There is no person who does not know pizza. We eat it as street food, eating a slice of pizza on the street, but also in restaurants as a main meal. There are many different types and forms of pizza nowadays, as pizza is a a world tour he has become. For Gianni, a true Italian, pizza is his heart and for him it is not a food, but a way of life and the warmth of home!
- How did the pizza career start?
- Back in the day, it evolved from baking bread, when Italian bakers would put the dough in the oven and then add a little tomato and cheese. Very quickly this dish has been a success. And so pizza was born, which the Italians, being Italian, started to change. It was not known then, only in Italy- and it became a national dish. More and more varieties appeared, the Tuscan variety, the Sicilian variety, or even the Lazio variety. Basically, it spread through internal migration, and a pizza culture blossomed that is Italian! From there, a pizza innovation started, to the point that, for example, in Tyrol, they even made it crazy with a speck of ham. From then on, wherever it was made, basically everyone put whatever ingredients they wanted or had available.
- A real pizza then is Italian?
- Make no mistake. A lot of people make good pizza nowadays. What makes Italian pizza really good is authenticity! Real wood-fired ovens, the flavours of our childhood, the best ingredients. We Italians believe in pizza and we take it seriously! But remember, wherever you go in the world, there are other ingredients available. For example, when the Italians emigrated to America, the flour and tomatoes they took with them - quickly ran out. So they started using the raw materials that were available locally. They had to find ways to keep the flavours of home, the traditions, the memory of Italy alive. This is how different products were created, from American pizza to Thai pizza. But the original will always be Italian!
- Does this mean that everything can be packed as toppings?
- Good question! This is a big misdirection route for pizzas! Pizza is not stuffed with all kinds of toppings! Keep the flavours in balance. This means that you need a few ingredients that go together to create harmony in the pizza! Pizza is a simple product, but it is difficult to make it well. Personally, I - and Italians in general - feel bad and can't stand it when pizza is degraded. We think that pineapple and corn toppings, or even varies by country all kinds of variations are sometimes enough, terrible! Just a simple example, don't put stew or fried meat on pizza anymore! With too much variation, you ruin the simplicity of a perfectly good real Italian pizza. The three ingredients that you add should be of high quality (tomatoes, cheese, basil) because they make the pizza light and pleasant to digest. If an Italian wants to determine whether the pizza is good or not- he will taste a plain margarita or marinara!
- How has pizza changed?
- Pizza dough is the most important thing, because we are not making bread. It is not made with any of the original recipes. Of course, this is not diabolical, but the original pizza was made with yeast. The other big change was the burst of technology. Electric ovens came in and the typical pizza, what we call (intelia al forno pizza), which a regular baker can make, was born. These electric ovens can heat the dough to the right even temperature, but the dough doesn't have that soft smoky taste, it doesn't have the magic of wood! It's like turning on an electric fireplace or filling a real one with wood. It's heaven and earth. Not to mention the fact that it takes a completely different skill set to run a real wood-burning stove than an electric or gas one. There's a reason why there are pizza chefs specifically, and there's a reason why anyone who wants to make a traditional pizza goes out to learn from an Italian master.
- Do you have a favourite pizza?
- More. I say let's keep the tradition. Nowadays it is possible to buy Italian ingredients anywhere in the world. What I would definitely recommend is to use animal-based mozzarella, use top quality olive oil and add flavourful tomatoes as a topping. Keep that fantastic sweetness that tomatoes can only give you. After that, of course, you can create, you can try, but treat the pizza like a deviled egg. When I was a kid, pizza was 40X60, with a quality of dough that could easily last a whole day without deterioration. Nowadays we have a lot of recipes available and I think every pizza has its own clientele.
There are also vanna trends, such as the Pizza romana, which is a Roman-style pizza. In Italian culture, it is eaten more as a snack, a thicker variety. They usually use brewer's yeast. The toppings are put on cold so that the product retains its crunch. It is usually eaten with mortadella, but cold cuts are also added. There are also several recipes, some of which use sugar on the topping.
- Nowadays, there are plenty of „product pizzas” on the market, even in the freezers of supermarkets. Are they far from the real thing?
- Let's not forget that technology, cooling technology, has changed a lot in recent years. You could call it the industrialisation of pizza. But we have all seen how popular it is and that everyone is now looking for quality. It is simply no longer possible to make a shoddy, unsaleable product in this segment. Of course, there is a world of difference between this and the original pizza, baked in a wood-fired oven with Italian ingredients. I think we need to improve, but if you are used to good quality, you should never go backwards, you will find better and better products, even among industrial pizzas.
The world of pizza is therefore extremely diverse, already in Italy and indeed throughout the world. It is impossible to know everything. But what we do know, let's know well, put our expertise and our hearts into it. I, for example, am very proud of the pizza we developed in the home-delivery days. It's important how we revive a pizza in this form. We added an „instruction manual” for a reason. We made it so that we finished the baking process a little earlier and the consumer has to finish it at home. In this way we achieved that it retained its crunchiness, did not become biscuity and retained its quality. This was very important for me, that if life brought it, we should improve, think ahead. Let's be able to put a real quality Italian pizza on the table in our homes.
Author: Tamás Budafoki
Photo by Trattoria Pomo D'Oro
