Widening the horizons of pizza

If it has to be pizza, so be it! Identità di Pizza, the now classic section at Identità Milano with gourmet pizza (actually no: contemporary pizza! As of today, let’s call it thus, as Renato Bosco had us promise) scheduled on the very next day after the debate on “starred pizzerias” livening up the auditorium hall, with the best of the best of Italian pizza, couldn’t happen on a better day.

As usual, Identità di Pizza, organized in collaboration with Molino Quaglia, covered all the main points crossing the development of contemporary pizza. First of all, ideally dividing it into two parts: pizza chefs from Italy and pizza chefs from abroad. Starting from the latter, Piero Gabrieli was the first to point out the fil rouge that connected their speeches: fighting food waste, along the lines of the commitment taken at Expo 2015.

Pizza is pizza. Yet with its “scraps” one can make some excellent starters, or even first courses or mains or desserts. For references, ask for instance Ruggero “Lello” Ravagnan, of the very popular Grigoris in Mestre. Being the first of the three Italian standard-bearers, he takes care of the starter. He takes the leftovers from the dough, puts them in a planetary machine with butter, sugar and flour and kneads everything very well so as to obtain a thin pastry which he then fries, making the perfect case for sweet-savoury cannoli to be filled perhaps – as he did – with stracciatella from Apulia and confit cherry tomatoes. Or he takes the same “leftovers”, hydrates them with an emulsion of wheat germ water and extra virgin olive oil: he then can knead these into new compact balls, with small cavities and that touch of acidity (the heritage of mother yeast) that makes the product digestible. Out of this he makes a bread to be seasoned – why not – in an “Assenzian” way, with master Corrado Assenza watching: almond from Noto, wild thyme, candied olives, carrots processed with dry Marsala.

It is then the turn of Massimo Giovannini, of Apogeo in Pietrasanta. He even “saves” mother yeast leftovers. And cooks a first course with the same ingredients that were earlier used as a pizza topping (cream of “schiaccione” beans from Pietrasanta, vacuum cooked pork shoulder, cauliflower – including the leaves – radish, shallot cooked in saffron, vegetable reduction). All these elements, together with an excellent goat milk robiola, become the filling and seasoning for ravioli whose case is born from the left over mother yeast. This is made with 175 grams of water every 100 grams of left over mother yeast, blended, warmed so as to gelatinise the starch, then dried with around 200 grams of Petra 1 flour so as to make a nice elastic dough.

It’s now the turn of Giuseppe Rizzo, a pizza chef from Lombardy originally from Campania. Helped also by Assenza and Federica Racinelli, he has fined tuned a sort of very soft and not very sweet pound cake which he serves stuffed with the same ingredients used for a “savoury” pizza in the menu – artichokes, carrots from Polignano and candied bergamot – with a clearly sweeter note, adding fiordilatte cream and flakes of dark chocolate. The dough is made starting from a left over very mature ball of dough, which is whisked with an emulsion of wheat germ, egg yolk, almonds, corn starch and beaten egg white: here comes La pallina che si è montata la testa [The little ball with a big head]

This was the Italian trio. Then there’s the “foreigners”, so to speak. The first is Christian Puglisi, in Denmark, from Calabria. Speaking of him in the introduction to Identità di Pizza, Paolo Marchi himself underlined his recent words: «Nordic cuisine is held together only by marketing, while pizza is the real future». Which of course had to be part of one of the three places he runs successfully, namely Bæst. There are few pizzas in the menu, which meet ingredients with an unusual story. Puglisi explained he wasn’t interested in importing buffalo milk mozzarella from Campania, but instead wanted to make use of the excellent milk available in Denmark, opening a dairy farm dedicated to his pizzeria, where he produces fiordilatte trying to make it as creamy and soft as possible. And he did the same with cured meats, opening a laboratory above his pizzeria.

Finally, the one coming from further away: Tony Nicolini, Australian pizza-chef and entrepreneur originally from Abruzzo who today leads a small empire of 5 restaurants and 150 people only based on pizza. He presented his Pizza's sweet appeal, sweet pizzas born for fun after a request made by chef George Calombaris for a street food contest and today an essential part of the menu, as a dessert or a sweet snack. La pizza senza scarpe – [without shoes], inspired by the local climate, the state of mind and the tropical produce of Queensland – the dough is made with Petra 3 and Venere rice flour, with a unique texture, stuffed with mango, macadamia nut, coconut, mint and icing sugar. Margherita dolce which instead has a sweet dough (Petra 3, Special and a sugar that “drives” the leavening giving a special softness) stuffed with a compote of spaccatelle tomatoes from Abruzzo, strawberries and acacia honey together with a cream of buffalo milk ricotta and Passito di Pantelleria wine and fried basil. Italy triumphs Down Under too.