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Pizza Night

Deliciously Doable Recipes for Pizza and Salad

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Hardcover (Paper-over-Board, no jacket)
$30.00 US
8.7"W x 9.6"H x 1"D   | 40 oz | 12 per carton
On sale Apr 16, 2024 | 256 Pages | 9780593579947
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Make pizza night a weekly tradition with these 52 seasonal pizzas paired with salads for a complete meal—from the award-winning author of Bread Toast Crumbs and creator of the popular blog Alexandra’s Kitchen.

“I dare you to flip through Ali’s easy-to-follow, farm-fresh recipes and not feel inspired to plan your first pizza night immediately.”—Jenny Rosenstrach, bestselling author of Dinner: A Love Story and The Weekday Vegetarians

Making great pizza isn’t complicated. Whether you’re using a kitchen oven, a grill, or an outdoor pizza oven, it all starts with the dough.

In Pizza Night, Alexandra Stafford presents four simple doughs—thin-crust, pan, Neapolitan-style, and gluten-free (plus sourdough variations)—and easy techniques for perfecting your crust. From there, you can create a variety of delicious pizzas, including Detroit-Style Pizza for a Crowd, Classic Margherita Pizza, and Winter White Pizza with Garlic and Herbs. You can make it the same day or ahead; make it extra cheesy and decadent or go the healthy road—pizza-making easily adapts to busy schedules and tastes and requires little in special equipment.

Arranged seasonally, each pizza is paired with a salad, from a springtime Salami and Red Onion Pizza with Calabrian Chiles and Hot Honey served with an Arugula Salad with Prosciutto and Parmesan, to a fall Broccoli Rabe and Smoked Mozzarella Pizza accompanied by a Farm Share Harvest Slaw to a summery Roasted Hatch Chili Pizza with Corn and Oaxaca with a Melon, Cucumber and Mint Salad. To end your meal on a sweet note, there are also a handful of simple desserts to choose from (Loaf Pan Tiramisu, One-Bowl Lemon Ricotta Pound Cake). Pizza Night serves up a year’s worth of delicious, inspired, and satisfying pizzas and salads.
“In Pizza Night, Alexandra makes a strong case for enjoying pizza every week of the year—and who wouldn't want to live that life? With her dependable dough recipes, innovative and seasonal toppings, and nourishing salads, you'll never be left wondering if you can make pizza this week, only that you should.”—Maurizio Leo, baker and author of the James Beard Award–winning The Perfect Loaf: The Craft and Science of Sourdough Breads, Sweets, and More

“This gorgeous book is, of course, for anyone who craves excellent homemade pizza (Hot Italian Sausage and Giardiniera Pizza with Mozzarella! Roasted Wild Mushroom Pizza with Garlic, Thyme, and Fontina! Buffalo Cauliflower Pizza with Scallion Crème Fraîche!), but it’s also for anyone who wants to be intentional about rituals and memory-making and doesn’t know where to start. I dare you to flip through Ali’s easy-to-follow, farm-fresh recipes and not feel inspired to plan your first pizza night immediately.”—Jenny Rosenstrach, bestselling author of Dinner: A Love Story and The Weekday Vegetarians

“At last! The perfect casual meal finally has a cookbook worthy of its elemental splendors. Ali’s lifelong love of a good pie and reverence for its special place in our lives shines in recipe after recipe. As if that alone were not enough, she also matches each pizza (one for every week of the year) with a fabulous, alluring, seasonal salad—many of which are worthy of their own meals.”—Emily Nunn, author of The Comfort Food Diaries and creator of the Department of Salad
 
“Readers of Pizza Night are going to have difficulty deciding which pizzas to make, because they all sound (and look) amazing. The helpful pictures—especially when it comes to dough stretching—are invaluable. And so many styles! Roman, Neapolitan, Detroit . . . it’s all here, giving any pizza lover an excuse to whip up a pie (or three) any time of the year.”—Steve Dolinsky, the Food Guy on NBC Chicago and host of the Pizza City podcast
  
“This book—I’m loving it! Pizza is just one of those foods that I cannot get enough of. Pizza Night is filled with brilliant combinations for pizza and the salads are off the charts! This book will have you enjoying pizzas through all four seasons. Well done, Ali!”—Andris Lagsdin, creator of the Original Baking Steel and author of Baking with Steel
Alexandra Stafford graduated from Yale and moved to Philadelphia, where she attended cooking school and worked in professional kitchens. After two years at the acclaimed restaurant Fork, she left to start her blog, Alexandra’s Kitchen, which won a Saveur Blog Award for Most Inspired Weeknight Dinners. Her first cookbook, Bread Toast Crumbs, was nominated for the IACP Julia Child First Book Award. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and four children. View titles by Alexandra Stafford
Introduction

I was seven when my parents divorced. It was the eighties, everyone was getting divorced, but I remember feeling sad anyway, sitting with my older sister on her bed while my mother, gently rubbing our backs, consoled us, teary-eyed and confused. In my memory, her voice sounded like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon, muffled and muted, an incomprehensible babble. But then, piercing through the prattle, came, “When we move, we’ll have pizza every Friday.”

Those three words—pizza every Friday—washed away every tear, dried up every worry, and provided immediate clarity. Pizza. Every. Friday. Everything would be fine.

And everything was fine. We moved across town from our creaky old house on busy Main Street to one with wall-to-wall carpeting on Clear View Drive. In our new house, my sister and I spent hours choreographing gymnastics routines to Madonna and rollerblading in the basement to Cindy Lauper. This new neighborhood, with rows of houses each just a hair different than the next, felt like Utopia, home to kids of all ages, instant playmates for my siblings and me. We biked, jumped rope, and played hockey in the street.

And, as promised, we had pizza every Friday.

I remember so looking forward to hearing the doorbell ring, to tipping the driver the few dollars my mother had handed me, to opening the box to reveal an enormous, cheesy, pepperoni-topped pie, a dinner followed by “TGIF,” two hours of TV, our allotment for the week. Fridays were a dream.

Like many Americans, my love for pizza began as a child. The local pizza parlor, Louie’s, was where we wrapped up every soccer season, where we drank Fanta with abandon, where we celebrated every birthday, every recital, every milestone. It’s also, incidentally, where my aunt, in town for the weekend, jumped over a booth to perform the Heimlich on a blue-faced customer, dislodging a clam from his throat, which, as I remember, soared across the room.

Clam pizza was popularized by Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletano in New Haven, Connecticut, twenty minutes from my home. Pepe’s thin-crust pies with charred edges, along with those from Sally’s, just down the street, and Modern, a few blocks away, gave New Haven a national name for pizza.

But this was not the pizza I grew up on. Like most children, I didn’t appreciate blistered edges or burnished undercarriages, and I didn’t mind excess: the cheesier and greasier the better. Back then, I didn’t see the beauty in the less-is-more approach, in a lightly topped, lightly cheesed, lightly sauced pie.

That appreciation would come years later when I moved to New Haven for college. There I did what many did: waited in line at Sally’s, Pepe’s, and Modern, so I could weigh in on the best-pizza debate. In between these research outings, I had my fair share of late-night dollar slices, floppy and foldable on grease-soaked paper plates, showered with pepper flakes and parmesan. Oil dripping down my chin, I loved them all, but it was the pizza at Bar, lesser-known (on a national level, at least) but closer to campus, that stole my heart. It’s also where I fell in love.

I met Ben, now my husband, at the end of my sophomore year. He was a senior and would be gone in three months, but we gave it a go and soon found a common love: eating. I know: At that age, who doesn’t share that love? But still, we liked to eat, and we ate a lot: wings at Archie Moore’s, burgers at The Doodle, falafel at Mamouns, grilled cheese and black bean soup at Atticus, chicken souvlaki at Yorkside, and more burgers at Louie’s Lunch.

But as time went on, and in the years after Ben graduated, we mostly found ourselves at Bar, for their good beer, their one salad, and their pizza, namely their white clam pizza, made in the style of Pepe’s: sauceless and strewn with tender clams, lots of garlic, olive oil, a modest amount of Romano cheese, and a sprinkling of oregano. With a squeeze of lemon, nothing was better. Truly, I don’t think anything is better to this day.

Ben and I married a few years after I graduated. In the years that followed, we moved around a lot, from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again, settling finally in Upstate New York, where we’ve been for over ten years now. During this decade, we had four children, so while my memory of most of it is a blur, I could describe in detail the pizzas we ate along the way.

There was the boxed Margherita pizza from Marra’s that we brought home when Ben withdrew from medical school to join the Marine Corps—a decision that inspired our worried-sick parents to drop in to our South Philadelphia apartment to intervene, hoping to change his decision, the one, they would learn, finally allowing him to fall asleep at night.

There were the many wood-fired Neapolitan pies with their ballooned edges at 2Amy’s in Washington, DC, where Ben and I met every few weeks when he was stationed in Quantico, Virginia. And the decidedly not-Neapolitan pizza we ate beneath surfboards dangling from the ceiling, surrounded by diners sporting flip-flops, trucker hats, and hoodies, at Pizza Port in Carlsbad, California, where we ended our two-week cross-country drive.

There was the speck-topped pie at Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, the last meal we ate before Ben deployed, and the Margherita pizza topped with house-made mozzarella at Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, where we ate when he returned.

There was the Grimaldi’s pizza lunch under the Brooklyn Bridge, surrounded by friends who were in town for a dear friend’s wedding. And the “bee-sting” pizza at Roberta’s, where we ate before flying out of town for another dear friend’s funeral.

There was the boxed pie we inhaled after hiking Mount Marcy, a trek that left us utterly and completely spent, and the New Haven–style pizzas we ate in my parents’ backyard the night before my brother got married, an event that made me wonder why all weddings weren’t giant pizza parties.

I could go on, but you get the idea—pizza gets you through it: divorce, marriage, death, birth, triumph, defeat. It’s no wonder every culture, or nearly every one anyway, has developed some sort of pizza-ish creation, dough baked with toppings, a mingling of humble ingredients, their union so much more than the sum of their parts.

As I get older, I love pizza more and more. Saying I could live on it would be bold, but I do know this: There is no food I’d wait in line longer for, there is no food I’d go more out of my way for, there is no food I’d travel farther for. Pizza is what I find myself dreaming about before bed, a subject I never tire of reading about, and the one food I plan trips around. Because time has proven, pizza is worth it. It’s the ultimate comfort food. Every Friday. And beyond.

Photos

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About

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Make pizza night a weekly tradition with these 52 seasonal pizzas paired with salads for a complete meal—from the award-winning author of Bread Toast Crumbs and creator of the popular blog Alexandra’s Kitchen.

“I dare you to flip through Ali’s easy-to-follow, farm-fresh recipes and not feel inspired to plan your first pizza night immediately.”—Jenny Rosenstrach, bestselling author of Dinner: A Love Story and The Weekday Vegetarians

Making great pizza isn’t complicated. Whether you’re using a kitchen oven, a grill, or an outdoor pizza oven, it all starts with the dough.

In Pizza Night, Alexandra Stafford presents four simple doughs—thin-crust, pan, Neapolitan-style, and gluten-free (plus sourdough variations)—and easy techniques for perfecting your crust. From there, you can create a variety of delicious pizzas, including Detroit-Style Pizza for a Crowd, Classic Margherita Pizza, and Winter White Pizza with Garlic and Herbs. You can make it the same day or ahead; make it extra cheesy and decadent or go the healthy road—pizza-making easily adapts to busy schedules and tastes and requires little in special equipment.

Arranged seasonally, each pizza is paired with a salad, from a springtime Salami and Red Onion Pizza with Calabrian Chiles and Hot Honey served with an Arugula Salad with Prosciutto and Parmesan, to a fall Broccoli Rabe and Smoked Mozzarella Pizza accompanied by a Farm Share Harvest Slaw to a summery Roasted Hatch Chili Pizza with Corn and Oaxaca with a Melon, Cucumber and Mint Salad. To end your meal on a sweet note, there are also a handful of simple desserts to choose from (Loaf Pan Tiramisu, One-Bowl Lemon Ricotta Pound Cake). Pizza Night serves up a year’s worth of delicious, inspired, and satisfying pizzas and salads.

Praise

“In Pizza Night, Alexandra makes a strong case for enjoying pizza every week of the year—and who wouldn't want to live that life? With her dependable dough recipes, innovative and seasonal toppings, and nourishing salads, you'll never be left wondering if you can make pizza this week, only that you should.”—Maurizio Leo, baker and author of the James Beard Award–winning The Perfect Loaf: The Craft and Science of Sourdough Breads, Sweets, and More

“This gorgeous book is, of course, for anyone who craves excellent homemade pizza (Hot Italian Sausage and Giardiniera Pizza with Mozzarella! Roasted Wild Mushroom Pizza with Garlic, Thyme, and Fontina! Buffalo Cauliflower Pizza with Scallion Crème Fraîche!), but it’s also for anyone who wants to be intentional about rituals and memory-making and doesn’t know where to start. I dare you to flip through Ali’s easy-to-follow, farm-fresh recipes and not feel inspired to plan your first pizza night immediately.”—Jenny Rosenstrach, bestselling author of Dinner: A Love Story and The Weekday Vegetarians

“At last! The perfect casual meal finally has a cookbook worthy of its elemental splendors. Ali’s lifelong love of a good pie and reverence for its special place in our lives shines in recipe after recipe. As if that alone were not enough, she also matches each pizza (one for every week of the year) with a fabulous, alluring, seasonal salad—many of which are worthy of their own meals.”—Emily Nunn, author of The Comfort Food Diaries and creator of the Department of Salad
 
“Readers of Pizza Night are going to have difficulty deciding which pizzas to make, because they all sound (and look) amazing. The helpful pictures—especially when it comes to dough stretching—are invaluable. And so many styles! Roman, Neapolitan, Detroit . . . it’s all here, giving any pizza lover an excuse to whip up a pie (or three) any time of the year.”—Steve Dolinsky, the Food Guy on NBC Chicago and host of the Pizza City podcast
  
“This book—I’m loving it! Pizza is just one of those foods that I cannot get enough of. Pizza Night is filled with brilliant combinations for pizza and the salads are off the charts! This book will have you enjoying pizzas through all four seasons. Well done, Ali!”—Andris Lagsdin, creator of the Original Baking Steel and author of Baking with Steel

Author

Alexandra Stafford graduated from Yale and moved to Philadelphia, where she attended cooking school and worked in professional kitchens. After two years at the acclaimed restaurant Fork, she left to start her blog, Alexandra’s Kitchen, which won a Saveur Blog Award for Most Inspired Weeknight Dinners. Her first cookbook, Bread Toast Crumbs, was nominated for the IACP Julia Child First Book Award. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and four children. View titles by Alexandra Stafford

Excerpt

Introduction

I was seven when my parents divorced. It was the eighties, everyone was getting divorced, but I remember feeling sad anyway, sitting with my older sister on her bed while my mother, gently rubbing our backs, consoled us, teary-eyed and confused. In my memory, her voice sounded like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon, muffled and muted, an incomprehensible babble. But then, piercing through the prattle, came, “When we move, we’ll have pizza every Friday.”

Those three words—pizza every Friday—washed away every tear, dried up every worry, and provided immediate clarity. Pizza. Every. Friday. Everything would be fine.

And everything was fine. We moved across town from our creaky old house on busy Main Street to one with wall-to-wall carpeting on Clear View Drive. In our new house, my sister and I spent hours choreographing gymnastics routines to Madonna and rollerblading in the basement to Cindy Lauper. This new neighborhood, with rows of houses each just a hair different than the next, felt like Utopia, home to kids of all ages, instant playmates for my siblings and me. We biked, jumped rope, and played hockey in the street.

And, as promised, we had pizza every Friday.

I remember so looking forward to hearing the doorbell ring, to tipping the driver the few dollars my mother had handed me, to opening the box to reveal an enormous, cheesy, pepperoni-topped pie, a dinner followed by “TGIF,” two hours of TV, our allotment for the week. Fridays were a dream.

Like many Americans, my love for pizza began as a child. The local pizza parlor, Louie’s, was where we wrapped up every soccer season, where we drank Fanta with abandon, where we celebrated every birthday, every recital, every milestone. It’s also, incidentally, where my aunt, in town for the weekend, jumped over a booth to perform the Heimlich on a blue-faced customer, dislodging a clam from his throat, which, as I remember, soared across the room.

Clam pizza was popularized by Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletano in New Haven, Connecticut, twenty minutes from my home. Pepe’s thin-crust pies with charred edges, along with those from Sally’s, just down the street, and Modern, a few blocks away, gave New Haven a national name for pizza.

But this was not the pizza I grew up on. Like most children, I didn’t appreciate blistered edges or burnished undercarriages, and I didn’t mind excess: the cheesier and greasier the better. Back then, I didn’t see the beauty in the less-is-more approach, in a lightly topped, lightly cheesed, lightly sauced pie.

That appreciation would come years later when I moved to New Haven for college. There I did what many did: waited in line at Sally’s, Pepe’s, and Modern, so I could weigh in on the best-pizza debate. In between these research outings, I had my fair share of late-night dollar slices, floppy and foldable on grease-soaked paper plates, showered with pepper flakes and parmesan. Oil dripping down my chin, I loved them all, but it was the pizza at Bar, lesser-known (on a national level, at least) but closer to campus, that stole my heart. It’s also where I fell in love.

I met Ben, now my husband, at the end of my sophomore year. He was a senior and would be gone in three months, but we gave it a go and soon found a common love: eating. I know: At that age, who doesn’t share that love? But still, we liked to eat, and we ate a lot: wings at Archie Moore’s, burgers at The Doodle, falafel at Mamouns, grilled cheese and black bean soup at Atticus, chicken souvlaki at Yorkside, and more burgers at Louie’s Lunch.

But as time went on, and in the years after Ben graduated, we mostly found ourselves at Bar, for their good beer, their one salad, and their pizza, namely their white clam pizza, made in the style of Pepe’s: sauceless and strewn with tender clams, lots of garlic, olive oil, a modest amount of Romano cheese, and a sprinkling of oregano. With a squeeze of lemon, nothing was better. Truly, I don’t think anything is better to this day.

Ben and I married a few years after I graduated. In the years that followed, we moved around a lot, from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again, settling finally in Upstate New York, where we’ve been for over ten years now. During this decade, we had four children, so while my memory of most of it is a blur, I could describe in detail the pizzas we ate along the way.

There was the boxed Margherita pizza from Marra’s that we brought home when Ben withdrew from medical school to join the Marine Corps—a decision that inspired our worried-sick parents to drop in to our South Philadelphia apartment to intervene, hoping to change his decision, the one, they would learn, finally allowing him to fall asleep at night.

There were the many wood-fired Neapolitan pies with their ballooned edges at 2Amy’s in Washington, DC, where Ben and I met every few weeks when he was stationed in Quantico, Virginia. And the decidedly not-Neapolitan pizza we ate beneath surfboards dangling from the ceiling, surrounded by diners sporting flip-flops, trucker hats, and hoodies, at Pizza Port in Carlsbad, California, where we ended our two-week cross-country drive.

There was the speck-topped pie at Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, the last meal we ate before Ben deployed, and the Margherita pizza topped with house-made mozzarella at Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, where we ate when he returned.

There was the Grimaldi’s pizza lunch under the Brooklyn Bridge, surrounded by friends who were in town for a dear friend’s wedding. And the “bee-sting” pizza at Roberta’s, where we ate before flying out of town for another dear friend’s funeral.

There was the boxed pie we inhaled after hiking Mount Marcy, a trek that left us utterly and completely spent, and the New Haven–style pizzas we ate in my parents’ backyard the night before my brother got married, an event that made me wonder why all weddings weren’t giant pizza parties.

I could go on, but you get the idea—pizza gets you through it: divorce, marriage, death, birth, triumph, defeat. It’s no wonder every culture, or nearly every one anyway, has developed some sort of pizza-ish creation, dough baked with toppings, a mingling of humble ingredients, their union so much more than the sum of their parts.

As I get older, I love pizza more and more. Saying I could live on it would be bold, but I do know this: There is no food I’d wait in line longer for, there is no food I’d go more out of my way for, there is no food I’d travel farther for. Pizza is what I find myself dreaming about before bed, a subject I never tire of reading about, and the one food I plan trips around. Because time has proven, pizza is worth it. It’s the ultimate comfort food. Every Friday. And beyond.

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