Pizza Dough recipes are the only ones that call for pizza flour.) The recipe does not, however, call for any yeast or chemical rising agent. If you use self rising flour you will get a biscuit-like crust (the recipe also contains butter and milk). If you use the pizza flour you will get no crust rise at all, just a tough cracker. Note that this particular recipe also calls for 20 minutes of kneading, guaranteed to turn this particular product into what I like to call sole of combat boot. Biscuit-type doughs should be handled as little as humanly possible.

All in all, How To Cook Pizza, The Ultimate Pizza Cookbook For Making Pizza At Home is in sore need of revision. Not recommended.

I really enjoyed "How to Cook Pizza, The Ultimate Pizza Cookbook for making pizza at home." I found the recipes were easy to follow and turned out perfectly when I tried them with my kids this weekend. It's so much more fun to make your own, instead of ordering out. There are many variations and the normal recipes I'm used to using, and can't wait to try them all. I would definitely recommend this book.

As much as I would love to like How To Cook Pizza, The Ultimate Pizza Cookbook For Making Pizza At Home, formatting and editing issues are so prominent that I cannot ignore them.

First, the book is repetitive. A number of recipes appear in the chapter on crusts or sauces and are then again repeated later in the book. Author Lynn Dillenbeck either leaves too much space between ingredients & sections, or nowhere close to enough resulting in an ingredients list that reads:

"1 cup sunflower peeled sunflower seeds 1/2 oak groats 1 carrot 1
cup celery 2 cloves garlic 2 tablespoons onion 3/4 teaspoon
kosher salt 3/4 cup flax meal 1 1/3 cup water 1/4 cup sesame
seeds 1/3 cup whole flax seed"

Lynn has included two different Tables of Contents. The one that you access from the Kindle Navigation menu is very nicely done. The second Table of Contents appears directly after the Foreward as you page through. That one is a mess, with left aligned section titles and centered subsection listings, making it very hard to use.

Lynn states that you should acquire a pizza stone, but doesn't give any criteria for determining best value for the money. Her suggestion of which to buy consists entirely of "Get a good one, don't skimp on price, it'll cost you more in the long run." As the good folks at Cook's Magazine have proven over and over, price is often not the best indicator of value. She also specifies the use of special pizza flour - Antico Molino Caputo to be precise, stating that it has "just the right amount of gluten" without saying what the right amount is, just in case you have to substitute a different brand - but then does not call for pizza flour in any of the recipes that she provides. Let me also mention that she calls for a pizza peel and either a professional pizza cutter or rocking pizza knife. (This pizza is getting more and more expensive by the minute!)

At least one of the recipes contains a fairly substantial error. Her recipe for Greek Pizza Dough I specifies either self-rising flour or pizza flour. (The Greek Pizza Dough recipes are the only ones that call for pizza flour.) The recipe does not, however, call for any yeast or chemical rising agent. If you use self rising flour you will get a biscuit-like crust (the recipe also contains butter and milk). If you use the pizza flour you will get no crust rise at all, just a tough cracker. Note that this particular recipe also calls for 20 minutes of kneading, guaranteed to turn this particular product into what I like to call sole of combat boot. Biscuit-type doughs should be handled as little as humanly possible.

All in all, How To Cook Pizza, The Ultimate Pizza Cookbook For Making Pizza At Home is in sore need of revision. Not recommended.