Here is the protagonist of the sixth edition of PizzaUp, a symposium which took place at the beginning of November in Vighizzolo d’Este (Padova), at the headquarters of Molino Quaglia, where, in the new location, flours are produced while in the old one ideas such as the Manifesto della Pizza Italiana Contemporanea (Italian Contemporary Pizza Manifesto) are born. This is, as we can read in the final document, a list of “10 ethic and professional principles directed to all the pizza chefs to indicate the requirements of a pizza intended as a healthy and tasty product, on top of being the affordable entrance to fine Italian food”.
Francesca Romana Barberini, Eleonora Cozzella, Piero Gabrieli, Elena Maccone, Renato Malaman, Paolo Massobrio, Gianluca Mazzella, Davide Paolini, Luciano Pignataro, Monica Piscitelli, Chiara Quaglia and I formed the work group that identified these principles. Behind this, however, there’s all the work done in five years by the Università della Pizza (Pizza University), another creation of Molino Quaglia, to celebrate, under a modern light, “a dish that can give a fundamental contribution to the spreading and the knowledge of great Italian ingredients, on top of being an instrument for the development of the entire food supply chain. This is thanks to the creativity of those pizza chefs who give prominence to technical research on flour, yeast, pizza preparation and baking methods, who choose raw materials, from wheat to condiments, with great attention to digestibility and nutritional characteristics”.
These are the ten points included in the Manifesto della Pizza Italiana Contemporanea which was also endorsed by the 80 pizza chefs who, for this purpose, arrived in Vighizzolo from every corner of Italy:
1. Italian pizza valorises shapes, dough structures, baking and fillings that are born from local traditions.
2. Pizza must also be an expression of the pizza chef’s creativity, so that his level of culture and knowledge of the past can become the seeds of a continuous innovation.
3. Pizza must be born from ingredients and preparation, preserving and baking techniques that favour digestibility for the consumer’s final wellbeing.
4. Pizza reaches its highest quality levels when made with ingredients that are originally from Italy and are produced in Italy, stimulating the quality improvement of the entire food supply chain.
5. Among the ingredients used for the dough and the filling, preference must be given to those with a lesser degree of refining to enhance the original nutritional value of the product.
6. The pizza dough needs to respect the natural maturation and leavening times that depend on the raw materials and the techniques used.
7. Declaring the use of mother yeast must be exclusively refer to the result of a process of spontaneous fermentation of a mixture of water and flour acidified with lactic bacterial strains, and not dried mother yeast powder which doesn’t bestow the same digestibility and preservation characteristics that are typical of a “live” mother yeast.
8. The pizza menu must be updated according to the ingredients available that season to give consumers’ the chance to eat following the rhythm of nature.
9. The pizza chef and his collaborators need to maintain a good level of decorum with reference to their work and the location, working in view in order to transmit the value of their art with a dish that is respectful of both ingredients and consumers.
10. Italian pizza, therefore, must become an instrument to popularize Italian food and the richness of the Mediterranean Diet, originating from its products.
