Pizza perfect

Here is an idea for the perfect pizza.

Pizza completes against open toasted sandwiches. Food on top. Carbs on the bottom. Some fat in the middle to make the carbs palatable. Lets start with the carbohydrate base.

The base is bread. Flour from wheat because it is cheap easy carbs to feed a family. You might add some fat in the form of eggs or milk or olive oil or a cheap processed junk oil (palm oil/cottonseed/etc).

The main advantage of eggs is the cheap protein. You can feed old lettuce leaves to chooks and get eggs. Eggs are good for pasta because they make the pasta flexible when wet. Eggs make pizza bases too flexible which makes it difficult to eat a slice by hand.

A better use of an egg is to spread the contents as a thin layer over a pizza instead of a top layer of cheese. You buy very expensive slices of Italian dead pig meat, place them on the top of the pizza to crisp up, then realise they are doing exactly what regular bacon does. Why not toss on an egg to go with the bacon. Call the egg an uovo.

A fourth generation Italian pizza maker showed me how to add a tiny amount of olive oil to stop the pizza bases drying out while waiting to be used. No cling wrap needed.

You could add yeast to make the dough rise into a soft fluffy full thickness base, the way a third generation Italian pizza maker showed me when explaining genuine traditional pizza from his family home town. Baking soda and equivalents do not work as the base is not baked in a way that would release the carbon dioxide from the rising agent. The current corporate manufacturing fashion is for thin bases to save time.

Good pizza bases taste better when you use real wheat, wholegrain flour instead of that awful white paste stuff. The only place I found wholemeal pizza is way outside Sydney. In an attempt to add the fibre and flavour you get from wholemeal, one company adds cauliflower but then they need a whole stack of preservatives.

I simplify everything by using wholemeal Lebanese style bread. AU$4 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) compared to from $8 up to $25 for less enjoyable leathery but politically correct pizza bases, where, in this case, the "correctness" is the result of corporations heavily marketing something that is cheaper for them to make.

As a fashion item, ready made pizza bases have to be thin, the same as Apple phones and anorexic clothes models. Commercial pizza bases also share something with bikinis, the more you pay, the less you get.

A very successful traditional pizza maker taught me to put the pizza base in the oven for two minutes before applying toppings. This crisps up proper soft bases and works a treat on Lebanese style bread. If you have a half oven with both top and bottom grill elements, switch the oven to 180° Celsius, wait for the warm up to finish, then pop in a round of wholemeal Lebanese bread for 2 minutes.

Our oven has both half and full size sections. A single pizza needs only the half height oven. Some half height ovens do not have full elements top and bottom, something I looked for when choosing the oven. Our oven also indicates when the oven is at full temperature. The oven also has a timer but I use the timer on my phone so I can walk around while cooking. For example, walking outside to harvest fresh oregano.

Italy

Pizza is described as Italian while similar foods have other names in other countries. The pizza most commonly sold in Australia by the big companies is an American invention. To get real pizza in Australia, you have to visit family owned shops in the suburbs.

In Italy, every district has different pizza and they often claim it is the original pizza. Some of the pizza makers in Australia talk about their long family tradition of making pizza. One common complaint is the number of customers complaining when served a traditional pizza instead of whatever is pushed into fashion by the American media or the social media influencers paid to push the corporate products.

Have you consumed a traditional Cornish pasty? The Italian pizza equivalent is called a calzone and variations have other names. The English pasty existed a 1000 years before the first recorded mention of pizza.

Australian pie? You might see some of us at the beach eating a pie one handed. Hand sized calzone are sold in Italy for exactly the same style of eating, except for the beach due to the lack of endless beaches.

Italian pizza tends to use pork for everything while cooler climates use beef. Italian fruit (tomato) and vegetables would be summer crops in England while hot roast food, like pies and pasties, tend to be winter food. There are parallels between the north of Italy and the south of England.

The Italian flag is green, white, and red with a recent official document defining the colours as bright grass green, milky white, and tomato red.

Making pizza with these colours is easy when you like tomatoes. To make your wholemeal base the right white, sprinkle a little empty carb milled white flour on the base just before use.

Heaps of green items qualify, all the green fruit including avocado, capsicum, chill, and zucchini, plus herbs, some apples and pears with their skin side up, green olives and celery leaves.

Tomato red assumes the tomatoes are vine ripened. The commercial tomatoes are picked while still white or, gasp!, way back at the green stage then change to red in the truck on the way to the shop. The change in the truck creates the right colour but not a ripe flavour because the tomato is still back at the vegetable formation stage, not at the ripe fruit stage.

Australia

You can find any food on a pizza in Australia so long as you avoid the big brands, anything franchised or American. Pick your favourite food. Avocado. Prawns. Mango. There is a pizza made with that ingredient as the main feature or as a sauce. Salmon with mango and chilli. Yum.

You have to shop around. Some places feature the best in their less busy nights when they can take the time to make something different. There was one pizza place I used to visit where wholemeal was available only on Thursday nights.