GOURMET FILES
Pizzas for everyone
VASUNDHARA CHAUHAN
|
With pizza becoming as common as poori-bhaji, every eatery worth its name has this dish on offer.
|
Any competent home cook can make a good topping: it’s the crust that takes the cake
Photos: Shrivant Rajgarhia
Oven fresh: The crust should be tender, almost flaky.
Times have really changed. Children are practically weaned on pizza now, but I remember the first time pizza was sold in Delhi, sometime in the early 1970s: at Nirula’s Hot Shop. And since they served mustard with their pizzas, I still tend to fumble around the table looking for some sharp mustard to eat with my pizza.
And now pizzas are not just everywhere, their taste has changed since they first made an appearance in India. But when a food is prepared and sold in so many ways, with different ingredients catering to different tastes that’s bound to happen. What can you expect when every neighbourhood grocery store stocks pizza bases and “pizza spread” and every other housewife says “Aaj maine bacchon ke liye peeza banaya?”
History
In 997 A.D., the word pizza first appeared in Latin, but for a long time pizza wasn’t food; it was a baker’s tool, to test the temperature of the oven. Then, after tomatoes came to the New World and pizza topping was invented, for centuries it was a poor man’s street food. Late in the 19th century the queen consort of Italy, Margherita of Savoy, was honoured with the creation of the pizza alla Margherita because the red of the tomatoes, the green of the basil, and the white of the mozzarella cheese represented the colours of the Italian flag.
In India with liberalisation two things happened. Multinational brands came to India and we got a taste of the fully loaded pizza pies — heaped with kilos of cheese and tomatoes, and varieties of sausage.
Because this is India, Chicken Lovers became a slogan for toppings of barbecued, roast and any number of chicken products, including Chettinad and Butter Chicken. And, also because this is India, there is a wealth of vegetarian toppings — usually button mushrooms, corn and coloured bell peppers, even paneer. Big chunks of raw onions seem very popular, because it’s hard to order a vegetarian pizza without them.
What the majority of our pizza sellers seem to disregard is that even in Italy there are vegetarian pizzas — without the onions.
The other happy development is that more “exotic” ingredients are available off the shelf. Probably because we’re travelling more, are more exposed to international food and we’re asking for it when we shop at home.
And because now import is allowed, there’s an abundance of olives, olive oils, sun dried tomatoes, preserved artichokes, spicy Italian sausage, and good European cheese — if not in the neighbourhood kiryana shop, then certainly within a radius of 10 km.
Now I find that many restaurants — not necessarily pizzerias — have started serving something much more akin to the Italian pizza. Bases are thinner and toppings lighter and more interesting. Even Chi, a neighbourhood restaurant that appeared to offer only pan-Asian cuisine, offers eight different pizzas; each named after a well known Hollywood film: Pulp Fiction, Chicken Run, Hot Stuff, A Passage to India, Basic Instinct... The variety of toppings is no surprise but the quality is. The crust is thin, topped with a delicate hand.
I’d heard much of the pizza at the well known La Piazza and gave it a shot, only to find that the pizza was okay — nothing to complain about — but nothing to rave about either.
Everyone, even The Deck at the Habitat, has cracked thin crust. Everyone has access to decent cheese and they know how to make a passable tomato sauce. They’re good. But great?
Making the crust
At Azzurro I’ve had great pizza time after time. I’ve never had pizzas that taste this good, not even in Italy. To my mind, any competent home cook can make a good topping: it’s the crust that takes the cake. The other day I had one with a light topping of cherry tomatoes, rocket leaves and some shavings of parmesan cheese. Maybe some Parma ham — I don’t remember. The ingredients speak for themselves, but the crust! It was tender, un-chewy, almost flaky, with that fresh yeasty smell of just-baked bread, but without the spongy porosity of bread; it was what in Hindustani one would call khasta. The owner-chef, Shrivant Rajgarhia, says that could be because not only is Indian flour different — it’s softer — but he mixes whole wheat flour and semolina with the white flour, sometimes with a pinch of wheat-germ, to get the perfect dough. Indian flour also has less protein content, so it develops less gluten. It took Shrivant months of trying to arrive at the perfect recipe, and once the dough is ready, the oven must be just so. He has wood-fired ovens with very high temperature so the pizza is practically “flash-cooked”. One explanation for the etymology of pizza is that it comes from the Italian word pizzicare, which means “to pluck” and refers to pizza being “plucked” quickly from the oven. At Azzurro pizza never spends more than three minutes in the oven, so it supports this root for the name.
I don’t dare make pizza at home, although it’s become as common as poori-bhaji and it’s living up to an ancient tradition: of using bread as an edible plate or trencher. As Virgil wrote in the Aeneid, “Their homely fare dispatch’d, the hungry band/Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour,/To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour/Ascanius this observ’d, and smiling said:/“See, we devour the plates on which we fed.”
Vasundhara Chauhan is based in Delhi and works with Pratham’s ASER (Annual Status of Education Report).
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
