Pizza Showcase 1/10
Pizza Margherita.
The mantra is that a pizza should not have more than three ingredients. And here they are: tomatoes, cheese and basil. We take the liberty to add a drizzle of the most amazing OEVOO. It just elevates the entire experience.
Our first menu used to say, before you try all of the other pizzas, please make sure you acquaint yourself with the Marinara and the Margherita, the cornerstones of the concept that is pizza.
Some history.
The Margherita is mostly only preceded by the Marinara. But that is for another day.
Modern pizza can be traced to Naples in the early 19th century, its story really dates to the flatbreads of the ancient Etruscans who settled in Italy in the 8th Century BC. From archeological remains, we know that they made a sort of thick dough from ground grains, which was baked beneath hot ashes and then topped with seasoned oils, herbs, and other available ingredients. The Romans called these ash cakes, panus focus, which evolved into the Italian word, focaccia.
Even the word pizza is older than our concept of modern pizza. Until the 19th century, the word was used to refer to any round-shaped breads and desserts, like “pizza di Pasqua” (panettone-shaped cheesy Easter bread) and “pizza dolce teramana” (a round, layered sponge cake traditional in Abruzzo). In Pellegrino Artusi’s famed 1890s cookbook La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well) there are three recipes for pizza, all of them sweet. From at least the early 1500s, small round flatbreads topped with herbs and oil, referred to as pizza, were a popular street food in Naples. Later that century, after their introduction from the New World, tomatoes would top the pizza. This style was called pizza marinara (fisherman’s wife pizza), so named because it was traditionally prepared for seamen upon their return from a fishing trip. They would be so hungry that they would want to eat the Marinara before they get home for dinner but not ruin their appetite and upset Mrs. Seaman by not eating the home prepared dinner. Or so the story goes.
One popular account dates the invention of Pizza Margherita to 1889 and a Neapolitan pizza maker named Raffaele Esposito who wanted to honour the visit to Naples by Queen Margherita of Savoy and her husband, King Umberto I. The ingredients were to represent the colours of the Italian flag: red (tomatoes), white (mozzarella), and green (basil).
Food historians have found several key holes in the account. Probably the most damning is that the dish existed at least three decades before any royal visit to Naples. In an 1853 collection of essays about Neapolitan customs, author Emanuele Rocco describes a pizza topped with “basilico, muzzarella, e pomodoro”: basil, mozzarella, and tomatoes.
Which brings us to one other point: do you know why Italy is shaped like a boot not like a shoe? Ask chef next time you meet him.
What is so special about Margo’s Margherita? Nothing and everything. We use dough, San Marzano tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella and basil. Nothing else. Oh, and that drizzle of Extra Virgin Olive Oil.
Let us start with the dough. We use a very delicate sourdough fermentation process that takes months to evolve in flavour. Not too sour. We use organic flours, a blend of 9 different flours from Shipton Mills. Two types of whites: Manitoba, strong and 00 soft flour. These are the base of the other flours. We add the other flours to improve the profile of the dough both in flavour and in health benefits. We use Kamut, two types of wholemeal flour (milled differently), same with the two rye flours, spelt and a malted wheat flour. The final result is a flavour that is deep, intense, full of vitamins, lower in sugar and downright healthy.
The dough is based on a sourdough fermentation process that takes week to reach its optimum fermentation flavours and activity. Sourdough relies on a mix of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria, rather than baker’s yeast, to leaven the dough. It’s richer in nutrients, less likely to spike your blood sugar, contains lower amounts of gluten, and is generally easier to digest than bread made with baker’s yeast. It also doesn’t bloat you.
Once the dough is made, it needs to rest for at least 72 hours for the process to be complete. Once the 72 hours are over, the pizza can be made.
The tomato sauce is probably the most generic of ingredients, yet we make sure that we get the finest San Marzano tomatoes. We do not add anything to the tomatoes. Just salt. We certainly do not thicken with paste or make more wet with added water. Tomato as nature made it is perfect for the job. Just right.
Buffalo mozzarella is a huge topic when it comes to discussing pizza amongst pizzaioli. There is that famous John Ruskin quote that we refer to all the time: There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey. We use buffalo mozzarella. Not cow mozzarella (the real name for cow mozzarella is fior di latte). The difference is significant. Suffice to say that buffalo mozzarella is more or less five times more expensive than fior di latte. The taste is also very different. Fior di latte is buttery in taste and yellow in colour. Buffalo mozzarella is bright white almost with bluish hues and taste fresh like milk.
Finally, even if you get all these things right, there is the question of the pizza oven, the type of heat produced, the method of heating and the temperature. Our oven runs at 400+ C, it is fired up by kiln dried beech provided to us by Mead Brothers of Tring and we use a rotating lava base to bake the pizzas in. The wood is used to both fuel the oven and add a delicate smoky flavour to the pizza.
A proper Neapolitan pizza takes 90 seconds to bake. Realistically only a Margherita and a Marinara pizza can be cooked in this way. When a pizza has more ingredients on top it would require at least double that time for all the ingredients to reach temperature and cook.
If you ask 100 people to prepare a Margherita, you will get 500 different versions of the same simple dish. Even for us, no 2 Margheritas are the same. Different handling, different nuances, different fire intensity, there are so many variables that can alter the final product. Yet the only ingredient that must always be consistent is the passion and love a pizzaiolo has to put in his work coupled with the humility in the knowledge that even the weather can ruin your efforts in creating the best pizza imaginable.
The pizzaiolo at Margo’s at the Old Mill, Berkhamsted.
