It’s fair to say that the humble pizza has come a long way since its inception (in the form that we know it) in southern Italy in the 18th/19th century.
So, what is a pizza? In essence, it’s a baked flatbread with savoury toppings, usually including cheese and tomatoes. Couldn’t be easier to throw one together, right? Well there’s pizza…and then there’s PIZZA. For something that – let’s be honest – is less complicated to make than some dishes, it is notable how easy it also appears to be to get it wrong! Most of us have at some stage taken a bite of a pizza that was created with a distinct lack of love…made with poor ingredients, under- or over-cooked, and usually overloaded with salt to compensate for a general lack of flavour. Unforgiveable!
Any chef worth their salt (pardon the pun) knows that the aroma of a well-crafted pizza, made with quality ingredients and cooked to perfection, will be hard for any hungry diner to resist. As with much Mediterranean cuisine, the beauty of the pizza is in its simplicity and it relies on the quality of its ingredients, creativity when selecting toppings, and preparation and cooking methods.
Only the freshest hand-made and hand-stretched dough for the base will do (don’t let anyone tell you differently!). The base is the foundation of the pizza, but not just structurally. A good pizza dough will make you want to eat it even without a topping. The texture must be just enough to give a pleasing, light crunch to the bite but still be able to absorb flavour and be folded to make eating easier (if eschewing cutlery, as is only proper!).
The topping is where ingenuity and artistic licence can come into play. There are many wild and wonderful varieties of pizza out there, but the ultimate topping is surely made from mouth-watering, locally sourced ingredients, generously layered on the base and baked to perfection…Which brings us to the real show stopper…the Gozney wood-fired pizza oven.
Cooking using a wood-fired oven not only cooks the pizza more quickly, retaining a great deal more of the available nutrients and taste, but also infuses the food with a unique, irresistible flavour that just can’t be replicated in an electric or gas oven. The Gozney oven takes pride of place in the Polurrian kitchen and our chefs know just how to get the best out of this wonderful machine to create works of art every day. The pizzas available on the lunch and dinner menu may change depending on how our chefs have been inspired, the current must-try toppings offered are detailed below.
We must genuinely give thanks to the generations of Italians that have tweaked and mastered the recipe for the humble pizza, but also be grateful that we don’t have to travel as far as Naples to sample the best..
