17-03-2016
Francesca Barberini guided the whole afternoon at Identità di Pizza, with five prestigious speakers. Here she is with Christian Puglisi
Giuseppe Rizzo, wearing glasses
If it has to be pizza, so be it! Identità di Pizza, the now classic section at Identità Milano with gourmet pizza (actually no: contemporary pizza! As of today, let’s call it thus, as Renato Bosco had us promise) scheduled on the very next day after the debate on “starred pizzerias” livening up the auditorium hall, with the best of the best of Italian pizza, couldn’t happen on a better day.
As usual, Identità di Pizza, organized in collaboration with Molino Quaglia, covered all the main points crossing the development of contemporary pizza. First of all, ideally dividing it into two parts: pizza chefs from Italy and pizza chefs from abroad. Starting from the latter, Piero Gabrieli was the first to point out the fil rouge that connected their speeches: fighting food waste, along the lines of the commitment taken at Expo 2015.
Ruggero Ravagnan
It is then the turn of Massimo Giovannini, of Apogeo in Pietrasanta. He even “saves” mother yeast leftovers. And cooks a first course with the same ingredients that were earlier used as a pizza topping (cream of “schiaccione” beans from Pietrasanta, vacuum cooked pork shoulder, cauliflower – including the leaves – radish, shallot cooked in saffron, vegetable reduction). All these elements, together with an excellent goat milk robiola, become the filling and seasoning for ravioli whose case is born from the left over mother yeast. This is made with 175 grams of water every 100 grams of left over mother yeast, blended, warmed so as to gelatinise the starch, then dried with around 200 grams of Petra 1 flour so as to make a nice elastic dough.
Tony Nicolini, in the middle
This was the Italian trio. Then there’s the “foreigners”, so to speak. The first is Christian Puglisi, in Denmark, from Calabria. Speaking of him in the introduction to Identità di Pizza, Paolo Marchi himself underlined his recent words: «Nordic cuisine is held together only by marketing, while pizza is the real future». Which of course had to be part of one of the three places he runs successfully, namely Bæst. There are few pizzas in the menu, which meet ingredients with an unusual story. Puglisi explained he wasn’t interested in importing buffalo milk mozzarella from Campania, but instead wanted to make use of the excellent milk available in Denmark, opening a dairy farm dedicated to his pizzeria, where he produces fiordilatte trying to make it as creamy and soft as possible. And he did the same with cured meats, opening a laboratory above his pizzeria.
Massimo Giovannini
The events you cannot miss and all the news of topical interest from the food planet
by