Massimiliano Alajmo is not leaving. A master, he sends his Margherita travelling (and too bad for those who haven’t read Bulgakov). Of course, we’re referring to the pizza par excellence. The chef from Le Calandre in Rubano has been working for years on this new format of pizza, steamed so as to make it lighter, easier to digest, an even greater match for the ingredients.
This journey first started in 2013, on the very stage of
Identità Golose, when
Alajmo – who loves speaking about ingredients and has always been obsessed with the way in which eating acts on all our senses – made the news public.
Four years later, the time has come to assess the state of the research, now that Alajmo has patented this recipe and just opened Amo in Venice, a restaurant in which he presents his way of conceiving one of the simplest and hence inevitably one of the most complicated dishes in Italian cuisine.
First of all: what’s steamed pizza? It’s a pizza with very little yeast, but which “grows” in a steamed oven thanks to the strength of the water, which gives texture, steaminess, lightness and favours easy digestion by gelatinising the starch.
Paolo Marchi listens to the speech in good company
Now
Alajmo has reached this moment, which in two days’ time will already be overcome: two types of calzone,
MaxCalzone and
MaxCalzino, the latter folded in two, in which the dough is made with various aromatic powders, and then opened as a pocket, seasoned with oil or another fat so as to better convey the aroma and enriched with various high quality ingredients (in the case of the folded one, since it’s two flavours in one, you can double).
Then there’s the Centopezze, which mimes the texture of tripe: four layers of dough with as many aromatic elements giving different flavours and colours in a sort of puff-pastry-pizza. Two ways of breaking the visual and edible monotony. Two stops in a journey whose end is far away.
Translated into English by Slawka G. Scarso
