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Bianco reveals his food passions and pizza preparation tricks in the cookbook “Bianco — Pizza, Pasta, and Other Food I Like.” In the introduction, he describes why he chose this career: “Love brought me to the table and helped me stumble through the kitchen. I watched as my mom, aunts, and grandmothers made something delicious, and I watched how people responded to it. How I responded to it. It was an expression of love and, though I didn’t know it then, I wanted to be a part of it.”
Bianco teaches how to make pizza dough with water, flour, yeast, and salt. He demonstrates mixing and shaping and proofing it. Now we are ready to make pizza. Bianco uses sauce made from uncooked, crushed, organic tomatoes. He adds olive oil, fresh basil, and sea salt to it.
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The first recipe is for Pizza Margherita, the simple cheese pie that is the classic pizza of Naples. Bianco explains that the way the cheese is prepared is quite important. He offers recipes for white pizzas, pies without tomato sauce. White pies are less common in the U.S., outside of the East Coast.
Now that we are building up pizza momentum, Bianco produces recipes for unusual pies — the Pizza Rosa, the Sonny Boy, and the Wiseguy. He closes the chapter with focaccia, which he calls "grandma pie." The next chapter describes nine appetizing salads.
Bianco’s favorite sandwich recipes are made with foccaccia bread.
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There’s mozzarella and tomato, roasted tomato and goat cheese, a frittata, a tuna salad, suppressata and provolone, pulled lamb, and the meatball hero. He recalls when he was a child, the meatball hero was “the holy grail of sandwiches. It was hot, it was sloppy — man, it was good. You relished every bite.”
The chapter on pasta and grains traces the author’s earliest inspirations. He explains that “I have spent most of my working life focused on pizza, but pasta is where my relationship with food and cooking began.” As he observed his great-aunt making pasta, he realized: “Watching her taught me to engage deeply with the process of making food, to bring my intention and attention to the work table, to the stove, to the table.”
There are a dozen pasta recipes. You'll also find 15 recipes for small-plate servings. In the chapter on big plates and bowls we learn about dishes like polpettone, pappa al pomodoro, polpette di ceci, braciole, chicken cacciatore and mushrooms with beer.
Did you save room for dessert? The book closes with recipes for sweets. Here he prepares rhubarb ricotta pudding, mama’s simple custard, Carolina rice pudding, lemon cookies, farro biscotti, apple cake, fruit crostata, sponge cake, and three Italian ices; chocolate, nutmeg, and lemon.
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