A very significant episode, come to think about it, because it involved the celebrated chef who understands how cuisine cannot exclude new pizza and the nervy pizza-chef who understands how new pizza cannot avoid merging with the kitchen.

Yet it was not a conflict but a discussion. One would have thought the Bavarian chef (in the photo, with Corrado Assenza and some of the participants in the symposium) would speak of toppings in gourmet pizza: a chef’s topic, that is. Yet the German chef went beyond: «I thought not about what can end on top of the pizza, but inside the pizza».

He didn’t change the flour or the yeast, but focused «on the third element, water». Removing it completely from the dough in its “standard” version, and using first tomato water, then a rosemary distillate, or lyophilised herbs. This resulted in different, original, aromatic types of dough: «Each time, the physical behaviour of the dough changes, as well as the rising, the hydration, the topping».

It is this total diversity that did not fully convince Bosco: «If the goal is to aromatise the dough, why change its structure, with the consequent problems that were mentioned? Wouldn’t it be simpler to aromatise just the water in which it is cooked, as with the bagel pizza technique?». (That is to say boiling the leavened dough in aromatised water, before finishing the cooking in the oven).

This was an enlightening sparkle of technical yet almost anthropological dialectics: the famous chef who, as someone who sees pizza as something occasional, gives a high, complex take; opposite to someone who, without losing this complexity but also figuring out the difficult management of different types of dough, immediately imagines a more manageable technical solution for those who work with pizza in large volumes.

Carlo Passera
source: http://newsletter.identitagolose.it/email.php?id=561

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