Amazon.com.au:Customer reviews: The Joy of Pizza: Everything You Need to Know

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Caroline Jusak

Great book for professional and pizza enthusiast

Reviewed in Singapore on 19 May 2022

Great book, perfect for professional with detailed step by step written. Beautiful pictures and the book arrive very neat and clean. There are thousand things need to be learnt here. Highly recommended for those who wants to be confident in pizza making.

Shelley Moore

You need this book in your life!

Reviewed in Canada on 2 January 2022

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Fantastic unexpected pizza recipes!!! So fantastic!

Troy G. Johnson

The most complicated pizza you’ll never make

Reviewed in the United States on 12 November 2021

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I really wanted to LOVE this book and preordered it. It’s very complex and with my busy schedule I can’t take Dan’s dive into pizza world. Was hoping he was going to give how-to’s based on experience. Instead it’s a diatribe of his journey which would be wonderful IF I had more time. He is accomplished and obviously amazing. His ‘basic’ dough recipe takes 3 days which I just don’t have time to do. The book should be called “Dan’s Joy of Pizza”. I don’t have time to measure the temperature and humidity of my kitchen, flour, bowls, etc. to make dough. I admire him but the book is not for a working person trying to make good pizza. It’s for an artist seeking to perfect their skill.

42 people found this helpful

Pamela

Horribly over complicated narrative

Reviewed in the United States on 10 November 2021

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It’s my belief few on this planet could appropriately follow the directions or suggestions outlined in the pages of this book. Possibly might be helpful to professional business owner who went to culinary school and was thinking about making pizza.

29 people found this helpful

Andrewloves_

Detailed book, but not Razza

Reviewed in the United States on 23 November 2021

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This is a great guide to pizza if you’ve never made it before. It is highly detailed. The author provides the average home chef with all of the knowledge to make a great pizza. With that said, he doesn’t give you the recipes behind the great pies they serve at Razza - which was the entire reason I purchased the book.

I’ve been making pizza for years, so I know the fundamentals. What I was interested to see was the breakdown of what they do at Razza. What are they doing and sourcing there that I could learn from? I understand that dough is living and cannot be perfectly replicated elsewhere (moisture, bacteria, etc are location specific). With that said, I wanted to know what type of flour they use, the grind, maybe even a mill recommendation. I wanted to know what brand tomatoes they use.

It’s a solid book, but not what I was looking for or expecting. I wish it was a bit more like “Pizza Camp” by Joe Beddia. He doesn’t give away all his secrets, but he provides more tips/insight into what he uses in his restaurant.

14 people found this helpful

Andrew Young

Great book but not for all

Reviewed in the United States on 17 November 2021

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Pizza making can be an easy thing if you want basic mediocre pizza. You can just pick up some raw dough from your local pizza spot or buy a Pillsbury premade dough, add some sauce and cheese and bake it off. You technically have pizza. Is it great pizza? Maybe its great to your 5 year old so that's fine. You made them dinner and they are happy. Great job.

But if you really want to learn to make great pizza and understand how all the parts connect with each other, then you need to buy a book like this. He will explain what makes great cheese and great sauce. He will explain why dough making has different steps and its not just "toss in a bowl and mix and punch down every 30 mins". No. He will explain what makes great sauce and the characteristics to look for in ingredients. But with that said, if you are looking for a book to make all types of different styles of pizza and different doughs for each type of style, etc, this is not the book for you. He goes over the styles he makes in his restaurant (naturally leavened pies, round and square) and thats it. He wont talk about NY style, he wont talk about detroit style. That NOT what his place makes and thats fine.

I think if you have read 10+ pizza books in your time, you may learn one or two new things from this book. For me, I bought it b/c i was hyped up over a new pizza book from a really popular pizza spot in NJ. Did I learn a whole lot? No. I make pizzas at least 1x a week for the past couple of years and I learned alot just through trial and error. Learning from reading other books and learning from internet resources (reddit, pizzamaking.com, etc).

If you just want to make a pizza for date night, just google and be done with it. You dont need to buy any pizza book to just figure it out. I see some of these other reviews commenting on "its too complicated" or "i dont want to wait 3 days for my pizza dough, i want it tonight". Maybe cooking is too hard for you and you should just order delivery. This book does talk about the science of dough, fermentation, but it is all written in plain English and he explains it all in detail. If reading comprehension is too hard for you, just get delivery.

16 people found this helpful

D.B.

nerd level pizza

Reviewed in the United States on 11 November 2021

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love the nerdiness of the book and attention to detail. less a cookbook and more a textbook on creating your own style of pizza. just what i was hoping for as i'm working on re-envisioning my pizzeria.

if you buy, take a careful look at the construction. on my copy there isn't any glue on the binding and the cover is coming off. also a couple big ink splotches. but that's not a ding on the book, just give it a onceover incase mine isn't an isolated defect.

15 people found this helpful

Robert Brown

The Joy of Pizza: Everything...Who Needs to Know?

Reviewed in the United States on 18 November 2021

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I'm very experienced making pizza at home in a home oven and with an Ooni Koda 16 (Dan Richer even follows me on Instagram so he likes what he sees). I pre-ordered this almost immediately and was very excited when it arrived. That lasted all of 5 minutes. It's a good book! Great advice and information. Nice illustrations! Solid recipes!

But, who is it for? It only contains 4 or 5 dough recipes with the first being an Everyday Dough that works well for pizza or bread or whatever else. Well, why would I want that? I want pizza dough recipes. I don't even mind that it takes 3 days to make, I mind that it's just a general dough.

Is that great for beginners? Sure, but are they going to take 3 days to make it? Probably not many. Beginners don't want to do that. I remember when I was a beginner and that wasn't going to happen. Give me that 24 hours pizza dough! 48 hours tops!

The final dough recipe is exactly what I was hoping for (more actually), but even then, the main gist is to source artisanal single grain flour and use a sourdough starter. Awesome. I literally ordered some flour based on the book's recommendation. That's where that started and ended though. 1 dough recipe.

Everything leading up to the dough recipe is...fine. He writes well about the ingredients and his philosophy. Goes on and on about his rubrics, which is...nice. However, as someone not starting a restaurant, I don't need a 60 point rubric to break down the elements of every pizza (I kinda already do that anyway, don't we all in some form?). Tomatoes - I have tried a few different ones over the years and I know what I like. Same with olive oil. If we were still quarantined maybe I'd take a week and really analyze multiple cans of tomatoes and multiple bottles of olive oil, but that doesn't really sound practical now. I definitely appreciate his dedication and artistry to pizza making as he talks about the ingredients, but after a quick skim, I'm good. This "discover for yourself" approach is something I've already done and beginners need actual recommendations to get started successfully before they can start on the discovery portion of their journey.

The pizza recipes at the end look great and the flavor combinations are great. Not sure I need to keep the book for those though.

So who is this book for? Beginners? I'd argue Ken Forkish's Elements of Pizza is a much better start for beginners as it contains many types of pizza dough recipes and it tells you things as opposed to taking the "explore and discover for yourself" approach. Advanced bakers? There isn't a lot of meat on the metaphorical bone here. I read the introductory stuff, the first 16 pages, the dough recipes (finding one I personally thought worthwhile), and skimmed the finished pizzas. So someone in-between?

The largest take away for me, and something I am thankful for from this book because it is going to influence my baking and pizza making for the future, is exploring and trying different flours. Finding smaller mills and exploring their flours. So his larger philosophical pizza point did reach me, I just wish there was more.

If I was in a bookstore, I'd have skimmed it, took what I mentioned above away from it, and put it back on the shelf. In this case, I got the information I could take from it so I’m returning it. Is Amazon the new public library?

13 people found this helpful

Kenneth A. Adams

Excellent, But Not Perfect

Reviewed in the United States on 31 December 2021

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This book gave me what I was looking for: a compelling alternative to Neapolitan pizza. Although I'm too casual a baker to use the book's "rubrics" (questionnaires) for evaluating pizzas and raw ingredients, I appreciated the detailed approach. It yielded a lively, well-structured dough and allowed me to make some very good pizzas. The photo is of one of them.

But I ended up making three adjustments to the recipe for everyday dough. First, although the book recommends you reduce the hydration from 76% to 68% if you're using a high-temperature oven like my Ooni, I found that made the dough harder to work with, and I ultimately decided that I liked the result better when I used 76% hydration.

Second, I went with a shorter initial bulk fermentation. I found it made it easier to shape the dough balls.

And third, the book says you should use 250-gram dough balls for a 12-inch crust, but I found that yielded only a 10-inch crust. I wasn’t surprised: in "The Elements of Pizza," author Ken Forkish says that a 287-gram dough ball will give you an 11-inch crust. Sure enough, when I used 290-gram dough balls, I got an 11-inch crust.

I go into greater detail in a blog post. You can find it by googling my name and the name of the book.

2 people found this helpful

Bone

I can now make awesome pizza

Reviewed in the United States on 27 January 2022

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I am at the beginning stages of learning how to cook pizza with my new wood fired pizza oven. This book has recipes for my oven and regular ovens. For example, I use less water in my dough than if I used a regular oven. The recipe told me this and it works great. Measuring the temperature of my flour, room, and water is what I was missing. Now my dough is awesome and I am only on the everyday dough, the easiest to make. This book told me how to prepare my toppings and how to cook in my oven. It all works great. I quickly made great pizzas and moved on to calzones and stuffed crust pizza, which are not in the book, but were easy to adapt to and make once you can make great pizza. What I like about the book is it has a ton of detail, but you do not need to use that detail to make great pizza. The book goes into a lot of detail about quality sauces, cheese, olive oil, etc. I am still using grocery store cheese and jarred sauce, planning to make my own later. However, the detail is great for knowing what flour to buy, what olive oil to buy, what temperatures to use to make dough, etc. Take what you need out of the book to get started and then move on to more advanced concepts as you advance. That is what I like the most about this book. I highly recommend.

One person found this helpful

5 star		78%
4 star		11%
3 star		5%
2 star		2%
1 star		4%

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