Posted on 06/22/2022 5:39:59 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Pizza: high-end gourmet fare or affordable food for the people? That is the question pitting Italian billionaire Flavio Briatore against chefs in Naples, where pizza making has UNESCO world heritage status.
A staple for Italians and a favourite around the world, pizza is traditionally made of simple ingredients, with restaurants in the southern city of Naples serving the classic Pizza Margherita for as little as 4 euros ($4.24).
Briatore challenged these low prices in his answer to criticism of the prices charged at his Crazy Pizza restaurants, in London, Montecarlo, Riyadh and Italy, where a Spanish Pata Negra ham-topped pizza sells for 65 euros and customers are charged 49 euros for ones covered in black truffle shavings.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
I just ate half a loaf of homemade bread and now I’m hungry again. Thanks a lot.
Oop. Sorry.
I don't get it. I can be and is both. Sigh. I guess I'll have to "read the article" now...
/grin
I've read about this ham.
OF COURSE you can charge top dollar for a pizza topped with this.
As a bit of a pizza snob, I’ll say that first pizza at the link is a first class pie, A or even A+ quality, based on looks. That pie is $21 at a top quality place in Atlanta, Antico Pizza Napoletana.
The idea that you can get something like that for 4 Euros is absurd.
Flavio, after your yacht was confiscated by Italian tax authorities and sold at auction to your buddy Bernie Ecclestone, did you get it back yet? If not, can I charter?
Those toppings are made from expensive items. Thats why the pizza price is higher.
Its why I dont eatpizzas with those toppings. Id love the margherita pizza.
Golly, Moses.
Tapas
In a Tapas bar.
Takes me back
To be fair-I prefer my pizza deadly simple, without a lot of toppings. Here is what I do. (I don’t make my own dough yet, but there is a store-bought artisan dough at Market Basket that is as good as anything (crust-wise) that I have ever eaten.)
Put a pizza stone into the middle of the oven and preheat as high as you can go. Mine goes up to 500. I usually let it pre-heat for an hour.
Shape dough into a disk on a floured surface then pick it up on your knuckles and move it into the classic shape.
Cornmeal the peel and lay the dough on.
In a bowl, whisk together olive oil, garlic (I use the paste) black pepper and oregano, then brush the entire dough with it right out to the edge. I brush as far as I can go, and be sure that none will drip down onto the peel.
Take mixed Romano and Parmesan grated cheese and sprinkle liberally. Make EXTRA sure to get some of that on the very edge of the thicker crust where there will be no topping.
That is a treat for later.
Take fresh mozzarella slice it into thin disks as thin as it will let you (which is not too thin) but it is no big deal if it breaks up into pieces-it is better if it does, and you spread the mozzarella a bit sparsely over the dough out to the thicker edge but not on it.
The main purpose of the mozzarella at this stage here is to serve as a base to hold the pizza ingredients together when cutting and eating.
Get a lot of fresh basil-dried basil is absolutely worthless even as an emergency measure-I usually have at least 12 medium sized fresh leaves, stalks discarded, and I stack them into a stack with decreasing leaf size as you stack, then roll them lengthwise to make a thick rolled tube of lovely basil. I keep perhaps another 6-10 whole leaves for the very end.
I slice the basil just as thin as I can, slicing along the tube as if it were a jelly roll, then, I give a few slices through the pile of basil strips just to break them up a little.
I take half, and sprinkle it over the sparse layer of mozzarella.
Then I take two of the finest medium tomatoes I can find (not the biggest...the tastiest) I slice them very thin, and array them over the surface of the dough on top of the mozzarella. I put ground black pepper on the tomatoes here, but no salt. The Romano and Parmesan can be a bit salty, and adding salt here is too much, IMO.
I take half of the remaining chopped basil, and distribute it over the tomatoes.
I slice up the remaining ball of mozzarella into disks, and spread as many of them over the surface as I can to get this layer of cheese very thick.
I sprinkle the remaining chopped basil everywhere, then take the whole basil leaves and place them in an artistic way on the surface of it all.
Put it in the oven on the stone and bake for 11 minutes.
At 11 minutes, eyeball it closely, but don’t take it out unless it looks done. I have found that there is a wider range of crust consistency that is still “great” but crunchy crust-it is a disaster.
When it gets crunchy, you have ruined it, and it crosses that threshold quickly. At that point, you eat the pizza because you are probably hungry, not because it tastes brilliantly good.
If you do it right, you will see the flecks and strips of Romano and Parmesan that strayed onto the thicker outer crust, and they will be nicely darkened. And the crust will have that wonderful golden color with just a few places approaching brown.
Chewy inside. The outside has a hint of the olive oil/garlic/oregano flavor.
Chewy inside!
I move it onto a large cutting board, let it sit for 10 min (for my own self preservation, as I have no self control with blisteringly hot pizza) then I slice and serve.
I like mine with lots of crushed red pepper...:)
If I am feeling frisky, I will buy some Bianco Sweet Italian Sausage from Revere and put some of that on the pizza.
(They supply all the sausage trucks I used to encounter outside the old Boston Garden back in the Seventies. I am addicted to those.)
I love tapas bars. Sigh, one I really liked for years didn’t make it through COVID.
Wow; you should be on one of the competition cooking shows.
And here is the thing-I love mine simple, but...POWER TO PEOPLE WHO GO INSANE WITH EVERYTHING!
I love it. Not my thing, I am more elemental, but...I can appreciate someone getting all that stuff they love. As long as I don’t have to eat it, of course...:)
I had a barbecue pizza a while back, and...I didn’t expect to like it, but I really did like one specific thing about it, and it wasn’t the pork.
In some places, the BBQ sauce got splashed on the thick outer crust, and in the oven, the BBQ sauce out there carmelized and solidified at the higher temperature, and...it was delicious. I don’t even remember the rest of that pizza, but the crust was memorable.
You can probably tell I am a Crust Man.
The smells
The wine
Jerez
Those tiny sample slices
And maybe fish types
In skinny rooms with hams hanging down
And the ornate bars
I can almost taste it
LOL, pizza makes me insane, I love eating it.
I feel guilty even confessing this, but...I have had pizza that failed in so many ways, soggy crust, grease on the outside, but...
God help me, I still found a way to enjoy eating it!
Every time I do that, the disc just shrivels back up to a ball. With great effort, I might shape it into a disc, but it always immediately retracts into something much smaller. Any suggestions?
Italians don’t use yeast. They use a starter from old dough.
Well
Sicilians
Excellent post. Can’t argue with any of it, and I learned a couple of things to try.
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