The Panzanella, tuscan salad

Don't panic! We're officially still in Summer, and even if many may think that salads are for the hot Summer, we usually eat them all year round, but the one we bring you today is especially fresh and ideal for the summer: it the Panzanella!

The Panzanella is a typical Tuscan salad, and its recipe is very versatile, and may vary from household to household, like every traditional recipe. But there are three ingredients that you just cannot skip: the Tuscan hard bread, ripen tomatoes and basil.

In the Tuscan families' recipes you can easily find other ingredients (that you can skip if you want) like cucumber, capers, onion and a large etc...

At the end of the day, it's a different kind of salad, and you can enrich the fundamental ingredients with what you find in your fridge. We love to add mozzarella fresh cheese to everything and of course to salads too! If you thought that only the Caprese salad had the "mozz exclusive" you were wrong!

As a trivia, we can tell you that even if this dish is nowadays an entree or a first course or the perfect tupperware sala to bring with you for a picnic, many decades ago the Panzanella was the typical summer breakfast! They use to change it with the polenta during the Winter. Breakfast of champions for the landworkers that modeled the beautiful fields of Tuscany.

If you want to have a more accurate historical background of the birth of Panzanella, keep reading down here, if you don't, just read the recipe below the historical section! :)

History: 

The Panzanella is a dish that belogs to the so-called "cucina povera", the "cuisine of the poors" (that, by the way is the best ever in our humble opinion), and it's a easy bread & olive oil salad. It is a cousin of others mediterranean soups or minestrones, for instance the typical "Ribollita toscana", made with the cavolo nero toscano, a key ingredient that you probably have already known as "kale". Well, in Tuscany this fashonable healthy food has been eaten for century as a traditional dish. The Panzanella is also related with the "pappa al pomodoro", a tomato & bread soup very similar to the delicious Salmorejo Cordobes from Spain.

That said, the history of the Panzanella is quite large, and even if it's a simple dish, it has a lots of centuries on its shoulders. For instance, we find the Panzanella mentioned also in a XIV century masterpiece of European literature by Giovanni Boccaccio: the Decameron, which is believed to have inspired nothing less than Geoffrey Chaucers' "The Canterbury Tales", an all-time classic of english literature. You can find mentioned the Panzanella in the Decameron of Boccaccio in the Novel VII, day VIII, as a "washed bread", that is, wet.

Many others wrote about this delicious kind of salad, for instance an Old Master artist like the florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino, a true heavyweight of the Renaissance art. He during the 1500s was one of the main exponent of the so-called Manierismo, and he alternated his duty as a painter at the court of the Medicis with poetry, and he dedicated some beautiful verses to the Panzanella, that we write down here (in italian):

"chi vuol trapassar sopra le stelle di melodia v’aggiunga olio e aceto en’tinga il pane e mangi a crepapelle. Una insalata di cipolla trita colla porcellana e cetriuoli vince ogni altro piacer di questa vita, considerate un po’ s’aggiungessi bassilico e ruchetta."

"Those who wants to reach the melody of the stars above, add the olive oil and vinegar to the wet bread and gorge yourself with it. A salad made with minced onions and cucumbers is the highest pleasure in life, and think what would happen if to this salad I add also basil and arugula..."

It's worth to notice that in the Bronzino's lyrics there are no mentions of the tomato, and this is due to the fact that the tomato arrived in Europe just after the discover of America by Cristopher Columbus (thanks God for letting us living in the era of the tomatoes! What would be of us otherwise?)

Notice that Bronzino used the word "ruchetta", that how is called the arugula in many northern italian dialects, that later on become "ruquette" and then the standard british "rocket salad". Here is an interesting article of "Bon Appetit magazine" about the origin of the names of rocket salad/arugula.

The name "panzanella" maybe derivates to the word "panzana" that means something weak, soft, mushy, false, untrustworthy like a lie, for instance the word "panzana" in italian today means "hoax"
In this case, anyway, is not an hoax, the term refers to the mushy soft wet bread

Recipe: (for some 5 people)

- 300 or 400 gr. aprox. of Tuscan hard bread*
- 4 or 5 of ripen tomatoes
- 1 onion (in our case a red onion)
- 2 mozzarellas
- Basil
- Salt
- Extra virgin Olive oil
- White wine vinegar

*Tuscan hard bread: We can use almost every kind of rustic large loaf of bread. The main feature of the Tuscan bread is the complete lack of salt, and it's used mainly for recipes like the traditional bruschettas or minestrones, where the salty element is given by the topping or the other ingredients. Is frequently known as "pane sciocco", that is "fool bread", dumb, because of its unsalty, insipid taste.

Preparation:

1- Cut the bread into slices, we need hard, stale bread, not chewy bread from the day before. Put the slices of bread in a bowl with some water. It's not necessary to cover the bread with the water, just let it hydrate little by little, during a few minutes.

2- While hydrating the bread, mince all the ingredients. Many wet the onions with cold water, in order to let it lose its stinging flavour, but we love this trademark feature of the red onions. Of course, you can use also white or golden onions, the one you love best. Cut into slices also the tomatoes and the mozzarella.

3- Drain the bread and crumble it with hands, then add it all to the bowl. The basil and the mozzarella are excellent too if tore apart with hands, y'know, in the kitchen everything's better if made with hands! Add the salt to taste, and dress it with olive oil and vinegar (better if it's not the red wine vinegar, because otherwise it will colour the bread). Enjoy it!

It's the kind of salad just perfect for picnics, as a side dish for some protein meal, to put into a tupperware and bring it to the shore. And as we mentioned before, it's not just for the Summer, the panzanella can be a really complete food, very easy and quick to prepare during our everyday working routine.

From the Caprese salad to Futurismo

Even if the calendar tells us that the Fall is just around the corner, no one can keep us from lengthen the summer in our kitchens, and for this reason we bring you an all time italian classic summer recipe: the caprese salad!

The Caprese salad is a fresh dish that's filled with mediterranean taste and light, a simple and genial recipe that's based upon a column of italian gastronomy: a dish is a good dish when you can't add or quit a single ingredient without altering the global aequilibrium. Said in another word: elegance, pure elegance. Few ingredients, but perfectly balances and choosen. It is said that nothing is more complex to obtain than simplicity, and it's really true. Simplest things may result obvious to us, because they've been created to stay with us forever with no stress at all. Simplest things are simply impossible to improve.

The history of the Insalata Caprese is not well known, but what's sure is that it appears for the first time in a 1920 menù at the Capri island's "Quisisana hotel".
It may be interesting to notice that the caprese in that occasion was a part of a so called "futurista dinner", that is a dinner based upon the principia of the artistical movement of the Futurismo. Beside painting, sculptures, etc.*, the Futurismo and its leading poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, wanted a radical reform of the traditional cuisine. Marinetti established the rules of the game in his "Manifesto della cucina futurista".

View from Monte Solaro at Capri 

In his manifesto, Marinetti called for a complete erase of the pasta from the traditional cuisine, and its substitution with modern, aerodynamical, fluid and concentrated dishes. "simultaneous and shimmering bites", as Marinetti said: in the Twenties, the Futuristi already saw the molecular cuisine and Ferran Adrià's "El Bulli". The Futuristi loved the fresh and light colours, that they thought to be perfect for the modern way of life. And the very italian colours of the Caprese dish were very interesting for the nationalist european society of the Twenties.

There are other version of the birth of the caprese salad, of course. For instance, it is said that after the World War II, a mason that worked in the charming Napolitan island loved to bring the "tricolore", or the Italian flag, at work in the panini sandwich he used to eat. His creation had such a success that was imitated by the restaurants of the island, and from there the international jet set started to know the caprese salad. For instance, it is said that in the Fifties, the King Farouk loved a panini sandwich filled with mozzarella, tomato and basil.

But let's talk about the recipe of the Caprese salad! Can't be any easier!

Ingredients:

- Tomato
- Fresh mozzarella
- Basil

We love our Caprese with the mozzarella di Bufala, but many sources says that the original version of the salad should be done with a fresh cow mozzarella. The original recipe should be done without adding olive on it, but we can't help but pouring a drizzle of olive oil on our Caprese! You can give your own touch to your salad adding black greek olives, different kinds of tomatoes and so on. You can use also the Modena balsamic vinegar to dress it (but be careful to choose the original one!).

Preparation:

For the classic version of this salad, you should cut the tomatoes and the fresh mozzarella in slicesand put them in a dish, a slice of tomato and a slice of mozzarella and so on, and add basil to taste.

You can have your own Caprese in a thousand of different version! Use your own imagination! Here we bring you some ideas, like for instance a Caprese sandwich, Caprese skewer, Caprese hasselback, Caprese panini and so on!

Buon appetito!

_____________________________________________________________

Note:

For those interested in the artistical movement called Futurismo, keep reading! (We know that this is a cuisine blog, but you know...we can't help but talking about art! We're totally artoholic!) 

* We wanted to share with you some notion about the Futurismo, a most important artistical avant garde of the early XX century. Infact, it was one of the first anti-traditional artistical movements in the Old Continent. They literally
started a frontal assault against tradition.

Giacomo Balla, "La costellazione del Genio", 1918,
Museo del 900, Milan

The Futurismo created a large number of artistical masterpieces by artists like Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni. The last one was the creator of the Futurismo's most iconic work, represented today in the 20 eurocent coins. If you've been to Europe, you've had an artistical masterpiece in your pocket and you didn't know! The Futurismo was literally determinant in the aesthetics and in the pop culture of the XX century. We can see a lot of work of the Futurismo at the Milan's Museo del Novecento or at New York's Moma or 
- what else?- at the Met!

Umberto Boccioni, "Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio", 1913, Museo del 900, Milán

Greetings and have a great start of Fall! 

Cheese filled garlic dough ball recipe

Italians and Garlic, an history of love and...hate! This might be curious to hear to a northern american, but it is true. The garlic, an ingredient incredibly ancient and super healthy, is almost as loved in some region as it is hated in many others. Generally speaking, but with huge exceptions like Piedmont and Tuscany, in the central and overall in northern Italy is not so used. In Lombardy we have a paradoxical situation where is almost...well...how can I express it...is tolerated, let's say it in this way. In the southern Italy is incredibly loved and used in excellent recipes both for its flavour and its healthy properties. This is for sure an iconic indicator of how variegated Italy is in terms of both culture and traditions: what is beloved somewhere is not so well received in another. We can say that literally many Italies exists, unified in its charming and deeply humanistic culture. This will result self-evident to everyone who actually throughout the italian geography from north to south, and this is undoubtly one of the most charming feature of the Boot.

As for the use of the garlic and many other things, southern Italy may be considered more similar to Spain than to northern Italy. The emigration from the southern Italy to north America exported the culture of the garlic, and this is the reason that generated the equation: "italian cuisine equals garlic", generalizing a regional product as if it was used by the whole country with the same love.

Garlic cloves

But how was created garlic bread? It is considered to be an "americanized" version of an ancient "poor" traditional dish, the bruschetta, now a Tuscan typical antipasto. The bruschetta was consumed already in the roman era, and was made with old bread rubbed with garlic and drizzled with strong olive oil. Even if now the bruschetta is a gourmet antipasto to be eaten with the best italian extra vergin olive oil, originally it was rubbed with garlic and covered with strong oil in order to let the bread last longer in the poor cuisine of the ancient times.
European restaurants take the garlic bread back from the italo-american cuisine, and today it may be find in lots of Italian-inspired restaurants almost everywhere...north of the Alps. The main difference between the italo-american garlic bread and the bruschetta it's what is considered to be the main ingredient in terms of flavour: in garlic bread is the garlic and in the bruschetta is the olive oil, making it essential to be made with a very good olive oil. We have documents of menus in US with garlic bread in it as old as the second half of the Forties.

Recipe:

We wanted to give our own touch to the garlic bread, taking a little bit here and a little bit there, using instead of the usual bread the pizza dough and using a different sauce, inspired in the huge variety of canarian sauces known as "mojo", that will be sometime soon the topic of our post.

For this recipe you can use the typical pizza dough you usually use, the one you prefer best, every kind of pizza dough works for what we suggest you here. We usually use a very thin kind of pizza dough that we've mentioned in a previous post (if you want to read it, click here), because it's easy and quick to prepare.

It is the perfect recipe for a starter or an antipasto, it's better to eat it still warm, but cold are super tasty as well ;).
We can prepare the pizza dough and the garlic dough balls many days before our guests come to our house, since the rest of the preparation is pretty simple. Success is granted!

Ingredients:

• 1 pizza dough (recipe here)
• 3 garlic cloves (to taste)
• 30 g. of parsley
• 80 -100 ml of olive oil (better if it's extra virgin)
• Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (Always the original! To taste, but not less than 25-30 grams)
• Mozzarella filante cheese or any melting stringy cheese
• salt and black pepper to taste

Preparation:

1- With the pizza dough we make some little balls, trying to make them kinda uniform, we will fill them with the kind of cheese we've chosen. We put them in an oven tray separated each one from anothen, since they'll grow a little bit. We bake them in a preheated oven at 180º C for some 15 minutes or until we see them becoming golden brown.

Garlic dough balls ready for the oven!

2- While we're baking our garlic dough balls, we prepare our sauce (or "quasi mojo" he he!), very fast and easy to do. We can use a food processor, a mixer, a Thermomix...whatever you want, and here resides maybe the biggest difference between the mojo canario and this sauce, since the first one is traditionally made by hand and clearly has not cheese in it. Add all the ingredients of the sauce (garlic, parsley, olive oil, salt, pepper and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese) and process them together until you obtain a nice sauce.

...and garlic dough balls ready to be eaten in 3, 2, 1...

3- When our garlic dough balls are ready, we take them off of the oven and (when they're still hot) we immediately put them in a bowl together with the sauce. We stir them all together well in order to let all of the dough balls to wet well into the sauce and get all of the flavour. We can put a little bit more of grated cheese above the dough balls and...eat them as quick as you can, they literally will disappear in a matter of seconds!

The interior of our garlic dough ball...nom nom!

Buon appetito!

AnGie

Spearmint, coconut and lemon cake

Today we bring you one of those cakes that comes off almost by chance, and the result...well, you keep the recipe you've invented forever and ever! 
I absolutely love aromatic and medicinal herbs, I use them so much, and lately I have many of them planted everywhere around my house he he he! So I thought: why don't we use them in sweets too?


This cake is made with spearmint, which gave to the cake a fresh and different touch.
it's made with olive oil instead of butter too, which makes it lightier too, without losing the moisture of this sweet. I suggest you to try it!



Ingredients:

• 1 coconut yogurt (or a natural one)
• 125 ml. of olive oil
• 250 of brown sugar
• 4eggs
• 125 ml of buttermilk*
• 450 g. of all purpose flour
• 1 lemon (juice and zest too)
• 1 pinch of salt
• spearmint (some 20 leaves)
• 80 g. of grated coconut
• 15 g. of baking powder

* You can buy the buttermilk, but I tend to prepare it at home. Some 15 minutes before you start doing your cake, prepare in a mug the needed quantity of milk, and add the juice of an half of a lemon. Let it rest enough time, and you'll see a sort of sour milk: do not worry, it's good like that! Stir it and use it as it is. This ingredient add will help your cakes to be super moist.

Preparation:

1- In a bowl, put the eggs (both the yolk and the egg white) and the sugar. Mix it well at medium speed.

2- We add to the mix of the eggs the olive oil, the lemon juice and the yogurt. Mix it well.

3- Mince finely the spearmint with a knife and toss it into our mix, together with the lemon zest.

4- In another bowl, put some flour, the yeast and the salt. Sift it all and put it aside.

5- We add our mix of flour little by little, mixing it well, after that we pour some buttermilk and then return to flour. Repeat the operation. We want to add 1/3 of our flour, then 1/3 of our buttermilk, and go on like this until there's no flour and buttermilk left.

6- Grease the mould, add the mix and pop it into the preheated oven at 180°C, for about 45 to 50 minutes. Be careful to put the mould in the middle rack of the oven, and if it starts to becoming golden brown the surface but the interior is still not baked, cover the surface with an aluminium foil or a baking sheet.

7- When it is baked, we take it off its mould and we let it cool completely over a rack, and after that we sprinkle with icing sugar to decorate it.

It is quite perfect to be eaten with a good ol' cup of tea, so...please, prepare the tea, that we'll bring the cake! ;)

Greetings!

AnGie

Mediterranean flavoured bread

2014 is the International Year of the Mediterranean Diet, so good and healthy. To celebrate this fact we bring you a bread really Mediterranean, and I tell you this because of his ingredients: tomato, cheese and onion with that golden touch of the Olive Oil. Can there be a more mediterranean thing than bread? Or olive oil?

For this kind of bread, I found my inspiration in the italian bread called "filone". It's and everyday bread, and it just do not need any addings and makes you addict to it! In the unlikely event of not eating it all right away, in the following days you can open it and warm it or toast it, you'll just need a drizzle of olive oil, and it will be just espectacular! 
This bread do not need the sourdough, and so it's perfect for those who are beginners in the art of bread. It's simple and fast, try it! Here in our blog we absolutely loves breads, and if you want another recipe from ours, here you are!


Ingredients:

For the first dough: 

• 15 g.of brewer's yeast
• 250 ml of warm water
• 375 g. of flour

For the main dough:

• 300 g. of flour
• 150 ml.of warm water
• 15 g. of brewer's yeast
• 2 spoonful of brown sugar
•  50 g. of Grana Padano cheese
• 1 big onion
• 15 sundried tomatoes
• 60 g of extra vergin olive oil
• 1 spoonful of salt
• more flour to work with the dough

Preparation: 

1º- We prepare the first dough, and to do so, in a bowl we add some warm water and we put in there the yeast. Add the flour and stir ithoroughly until we'll have a ball. Cover it with a plastic wrap or a kitchen towel and let it rest for about 30 minutes.

2º- We peel and cut à là brunoise our onion, that is in little dices. Fry it in a heated pan and put it aside.

The final dough ready for the last rest

3º- In a bowl, put the water and add the yeast and the sugar, stir to dissolve it. Add the oil, the flour, the salt, the shredded cheese, and the minced tomatoes. Add to our first dough, that now is a ball. Knead the dough in a surface covered with flour until it's completely uniform. If the dough is too sticky, just add some more flour. You can do this step with a kitchen robot or a mixer, of course! When it is uniform, we put the dough into a bowl and we cover it with a plastic wrap, and let it rest for other 30 minutes.

With the hands in the dough...what a joy!

4º- When you're done with this step, prepare and put some flour on a kitchen towel. Divide the dough into cylinders of the size you want and put them above the towel, each cylinder separated by a folding on the towel like you see in the picture, so that the breads won't stick to each other. Let it rest for other 30 minutes. 

5º- AftePasado er this time, we can see our breads have grown a little bit. With a well sharped knife, do some cuttings on the surface of the breads.

6º- Bake them in a preheated oven at 180° C with no fan for 20-25 minutes.

Enjoy the recipe and keep eating mediterranean bread!

Saludos

AnGie

Pizza! History and recipe

Welcome to Spring! To celebrate the return of the beautiful season, we bring you a recipe of an all-time classic of italian cuisine, the world renowned italian pizza!

Beside the fact that we don't know when and where the modern pizza was born, we know that its roots are extremely old and fascinating. The first kind of Pizza as we all know it is the Pizza Margherita, born in 1899 by the hands of a chef named Esposito, in occasion of a visit to the city of Naples of Margherita of Savoy, queen of Italy. To honour the royal visit, the chef created a pizza using the iconic colours of the italian flag: red because of the tomato, white for the mozzarella fresh cheese and the green using the basil. 

It might be interesting to know the history of this universal yet so regional dish. The word "pizza" is to be found for the first time in history describing a kind of bread in the year 997 a.C., in a document discovered in the city of Gaeta, between Rome and Naples. During the Renaissance, the word "pizza" started to define a sort of flat, round bread, as we can see in documents found in Naples in XVI century. But still, we have to remeber that we have to wait Cristopher Columbus' discover of America for the pizza to have the excellent tomato sauce over it. Pizza started to get red only after XVII century, creating one of the most successful gastronomical marriages in the history of Mankind, Beside the legend of the pizza being invented to honour a queen, we have also information of recipe books describing a completely modern kind of pizza already in year 1830. 

For example, Alexandre Dumas father, the creator of the Four Mosqueteers, which was one of the many, many frenchmen in love with Naples, enthusiastically described the varieties of pizza he found in Naples years before the visit of the queen Margherita. In a 1866 book, written by Francesco de Bouchard, we find described the three main varieties of Pizza we can still find nowadays: the Margherita, the Marinara and the Calzone.

What we find most strange of all those legends is that...there were times where the a dish as universal as Pizza wasn't already been invented! Today we can find just so many varieties of pizza beyond the Naples' "Originale and verace", for example Genoa, Rome and Sicily (with the excellent streetfood called "sfinciune") are definately worth a mention. It is interesting to notice that today in defence of the quintessential dish of the mediterrean cuisine it has been developed a label to protect the original dish against the awful imitation and not so mediterrean processed pizzas you find in supermarkets, something more linked with the fast food doctrine than it is with the champion of the Slow Food movement as a real neapolitan Pizza without a doubt is. Italy protects the label of Pizza Napoletana verace since year 1984, and European Union since 2010. Next step is to protect this excellence also in the United States.

But let us get back to the recipe!

We use to eat lots of home made pizza with the original ingredients and we've tried lots of pizza everywhere in Italy, everywhere there are different recipes, different doughs, different tricks...let's say we have a considerable to-do list when it comes to talk about pizzas! We'll talk about each one of them in different post you'll find here, in our blog! 

Today for example we'll bring you a very fast kind of dough that permits you to obtain excellent results if you like crusty and thin pizzas. Generally those recipes are a little bit by eye, but this time I measured all the ingredients to help you with the task. 

 Ingredients: 

Italian dry yeast from Paneangeli

• 460 g. flour ( 4 cup aprox.)
• 10 g. or 2 tsp of fine salt
• 5 g. or a spoonful of sugar 
• 30 g. olive oil
• 310 g. of water
• 1 packet of dry yeast 

 Procedure: 

-Start with pouring in a bowl some water, then warm it up for example putting it in an microwave oven, just for a moment. Once the water is warm, put the yeast over it, and let it activate for some 3 minutes. I prefer to use the italian yeast from Paneangeli, but in Spain I also use the one from Maizena, or elsewhere...well use your own local yeast used by bakers. 

The yeast activating

- In another bowl, add the rest of the ingredients and finally the water with the activated yeast. Put it all together and mix the dough. For this step, you can use a dough mixer, a Thermomix or what you have in your house. When all the ingredients are well mixed together, stir them some 10 minutes if you use a food mixer (for the Thermomix, use spike speed, for Kitchen Aid, use speed 2) or until the dough is completely smooth and with no imperfections. Keep in mind that the longer you knead the dough, the better it would be! 

The dough kneading

-Once the dough is mixed, we pass our dough in a surface covered with some flour, shape it as a ball and we cut it in half or we cut as many pieces as the pizzas we desire to obtain. With those quantities you can get three round pizza (European size), or a single big baking tray square pizza and a mid sized one, you choose! 

-let the dough rest in a bowl with the surface covered with olive oil in order to not let it stick to the bowl, and beside that we brush some oil also above the dough in order not to create a sort of crust. We do not need a lot of oil, just a little to create a protection. We cover the bowl with plastic wrap and we let it rest. You can let it rest any longer, but the ideal would be around one or two hours. if you have a warm place in your house, put there the dough. In summertime the dough rest time are generally shorter, unless you live in Canada he he he! You can also put your bowl in a (turned off) oven. Our doughs will grow, but don't worry, they will not grow so much they will fall out of the bowl! 

 

 -After an hour or two, in a surface covered with some flour put one of the doughs. Just turn the bowl upside down, the dough will fall naturally, so that the lower part will be the top of our pizza. My secret is to use for P.A.N. flour or cornstarch instead of the normal flour in order to dry out the dough and even a little bit toasted. Just put it on the upper part, remember this dough is not to be turned upside down...and you can't even knead the dough after the dough rest. Take the dough off the bowl and start stretching the dough from above, put you fingers inside the dough and open them, whilst turning the dough like it was a steering wheel. To me this technique it works the best, try it and you'll tell me! This dough it stretches very fast and easy, be delicate in this phase because the dough will be extremely thin in a matter of seconds, and you will not even need a rollin pin, everything with hands, old school!

Stretching the dough

-As for the toppings, you decide! It's a matter of taste and what our guests like best. But remember that being this a very thin dough I would not put just too many ingredients over it, in order to be sure that it will not eventually break. Anyway, if you are a whole-lotta-ingredients lover, we can cook a little bit the dough with tomato sauce and cheese first, then open the oven and put the rest of the ingredients. In this way the base will hold everything you put over your pizza. 

ingredients

For instance, I decided to have my pizza with tuna, champignon mushrooms, onion and a little bit of Gorgonzola cheese, beside, of course, of the mozzarella fresh cheese. I put every ingredients right from the start, with the exception of the champignon mushrooms, because the latter were fresh and I did not want them to overcook them. The order with the topping is always the same: tomato sauce first, then mozzarella and after that all the rest. In my case I use a kind of mozzarella made specifically for pizzas, or "mozzarella filante", and fresh mozzarella, or "mozzarella fiordilatte". 

Mozzarella and Gorgonzola cheeses

-Preheat the oven at 180° celsius with no fan and we'll have our own home made tasty, thin and crispy pizza! But while in the oven, always keep an eye on it, because every oven is a world of its own...and next step, the most important of all...eat you pizza right where you are!

The true thin and crispy pizza

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Spicy tomato sauce: 

Sometimes I add to my pizzas another tasty touch with an home made spicy tomato sauce. To do so, I add to the tomato sauce garlic powder (not fresh garlic, you don't want to cook it fresh, otherwise it would taste badly), oregano, dark pepper and salt. Stir the mix and use it as the base for our pizzas. It will just taste soo good! 

Note: We can preserve our Gorgonzola in the fridge if we cut it in little pieces and we cover it with oilve oil. In this way it will be ready for whatever gastronomical creation! 

Greetings and enjoy your pizza! 

 Angie 

Our Bowl learned how to make a proper pizza from the masters