The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Pizza & Panini

Tantalizing Recipes that will Turn your Kitchen into your Favorite Pizza Parlor
By Eric Sherman

A review/interview by Marty Martindale

For some pizza is a way of life, and if almost any food, though abbreviated, is supported by a crust, life becomes terribly good. Erik Sherman is a pizza purist. He is not looking for cooks who instinctively avoid yeast. He feels crusts are simple, ten of them, and he shares his years of well-learned tricks for simple success. He also lines out some tasty toppings and sauces for a wide range of pizzas, not just the Italian type, originally known as “tomato pie.”

He divides his pizza recipes into four categories:  Meat, Vegetable/Garden, Morning Pizza and Global. Global is especially interesting, for he gives recipes from nine cultures:  from Indian to Scandinavian, Middle Eastern to Russian. What a great start for some unusual entertaining?

Sherman’s Panini recipes run from the Ruben to the Oyster Po’Boy, a Tuna Meltdown and many more. These are followed by his Plant-Filled (vegetarian) Paninis. He internationalizes these too, specifying which of his nine bread doughs work best.

Crusts on either the pizza or the Panini need the correct textures. The pizza dough needs to be on the moist side for open texture, he emphasizes. “The more you hold back on the flour, the happier you will be with the result,” he promises. With mixed grains, he advises making a porridge of these grains with water, then add the porridge mixture to the flour when you add the other ingredients.

After taking Sherman’s “pizza/panini course,” you will feel at home with phrases like, “Heavily dust your peel,” which means you will generously lace your pizza paddle with cornmeal. You will also have mastered Sherman’s 11-page glossary and find yourself using words like “Pissaladiere and Flaeskeaggekage!”  You will also come away wanting to address whether or not a pizza stone in your life. Sherman’s all for using a large, unglazed ceramic tile as pizza stone. He explains, “Pizzas in Italy cook in wood-fired ovens 700 to 900 degrees F. For this reason, get your conventional oven hotter by preheating your tile in the oven to 500 and waiting 30 to 45 minutes before inserting pizza. If your cheese topping browns before the crust is done, delay adding the cheese the next time.” He feels pizza should be perfectly cooked in ten minutes. 

Pizza, a life quest. In an interview, Eric tells us there will be more to the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Pizza and Panini, and he will move it to the web with new appendices and much more. “Remember to experiment,” he adds.

You can reach Martindale at FOOD SITE OF THE DAY.