Giorgio Locatelli’s pizza
Giorgio Locatelli’s cookbook, Made at home, contains delicious recipes that remind him of home. Try this recipe for pizza, for example. At his restaurant Locanda Locatelli, Locatelli makes this pizza for his staff every Saturday.
Locatelli: ”Pizza isn’t everyday food for me. It’s something special. You go somewhere where they bake nothing but pizzas in a wood-fired oven, or you make pizzas yourself at home. I don’t believe we’ve done pizza any favors by turning it into a dish that you can simply take out of the freezer whenever you feel like it. It should be a light, fresh, crispy success, like in Mediterranean cuisine, and not something that is usually heavy or limp and full of preservatives.
Naturally, the recipe I’ve given here is for a pizza Margherita, but you can use extra ingredients according to taste. Saturday night is pizza night for the staff at Locanda, and we always make all kinds of different versions. Whatever you choose, the most important thing is not to add too many ingredients. Be sparing. If you overload the pizza, you keep the heat away and the top cannot become crisp. Also avoid ingredients that contain too much moisture, because you don’t want the top to turn into a kind of swimming pool in the oven. Buy mozzarella in water, cut it into slices and let it drain well. Cow’s-milk mozzarella is fine, because the best buffalo mozzarella isn’t suitable unless you add it only after baking, scattered in pieces over the pizza with some fresh basil. The same applies to Parma ham: it’s better to add it only after baking.”
Method
1 Mix all the ingredients for the dough with 300 ml water (at room temperature).
2 Divide the dough into four pieces, shape each piece into a ball and place them well apart on a baking sheet.
3 Cover everything with plastic wrap and place the baking sheet in the refrigerator overnight, where the dough will rise slightly. Remove the dough from the refrigerator four hours before baking the pizzas and let it come to room temperature slowly. It will rise a little more now.
4 Preheat the oven to 220°C and put a baking sheet or sheets inside to heat up – pizza stones are even better.
5 Lightly dust the work surface with flour. Flatten each ball by hand and stretch the dough with your fingertips into a circle 3-4 mm thick.
6 Spread a serving spoonful of tomato sauce over each pizza. Divide some pieces of mozzarella over the pizzas and drizzle each pizza with a tablespoon of extra-virgin olive oil. Finish with a pinch of dried oregano.
7 Slide two pizzas at a time onto the pizza stone or baking sheet and bake them for 10 minutes, until the edges are dark brown and the mozzarella has melted.
8 Remove the pizzas from the oven and sprinkle with some basil.
Toppings
Before putting the pizzas in the oven, you can add some blanched spinach and sautéed mushrooms, cooked ham or drained tuna with thin rings of chili pepper and onion. Or spread some ‘nduja (soft, spicy salami) over them and, when the pizzas come out of the oven, scatter some dollops of burrata over them. If you prefer pizza without tomato sauce, you can add some blanched broccoli to the mozzarella; remove the casing from a few Italian sausages and fry the meat filling in a pan until golden brown, then sprinkle it over the pizzas before putting them in the oven.
Pumpkin purée
As another alternative to tomato sauce, you can make a smooth pumpkin purée by roasting the pumpkin in the oven and puréeing it with a little water. Spread the purée over the dough, as you would the tomato sauce. Add some cubes of taleggio cheese and some cooked potatoes that you dry and crumble after draining.
Title: Made at home
Author: Giorgio Locatelli
Publisher: Fontaine Uitgevers
Price: €29,99
