Wolfgang Puck's Pizza, Pasta, and More!
If you were to mention Wolfgang Puck's name to the average American, he or she would associate the Austrian celebrity chef with a line of frozen pizzas. Of course, Puck has achieved a lot more than that - one of the many restaurants he has opened, and which is still going strong after about 30 years, is Spago, in Beverly Hills, California. Catering to the rich and famous, Spago is where the chef started serving high-end, 'gourmet' pizzas with creative toppings that went far beyond their humble roots in Italy.
There's plenty of that in this book. Yes, there's that old favourite, pepperoni and mushroom pizza, but there's also white clam pizza, one that's topped with spicy scallops and artichoke and one with shrimp and goat cheese. Surprisingly, though, that all seems a bit old fashioned. The book was written in 2000, and pizza has come a long way since then: the trend for high-end pizza now focuses just as much on the dough as it does on the toppings.
The book is more interesting for its pasta section. Puck gives recipes for several doughs, such as basic pasta dough, spicy red pasta dough and potato gnocchi; as well as dishes such as angel hair with crabmeat, oven-dried tomatoes, asparagus and golden caviar; spicy eggplant fettuccine; chicken lasagne; sweet potato ravioli with hazelnut brown butter and herb sauce; and pasta rounds with spinach-ricotta mousse.