Pizza Camp: Recipes from Pizzeria Beddia (2024)

Pizza Camp
The publisher sent me a revised copy with recipes so I've been working on the them. I started with the crust, if you don't have a good crust the whole pie is "blech". I make pizza from scratch every week I have a crust that I am very happy with but I know could be better, someday. This crust recipe the ingredients, the flour is different it uses bread flour, where I use unbleached all purpose. That is the only real difference ingredient wise, the other difference was the time. Mr. Beddia's crust slow rises over night in the fridge, mine sits on the counter for 2-4 hours. I made my recipe and his recipe and tested them on my regular pizza party friends. I added fresh rosemary to the dough, it's what I like. So the results were divided, 4 liked his better 3 liked mine better. His crust was a bit tougher, chewier.mine was lighter with a crunchier edge. I liked his slightly better but I am not sure it's worth taking up the fridge space over night. Below is my photo, the toppings were fresh Bella mushrooms, soyriso, onions and fresh mozzarella

I am working my way through the sauces, so far they are all very yums (technical term). I am not sold on anchovies no matter what he says about the taste. NOPE. I think this is a good basic pizza book for the home cook, it gives you all you need to go explore the flavors that work for you.

I loved Joe Beddia's story - I admire his vision, and he's an engaging, down-to-earth, unpretentious writer as well. For those offended by f-bombs, please skim because he is indeed colorful. The recipes are worth it. Follow everything to a T and you won't be disappointed. A word to the wise: Calculate at least 27 hours prior to your eating time to enjoy. The process is complex, but your curst will come out dynamite. I loved the process behind this. A very fun cookbook for pizza lovers alike, this cookbook will help make pizza making a spiritual experience for you.

This book is the book if you want to make pizza. If you don't...wait, what?

I've been in awe of Beddia pizza for some years now so I was incredibly excited when I found out he was going to share his secrets in a book. I wasn't disappointed!

Instructions are easy to follow and produce amazing results. The overnight rise is essential for full flavor but if I'm being honest, I usually only manage about a 2-hour rise given my poor advanced planning skills and it's still delicious dough.

What's funny is that the recipe that has blown me away more than any is his "spring cream" and variations for a white pizza. It is probably one of the most delicious things I've eaten on a pizza and it maintains a light touch without all the usual heaviness of most white pizzas.

The book is also a bit of a love letter to Philly and that certainly gives it a character that I don't ordinarily expect from a cookbook.

Beginners and seasoned pizza makers should both get something out of Pizza Camp.

Bought this book, a pizza stone and a pizza peel a couple of weeks ago. Have since had.. . I’m .... around 12 pizzas. Maybe more. Apart from one where I didn’t preheat the stone long enough and another where I forgot to flour the peel after the first pizza, they’ve been the best pizzas I’ve ever cooked.

I am a casual cookbook fan, maybe pick up one from the library every month or two. This one is probably the most engaging and enjoyable one I have picked up all year. It is very well written, I usually skim the more memoir-y sections of cookbooks but actually got into the writing here and found it was significantly more interesting and relevant then is typical. The author clearly loves pizza and truly wants to share that love.
It starts with the basics (crust, sauce, cheese...) before getting into specific recipes.
The basics are really at the heart of good pizza, and the steps (and reasoning behind the steps and choices) are laid out in a clear easy to follow way. They are remarkably simple to follow. This crust recipe is easily the best I have used. It does need to be planned ahead, but is otherwise very simple, as is the sauce.
The specific recipes get a bit more complex, but never too bad, and with great takes on classics and new unexpected combinations.

Definitely recommend it for an insightful look into Pizza and great recipes for upping your pizza game.

These recipes look amazing! And for a cookbook there's a lot of language...nonetheless I'm making this pizza next week

Yummy!

By Bill Marsano, from a pre-publication copy. There are all kinds of camps for adults these days. Basketball camps, fishing camps, baseball camps, bridge camps for card players. Somebody forgot to accommodate that band of obsessives known as amateur home pizza chefs—no camp for them! Well, here is Joe Beddia with a pizza camp in the form of a handsomely photographed 8”x10” book. Beddia is the owner, founder, creator of Pizzeria Beddia in Philadelphia, and there are those with cre-dentials who say and even shout it is one of the best pizzerias in the country. Beddia has assistant in his shop, but he boasts that he makes every pizza himself, and he is clearly a ‘pizzaiolo’ who has studied his craft and mastered it. The best thing he does in this book is liberate that small but fanatical; band of pizza-lovers who drive themselves crazy try-ing to make the own pizzas at home. No, he says, you don’t have to have 00 Italian flour; all-purpose will be fine; no, you don’t need mozzarella di bufala if you ca get a good, fresh, locally made ‘mozz’. (He myself us-es a local aged gouda!) Yes, you can use canned tomatoes—just try sever-al brands and use those that taste freshest—and crush them in by hand or in a food mill, not a food processor. If you can’t get a pizza stone, use quarry tiles from the local building supply (an 800° oven is not neces-sary). Apply a dusting of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese after the pie comes out of the oven, not before, and it’s OK to use pecorino instead. Those and his handful of other tips are really all you need, ‘but wait—there’s more!’ as they say on TV. Recipes include pizzas with asparagus, cream, onion and lemon; pineapple, bacon and jalapeño; roasted fennel and sausage; and more. Hoagie and Philly Cheesteak recipes are here too, along with a wealth of photos that are likely to make your stomach grumble. I’ll add some tips of my own: for ‘parmesan,’ use only Parmi-giano-Reggiano (real, imported, expensive), as there is almost no good domestic parmesan (there is one brand; I forget its name but it’s certainly NOT BelGioioso). When heating the oven, give the stone or tiles an extra 30 minutes before baking a pie. Plan ahead so you can give your dough a slow, overnight rise. Now—buy the book clear the kitchen and get to work.—Bill Marsano is a veteran writer and editor and a long-time ama-teur pizza maker.

Beddia is exacting and specific, but sometimes that's just what you want. This is the story of someone's favorite pizza. It may not be everyone's, but it's damn good. He had me on page 41 where he said that dough should have the same feel as a buttcheek.
edited to add: made his crust recipe 2x now and it is. the. best. Maybe he didn't do the overnight fridge rise first, but to me it was a revelation. Crispy, but the inside is so chewy, tender and flavorful. It's like potato bread or something.

There is a lot of passion, experience, and attention to detail that went into the making of these pizza recipes. I really like the results I've seen from his sauce technique.

I personally feel that listing a cookbook as part of one's reading challenge goal might seem to be cheating. Does anyone really read a whole cookbook? This one, you will read and may read some of it several times. It is a beautiful book, published almost as an art book, and the feel of the pages and the excellent photographs are a joy. But the narrative that accompanies each recipe is what I love most. Joe Beddia gives his personal history, when he learned to make a recipe or what inspired him to create another, his preferences in ingredients (not just "spinach," but "the larger crinkly spinach with the roots on") and how he used extra pizza dough to make hoagies when he didn't sell all his pizzas. It has been a long time since he didn't sell all his pizzas, though, because Andrew Knowlton of Bon Appetit magazine declared Pizzeria Beddia in Philadelphia "The Best Pizza in America" in 2015. His restaurant has no tables or seats and the line for his pizzas goes easily around the block. I googled Pizzeria Beddia and saw an alarming story about Joe Beddia considering closing his pizza mecca. Knowlton, in his review of PB in 2015, predicted that one day, the restaurant will close. When it does, Knowlton predicted that people will walk by the storefront and say, "There lived a pizza master."

Yes, I did in fact read this cookbook. Maybe not every word (yet). It's a hoot.

A paean to pizza, and making top drawer stuff at home. Very interesting views on dough making (slow rise method, not hard if you're into such things, but probably a revelation if you're not), sauce making (simple, not cooked), pizza construction (when you put what on), baking (very hot oven, finished under the broiler), and finishing (a lot of stuff should only go on AFTER the pie comes out of the oven, in Joe's view).

I have used the techniques to make a great pie. The recipes themselves border on the odd, but I plan to try many. The sausage recipe is OK, but needs a little more seasoning in my view and you should probably be grinding your own (see the Charcuterie cookbook by Ruhlman/Polcyn for sausage making techniques).

Visually a very fun book. If you like making pizza, you gotta get it!

I love making pizza from scratch already, so it's interesting to read how others do their thing. Our crust making is pretty similar, but I'll definitely be trying out some of his baking instructions, cheese combos, and unusual creamy pizzas. Great photos in here too.

Nice pictures!

Hipster pizzaiolo ditches pizza dogma to make amazing pies. Entertaining, practical, and visually appealing book. Worth reading every page.

The recipes and writing are good but the visual style is busy and crowded. Not a bad book but not one I'd rush out to buy either.

A mouth watering read. And gracious of him to include so many pizza place shout outs that aren't merely his own.

He makes the best pizza doe..Still haven't mastered tossing the crust and i always mess it up...not sure if it is due to the recipe or me. But the crust tastes great....

A great read that yielded some amazing dough and amazing pizza with some witty hand-lettered quotes peppered throughout.

Has a recipe for Di Fara pizzaaaaaaaa

inspirations for your next pizza night.

I make homemade pizza every week, and still managed to learn a lot from Pizza Camp. Excited to try some of the recipes!

The author has a passion for pizza.

Motivates me to up my game on homemade pizza.

Kind of short on recipes, but the pizza p*rn pics and the sauces make it worth a flip through. Za za za.

I really liked this one. The humor, the stories, the pairings, the no nonsense and don't-make-this-complicated approach. Can highly recommend.

Beautiful Book, Great Pizza

I own the hard copy and the Kindle version. Get the hard copy. It is just a fun book to read, and The pizza is great.

Cannot give an honest review since the only recipe supplied was for the dough. I have no idea if the food in the book is any good because I have no recipes to make. Not even a basic margarita pizza. Nothing.

I received this book (or parts of this book. See above) as an egalley in exchange for an honest review.

My family and I enjoy making homemade pizza on a regular basis, so I was excited to check out Pizza Camp and learn some new tips. We are looking forward to trying some new recipes and maybe even invent some new combinations now that this book has us thinking outside of the box!

* I received a digital copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Joe Beddia is not your average pizza maker. I haven't met the man myself, but what I've read about him makes me think he's not the average anything. With a background in fine dining and brewing beer, he took everything he learned form his culinary jobs and his world travels and put it all into a tiny pizza shop in Philadelphia, where he makes 40 pies a day by hand and then goes home. He could sell a lot more than that, but he doesn't want to. It doesn't matter to him that people stand in line for hours trying to get one of his famous pizzas. He has no phone there, so he can't take orders. He just wants to do it the way he wants to do it, and if you want to eat his pizza, then you have to do things his way.

The same goes for his cookbook. It's not your average pizza cookbook. There are recipes, of course, and you can take this book and make an amazing pie with it. But you also have to put up with all the Beddia-isms, the articles about art or wine, the random drawings, the bad jokes. And if you have to ask, "Is it really worth all that?" then you don't know the first thing about Joe Beddia or his pizza.

Joe opened Pizzeria Beddia in March of 2013. It has no delivery or slices. It has no chairs. And Bon Appetit has named it the best pizza in America. Because that's how Joe does things. With the perfectionism of an artist, the experience of a chef, the imagination of a preschooler, and the doggedness of a . . . well, a dog with a favorite bone, Beddia shows what it takes to make the best pizza in the country.

And now he's sharing his secrets with us all. Pizza Camp is his invitation to share in the fun and discover how making pizza dough is like a meditation when it's done right. He encourages us to try putting cream onto a pizza, to make our own sausage, to explore our neighborhoods in order to find the tastiest local cheeses, the best tomatoes, the most creative toppings that are right in our backyards. You can follow his recipes to make his signature pizzas (Roasted Corn, Heirloom Cherry Tomato, Basil Pizza or Roasted Mushroom Pizza or Bintje Potato, Cream, and Rosemary Pizza or the Breakfast Pizza with Cream, Spinach, Bacon, and Eggs, for example). Or you can use his dough as your own canvas and make some pizza art of your own.

If you get tired of pizza (is that even possible?), Beddia includes recipes for other things you can do with his basic dough recipe: strombolis, hoagies, and even homemade croutons. Pizza Camp also has Beddia's picks for the best pizza equipment and tips on how to put them to good use, like how to build a pizza on a peel and still be able to slide it into the oven with the grace of an experienced pizza maker.

Part cookbook, part love letter and thank you to Philly, Joe Beddia's Pizza Camp is a must for anyone wanting to know how to make the best pizza in the country, or really anyone wanting to know what it takes to be the best at anything.

Galleys for Pizza Camp were provided by the publisher through NetGalley.com.