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! 

Potas en salsa Canary Islands recipe

The potas in salsa are a traditional Canary Island dish, coming from fishermen's traditions. As usual for this kind of dishes, every house or every neighborhood cook it differently, and I'm no exception, and I'm gonna tell you my family's recipe. 

The pota is a kind of mollusk (or a cephalopod, since it has no shell) very similar to squids, but it's cheaper and not so well known, but it's just perfect for many delighful dishes. The quality of the flesh may be somehow inferior in quality, when compared with the squids, but when it's well cooked, the result will be super tasty!

In Canary Islands potas are a very common dish, especially when cooked in sauce. I remember that even not so many years ago (and still today, once in a while) fishermen used to came in my neighborhood to sell potas, yelling "potasss! fresh potasss! very tasty potasss!", and everyone come off to buy the potas they'd fished the night before. That's one of its characteristics: it's fished by night and in high sea.

The potas can be cooked in the same ways as squids or calamari, which makes them great for the children (and not only!) since they've no bones. Nutritionally talking the pota it's very interesting too, since it has a lot of proteins and the fats it has are very healthy, and even if it has 190 mg. of cholesterol for every 100 grams of flesh, its flesh does not makes that the cholesterol in our blood grows as other meals, and it even helps lowering the levels of cholesterol because of the kind of fats it has. Potas are very rich in vitamines and minerals like phosphorus, potassium and magnesium. So, let's eat potas! You can eat all you want as long as you eat the right quantity!

This kind of recipe is very versatile, we can prepare more than we need and what we don't eat we can use in many others preparations! Take advantage of it, you'll save time and money. And beside that, it's a dish with easy and cheap ingredients. Less is more!

Ingredients:

• 1 y 1/2 kg aprox. of Potas.
• 1 red pepper
• 1 big onion
• 3 garlic finger
• 3 or 4 sauce tomato
• 1 spoonful of sweet pimenton (spanish paprika)
• 2 leaves of laurel
• 2 glasses of white wine ( aproximately)
• 5 or 6 spoonful of olive oil
• Salt (to taste)

Preparation:

1- Clean the potas and cut it as you prefer. I do not take off the skin when I cook it, because it adds a flavour to the sauce, but that's a matter of tastes.

2- Put a pot heating, add olive oil, minced onion, just like to make a soffritto. When it starts becoming somehow fried, we add the minced garlic, the minced pepper and we continue frying it. When it's halfway through the frying process, we add at last tomatoes cut into pieces and previously peeled.

3- When we're done with our fry, we add the potas, we stir them a little bit, we add the spanish paprika, known as pimenton, the laurel and the white wine. What I told you is an approximate quantity, and you maybe should add some more wine during the cooking.

   
Let cook our potas with the pot covered for about 50 minutes (we can check it out when the potas are ready seeing if the tentacles are soft, since they're the hardest part of the pota, if they're soft, then the pota is cooked). If we see that the flesh still isn't enough cooked but the sauce has dried a lot or it's sticking too much, we shall add some more wine, but never water! In this way, it will result a lot tastier. At this phase, we'll try the salt, and that because this kind of mollusks tend to be somehow salty, and in this way we avoid the risk of having a dish that's too much salted. If we thikn it needs it, then we'll add some sea salt, we'll stir it and we'll keep cooking it...chup chup chup!

4- When we think that our potas are ready, we'll let them cooking some minute more, so to let the sauce "stick" to the bottom of the pot, which will add a toasted touch that's very tasty, but be careful in this phase or you'll burn it!

The classical dish would be potas en salsa to be eaten with some delicious papas arrugadas, or boiled, or even mashed potatoes.

It's a delicious dish, and it's very versatile too, since we can use it to make rice with potas, and the rice with the tasty sauce it's just wow! We can also use it to fill empanadas and so on. Of course, we can freeze it and conserve it for any occasion.

I suggest you, for example, to eat the potas you've left with rice, the following day. Sometimes I just cook potas in salsa to eat it directly with the rice, nom nom!).

To do so, you just need to add to the same pot you've used to cook the potas left some rice and water (we'll add two times more water than rice, but that's depends on how dry your sauce is. If it's too liquid, we can low the quantity of water). We can add a little bit of curcuma too, to give it the typical yellow colour without using colorants, and ejoying the many benefit that curcuma gives us! We add salt to taste, we cook it and when the rice is ready...there you have it! Here you are a delicious and super tasty rice dish!

Of course we can add olives, peas or whatever we want to our rice, but the great thing here is to make something easy, with just some ingredients and obtain a delicious dish!

Enjoy your meal!

Angie

The History of Pasta

It's strange to think that once upon a time there were no pasta around us. It's just weird to think not to have spaghetti in our kitchens, that also something so universal has a story, has a birth. But, like tomatoes or potatoes, there has been an era before pasta! Pasta is a simple and genial creation that can be summed up like this: "different shape creates different taste". Is infact a nonsense to consider the pasta without his mate, the tomato sauce, or, in italian, the "sugo". The sauces can be more or less liquid, or dense, with meat or fish, they can have different textures and so on. And this is the reason for the thousand different types and shapes of pasta, to better keep the sauce and its flavour. Almost every single town has his own type, at least in the central and southern Italy. The marriage between the sauce and pasta has been developed throughout centuries, often using different local gastronomical excellences. According to a study, exists at least 563 different kinds of pasta.

The astonishing variety of Tagliatelle

One could argue that from the thousands kinds and different shapes of local pasta and its related "pasta chauvinism" begun the unique italian passion for the creativity and the design. And, by the way, how was created pasta?

In XIX century pasta became a luxury everyone could afford

According the legend, Marco Polo would have brought spaghetti from his legendary travel to China. But there are many doubts about this romantic narration. There are traces of pasta in Western World even before Marco Polo.
For example, Cicero used to eat a dish called Làgana. The Laganum was a sort of flat pasta very similar (also in the name) to our lasagna. It is interesting to notice that even two thousand years after Cicero, in some parts of Italy lasagna are still called lagana! Someone thinks that the whole Marco Polo legend was created by the Macaroni Journal (a italo-american review) to promote a dish yet not so well known in America.

But moving from legends to history, the actual origin of pasta is far from being
perfectly known. For example we know that the Greeks used to ate pasta, and so did the Etruscans. It is thought that pasta is a dish that grew together with the civilizations of Man along his expansion throughout Eurasia. When Man started to cultivate cereals and in the Neolithic started to create tools to mill cereals and then add water.

In the Middle Ages Italy, pasta was made like this

But beside this historical ride, we can say that the first traces of the pasta intended as we do in modern times is to be found around XIV century. During Middle Ages infact the pasta starts being boiled, and no longer put in an oven. There is a written document from that period, the "Liber de Coquina", that describes how to do the tagliatelle, from a neapolitan writer. In Italy we use to say "pastasciutta", rather than pasta, and that's because the dried pasta that we know today was created to last longer, probably by arabs that used it to eat when crossing the Sahara desert. In Sicily, that was then invaded by arabs, the water was abundant, and pasta started to be boiled rather than baked. The success was so great that many small shops started the commerce of this product. Other pasta shop then opened in the great portual cities, like Neaples and Genoa, then in Apulia and Tuscany and from there to the rest of Italy and the World.

Once that America was discovered and the tomato was brought here in Europe, pasta was ready to the final and most glorious step. In the previous centiries infact pasta was served with meat, meat sauces and cheeses (yes, the cheese always was there, we can immagine the Romans eating their pasta with Parmigianvs Reggianvs he he he!).

Around year 1500 were created in the small city of Gragnano, near Naples, the first artesanal "pastifici", or pasta ateliers, that back then were family-run. The Gragnano pasta, now legendary to gourmets, foodie, chefs and simple pasta lovers worldwide, is unique because of the particular climatological conditions of the small city, that's settled just above a valley, on the Monti Lattari mountains. In the baroque era, a crisis in the textile sector converted the vast majority of Gragnanese people to work in the "pastifici". Many watermills were then built to work the pasta in the valley below, more than thirty, that you can see still now in the so-called "Valle dei Mulini", or the "Mills valley".

Pasta left to dry in Via Roma, Gragnano's main street

After the Industrial Revolution, in the Eighteenth Century, were introduced in

today things have changed, but the taste is the same!

Gragnano modern and industrial machineries that lead to a bigger production and a smaller price, now finally everyone could afford some pasta from Gragnano! With the Unification of Italy in 1861, Gragnano started to export his delicious pasta also in the big cities of Central and Northern Italy, like Florence, Rome, Turin and Milan. To understand the importance of this small city, we can tell you that in year 1885 the railway that linked Gragnano and its pasta production with Naples (and so with the rest of Italy) was inaugurated by the King of Italy himself, Umberto I of Savoy and his wife, the famous Queen Margherita of Savoy (yes, the pizza Margherita was named after her).

Pasta di Gragnano is our favourite!

After a decline in the XX century, today Gragnano has rebirth as the "city of Pasta" par excellence. Today the city is the first pasta producer and pasta exporter in Italy. We can conclude or super tasty ride with the words of a myth of the neapolitan cultural world, a genial and ironical figure of the Italian Theater and Cinema: Antonio de Curtis, better known as Totò: "Se non è di Gragnano, desisti!", that can be translated as "If the pasta is not from Gragnano, give up!"

Greetings al dente!

Tom

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

Canary Islands Stuffed potatoes

Today we'll bring you a family recipe, a recipe from Canary Islands. This one is very versatile and can be adopted to a lot of versions, according everyone's taste, but these ones I'm gonna show you aren't the usual stuffed potatoes you can find anywhere. I have never find this kind of stuffed potatoes outside of the Canary Islands. In the many, many versions of stuffed potatoes you may find that potatoes are bread-crumbed , fried or gratinated, but this one's special. Other kinds of this recipe are from countries like Perù, Colombia or Cuba, between the others, and we'll talk about them in others occasions. Canary Islands have a really great culinary tradition with potatoes, or "papas", as they call them. We have seen for exemple the recipe about "papas arrugadas".

As for the quantity I'm gonna tell you, they are for three to four people (and their appetite!). Just vary the quantity according your guests.

Ingredients:

- Middle sized potatoes (dependig to how many guests, in my case 1,300 kg)

Pimentón y curcuma

- little zucchini (a Canary Island variety called "bubango")
- 200 g. of tomatoes
- 150 g. of red pepper
- Onions ( aprox. 200-250 g)
- 1/4 kg. of minced veal meat
- 1/2 cup of white wine
- 2 teeth of garlic
- olive oil
- 1 spoonful of pimenton (or sweet paprika)
- 1 pinch of curcuma (natural dye)
- 2 leaves of laurel
- thyme ( optional)
- Salt
- 1/2 liter of water
- 2 spoonful of flour (optional)

Preparation:

1º- Start with prepping the filling of our potatoes. In a pan, we put two spoonful of olive oil, we put it on heat and we add the half of the minced onion, some 100-150 grams and a garlic. Add fine salt to fasten the cooking, and when the onion start frying add the minced red pepper. Fry a little bit and add the minced tomatoes (some 100 grams). Add the meat to our pan and a little bit of salt too. When the meat is ready, take it out of the heat and put it aside.

 2º- Start preparing the potatoes, in my case I also used bubangoes, that are a Canary Island variety of the classical zucchini. You can in the same way have even stuffed peppers. Peel and wash the potatoes, then punch a hole inside the potatoes with a spoon or a parisien spoon scoop. In this step be careful not to break the potato, you don't want the hole to be big. Do not throw to the garbage the parts of the potatoes you've removed! You can do a spanish tortilla, fry or cook them, and you can put the parts of the zucchini you've removed inside your filling to add a lot of flavour...you can use it all!

3º- With the help of a coffee spoon, fill the potatoes or the veggies you've chosen. To close the hole to be sure our filling won't get out during the cooking time, you have many options. I usually put in a bowl 2 spoonful of flour and I keep adding some water and stirring, until I obtained a sort of thick cream. Then I put some of this thick cream above the hole, and then in a very hot pan I put the potato with the hole on the botto, so that it cook perfectly closing the hole. Another option is to use the removed parts of the potatoes to use them as a sort of cap, but with this option you shall be careful, because not many stuffed potatoes can cook at once, otherwise they would open and the filling will go out.

4º- In another pan we do another sautée, this time with onion, pepper, and the remaining tomato. Add the wine, the aromatich herbs, (laurel and thyme in my case), and put the potatoes with the hole side up. Add water, but not that much water to cover the potatoes. Add the quantity of salt you desire, cover the pan, put it on medium heat and let it cook...blub blub blub!
This step will last half an hour, but it  depends on the variety of potatoes you used, so give them an eye while cooking, and try once in a while if they are ready with a fork: if the fork enter the potato, the potatoes are ready. If potatoes are still not cooked, add water so that the sauce will not dry. Try the salt, you can adjust it while cooking.

resultado final de la cocción

5º- And now your stuffed potatoes are ready to eat! I prefer to eat it as a single course, given that here we have the veggies, the proteines and the hydrates. Eat it with a good wine and enjoy it! Sometimes I use veggies or champignon mushroom filling only, sautéed tuna, chicken or turkey or even with corned beef...you choose! I hope you'll like this dish that's thought for all the family and all year round!

Enjoy it!

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