Mastering pizza-making: 5 tips from the 'world's best pizza maker'
Creating the perfect pizza involves a combination of choosing quality ingredients, mastering the dough, and ensuring proper baking. However, people have strong opinions and preferences when it comes to how it should be made. To settle it all, Michele Pascarella who was crowned the best pizza chef at the World 50 Top Pizza Awards shared his tips to make the perfect pizza.
Who is Michele Pascarella?
Before getting to Pascarella's tips, let's get to know about him. He was born in Caserta, near Naples in Italy, which is known as the home of pizzas. His pizza-making passion began at 11, and he's now a celebrated chef and restaurant owner in London. Pascarella has earned numerous accolades, with the most recent one being the Pizza Maker of the Year in 2023.
Keep it fresh
The first and foremost tip in the list is to keep the pizza fresh, always. In a conversation with media outlet NPR, Pascarella says that he rotates the menu at his restaurant Napoli on the Road throughout the year. He makes pizzas with seasonal ingredients. According to him, "When you use seasonal ingredients, you pay less money."
Being simple is the key
There are countless varieties of pizza available across the world. However, Pascarella's mantra is to keep it simple. He believes that the best pizzas have fewer ingredients. By making pizza with fewer ingredients, one will "learn to appreciate the simple ingredients." According to him, the most important skill is knowing how to balance the ingredients on the pizza well.
Your process can be different from the pizza shops
Pascarella emphasizes the fact that you need not follow the same process as cafeterias or restaurants to bake a pizza at home. This allows more flexibility, for example, you can add more water to the dough than is normally done if you do not have pizza-making equipment. "If you use 1 kg flour, it's better to use 700g of water," he stated.
Avoid adding fruits
The addition of pineapple to pizza has been a debatable topic. While some enjoy pineapple on pizza, others find it weird. The chef clarifies it once and for all. Pineapples are not to be added to pizzas. He is not a fan of that combination. Not just pineapples, Pascarella's advice is to not add any fruits to pizzas.
Keep learning
Pascarella wants everyone to keep learning. According to him, one can never learn enough from the field of making pizza. "I believe there is no perfection in making pizza and I think that's the beauty about this job because it's an artisan work," he told DailyMail. Pascarella says that his goal is to keep making new pizzas every day.
