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At Dry Milano, Sirabella makes the Pizza Cassuoela Luca Cornacchia at Fermenta in Chieti highlights the Abruzzo dishes with the aim of telling the region and its products through his gourmet pizzas with real recipes. And he does so with the Shepherds’ Elixir Pizza; a Pizza with Callara Mutton, a typical marinated then slow-cooked mutton dish (up to 10 hours) in the callaro (pot hanging in the fireplace) on low heat. A dish with an intense taste that works well on pizza dough. And he is not the only one. From Fermenta we also find ‘Cif and Ciaf’, where the topping is precisely the famous dish linked to the festivities for the slaughter of pigs: a nostalgic, friendly dish, which was prepared with the cuts and the parts not used for seasoning (usually cheeks and off-cuts), quickly sautéed in a pan with oil and onion. In Catanzaro Mirko Cicco of Il Golosone puts the “Tiana di Agnello” another typical dish that is prepared on holidays in Calabrian homes, in the Roman pizza pan. The dough is seasoned with potatoes and rosemary to have all the ingredients of the classic dish and the topping is based on low-temperature cooked lamb, with creamed peas and fried artichoke. And sticking with pan pizza, Sara and Mario of Pizza Chef in Rome put “alla romana” tripe, chicken “alla cacciatora” and even meatballs on their bases. Yes, precisely those round meatballs, well cooked in the sauce and placed on the pizza. And as Mario is keen to emphasise: ‘everything in our pizzeria is properly cooked, especially the vegetable part, from the sautéed vegetables, to the cream of pumpkin, to the mushrooms sautéed and then combined with the rest of the ingredients’. In Rome, Pier Daniele Seu in his Seu Pizza Illuminati has made gourmet and cooked pizza his highest form of expression. His identity and his history live and relive in every recipe he invents for

BY GIUSY FERRAINA

his pizzas. An example from the latest menu is the Ham, Cream and Peas, a classic dish from the 1980s with Parmesan béchamel, fiordilatte, roasted ham, pea cream, nutmeg, Parmesan cheese and wasabi pea crumble; the Valeria in Koh Phangan with fior di latte, thay marinaded chicken, soya bean sprouts, thay salted zabaglione, coconut milk and green curry, cashew nut crumble, lime juice, basil and coriander chop is also interesting. Two pizzas in which the elements combined are many, and are carefully prepared before they reach the disc of dough to create a final result. Seu has no doubts about the importance of cuisine in a pizzeria. He believes that the things that differentiate the creative pizza chef from the rest are the toppings, much more than the dough. This is where the construction of identity is defined. A statement that finds full confirmation in his personal journey: from the beginning to the present day, cuisine is increasingly the protagonist of his dough discs and also in an original way; there are no imitations, only ad hoc recipes. “It all comes from my memories, from the dishes I ate as a child and from many trips, a great source of inspiration and knowledge. In the smells and flavours of new products, in the dishes tasted in foreign, typically local and award-winning restaurants, I always look for intuition, the element of taste to then be transferred to my pizza” – explains the Roman pizza chef. And just reading his complete menu, you understand the level he is on now. Let’s go to Mater in Fiano Romano (Rome). Leafing through the menu, you will find many proposals, all of which are seasonal and interesting, such as the Milanese with veal stew, potato purée and saffron cream or the pizza with onion cream, creamed cod and kale chips (taken to Identità Golose), the one with wild boar ragout and purple potato cream and the vegan one with beets, white cauliflower cream, cabbage and bread crumble. “I have always loved cooking and when I decided to open Mater I was afraid of turning it into a restaurant and I opted for a pizzeria (later finding twice as many problems), but with the clear idea that I could do what I usually did with pizza making, that is, creating dishes”. This is how Amalia Costantini, owner of Mater, begins. For her, pizza is cuisine: it must be like this if we want a unique, personal product. Her pizzas combine sourdough and dough, the careful research of ingredients, possibly organic and local, and worked in the restaurant. There are deliberately few assembled pizzas: here cooking and creativity have taken over. There is a predisposition towards vegetables proposed in different shapes and textures, used as a base, as an amalgam or as a crunchy touch. There is also a lot of colour, because as Amalia says: “my pizzas must also be beautiful and not just tasty”.

Let’s now go to Clementina in Fiumicino (Rome), the pizzeria of Luca Pezzetta, who delights with his virtuous raw and cooked seafood dishes. His slices of pan-fried or Roman pan pizza are garnished with shellfish, larded and bbq-seared prawns, accompanied by vegetable creams or rigorously homemade mayonnaise. His dough, rolled out with a rolling pin, does not betray expectations. Clementina actually disguises itself as a pizzeria but contains the essence of a refined seafood cuisine. Between the dryaging of fish, marinades, tuna and amberjack seasoning, the work done here is haute

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by Luca Pezzetta

cuisine, not to mention the choice to work only with local fish to try to be as sustainable as possible. Two pizzas worth mentioning which are exemplary of our theme: the “Tripe, Belly and Shellfish”, topped with tripe, pork belly, raw prawns, PDO Roman pecorino cheese, curled celery and tomato and then there is the colourful “Capricciosa di mare”, reinterpretation of a “pizzeria classic”, which reworks all the ingredients transforming them into homemade tuna ham, mullet roe, red and yellow datterino tomato stew, mozzarella strips and ground olives and artichoke petals “alla giudia”. And we can safely say that it leaves no room for “gustatory or emotional” doubt.

It comes from Calabria and is called Coccodrillo in Sila. The architect is Roberto Davanzo of Bob Alchimia a Spicchi in Montepaone (Catanzaro) who, in the last two years, has been making a lot of noise and who, with his commitment to doughs and toppings, has brought a new vision of pizza to the south. In this case we have a “Focaccia with potatoes from Sila with crocodile “alla cacciatora”, red pepper with vanilla, ash”. As he himself tells us: “A few months ago a supplier friend offered me this meat and, curious, I decided to try it. At the first taste I immediately thought of chicken and automatically of the chicken 'alla cacciatora' with potatoes that I had eaten a few days earlier in a restaurant in Sila. The scent of the embers led me to create a fake ash, while to make the filling softer without affecting but enhancing the crocodile that is the protagonist of the dish, I created a red pepper and vanilla sauce, one of my favorite combinations. We included the Sila potato in our focaccia, which is fragrant and soft on top while the base is crispy like chips”.

we can only conclude with cooking “inside” pizza. And here the absolute symbol is the Trapizzino, the brilliant work of Stefano Callegari who made his conceptual revolution of Roman pizza in the binomial pizzacuisine. The trapizzino is grandma’s homemade Roman cooking, inside a white pizza. To be exact, it is an open triangle of white pizza containing meatballs, oxtail, offal and artichokes, tripe, chicken with peppers and “picchiapò”, which has become a registered trademark, also successfully released from Rome and exported from Milan to New York. A tasty game, thought of as the take-away that has conquered the food guides.