Wednesday, October 28, 2009

A16 Food + Wine

This cookbook has been out awhile and I never really looked at it until I was in my favorite Barnes and Noble store the other day.

A16 is an Italian restaurant in San Francisco which prides itself on cooking authentic food from the Campania region of Italy. It is named after the highway that connects Naples to Puglia, the "A-16" , and is the highway from which the restaurant owners explored this region in Italy. The book has one of the largest and most detailed discussions (58 pages worth) on southern Italian wines.

One of the things I really loved about this book is the focus on ingredients. In particular, one section explains the differences in the flours used in pizza making and the variation it can make in your pizza dough. There is a whole section devoted to pizza making which I will be exploring more this winter. It highlights a famous pizzeria in Naples, "Da Michele" where they discovered the secret to their exceptional pizza dough – the addition of older, fermented dough to fresh dough to create a more complex flavor. A16 uses a method which duplicates the taste and lets their dough proof for 2-3 days. We will definitely be looking at this as we continue to search for the perfect pizza.