The story goes that in 1889, a pastry specialist named Rafael Esposito visited the peculiar city of Naples, Italy and needed to appreciate the royal families and the new unification of the place. So he decided to make a pizza for Lord Umberto I and the sovereign Margherita of Savoy in the colors of the Italian flag - tomatoes for red, mozzarella for white and basil leaves for green.
Hundreds of years after the fact, this UNESCO-listed dish is among the most sought-after types of pizza, "soft and pliable like a basset hound's ears" and as delicious as it seems to be overwhelming. What's more, it was this set of experiences that An kith Suresh, a chef from Navi Mumbai, ended up infatuated with while working at a 5-star property during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown.
Having spent a substantial part of his life in the food industry, An kith was no novice at cooking, but he never set eyes on pizza. "The specialty of pizza making and the creativity fascinated me. And that's just the beginning, so when I watched the Neapolitan pizza making records. I understood that the pizza culture in India is completely different from the one that exists abroad," he says.
This recognition was understood with the thought – “Imagine a scenario where we should make these Neapolitan pizzas in Mumbai.” He sent a distraught Pepperoni with his partner Priyanka Mandala to serve legitimate Neapolitan pizzas and abdicated their duty to take care of it.
Section of old Italy
The moment An kith originally read about the pizzas, he decided to try to reproduce a less difficult rendition himself. The moment he told his companions, the reaction was consistent - "You should start your own pizza adventure! Priyanka, who was working at the inn at the time, was so taken with the taste that she asked if they could start their own pizzeria.
The pair began researching rentals and shops in hopes of establishing their pizza home base. "If you want to make a true Neapolitan-style pizza, you want a wood-fired broiler because the temperatures go up to 400 degrees Celsius. We expected to keep that in mind when we were looking at the premises," An kith makes sense. “We didn't need a regular coffee shop where the hosts are in a different space than the coffee shops.
We needed to create a 'home base' where we could visit with our visitors while they were waiting for their orders and where they could watch the pizza being made,” says An kith. Making pizza interesting, it was a disaster. The pizza was flat, the flour wasn't right... We focused on this in light of the fact that we found employment elsewhere, had no income, and put every spare fund we had into this effort.
So we spent the next five months working out our mistakes, watching crappy tapes, researching articles about this style of pizza, and finally we got the chance to get things right. Besides that, An kith explains the most direct challenge, saying it was "the absence of Italian flour."
"We employed a merchant to track down the right wheat and get the ratio that would be good for the pizza. Then we addressed the atmosphere of the pizza, as the edges of a Neapolitan-style pizza should be puffy, says An kith. As the months progressed, I understood pizza making on a logical level.
Here you can capture your piece of Italy.
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