Pizza and bread take on the world

The Host Ambassadors return for this edition to give us into what is happening in the world of hospitality, at home and abroad, with a veritable abundance of food and drink ideas and ready to set fashions and trends worldwide, however short-lived.
One of the symbols of the Italian way of living is undoubtedly pizza, a timeless favourite everywhere. Alena Malnikovaexplains the evolution of the Russian version, which went from being a tasty, exotic fast food in the 1990s to a restaurant speciality, reaching its peak in 2000. At that time toppings would be high quality, including delicacies like truffle, black, caviar tuna and aged cheese, with restaurateurs trying everything to surprise guests (and raise prices). After the crisis of 2008 things slowed down: expensive toppings disappeared and pizza fell to the mid price range, which led onto another “re-birth” of pizza in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg “where you find Neapolitan pizza, Roman pizza and other versions called pinzza, pizzeta, pinsa and pizza-pie. Eating places range from fast-food outlets to restaurants  and there is a speak-easy pizza in the yards of the central district of Saint Petersburg. Well-known chefs have also begun to open pizzerias.”

Chennai Foody tells us how Bread, Pizza and Pasta work in India: a slow but gradual evolution, from some rather clumsy initial attempts to a version more similar to the original. Bread was still thought of as a “sick man’s food” as recently as the 1980s, but then it slowly but surely began to take its place in the daily diet and now comes in crispy western varieties, including Italian and French bread. South India’s first organised pizza was sold in the same bread chain in the 80s. The earliest pizzas had a standard six-inch flatbread base that was covered in ketchup, slices of bell pepper and mozzarella. Pizza with proper tomato sauce did not appear until about a decade later, thanks also to the arrival of home delivery services. Indians travelling around the world then began demanding more variety, and the first thin-crust pizzas appeared around 2010, when bakeries began springing up everywhere. Today, the influence of chefs from all over the world on Indian cuisine has helped popularise new types of pizza: diet pizzas that appeal to the health conscious and pizzas with rocket leaves, cucumbers and pesto sauce on a gluten-free pizza base, and even dessert pizzas with chocolate sauce and chocolate shavings. Pasta was and is the slowest to evolve, even though it made its entry long before pizza. Chefs are slowly trying to introduce the hitherto unknown concept of pasta (and rice) served al dente. While pizza is considered a fast food, pasta has taken its place as a main dish in Italian and ‘multi-cuisine’ restaurants.

Pizza has been around much longer in Brazil, a country that consumes nearly a million a day, with an annual turnover of around six billion euros, as Maria Capai of the popular Youtube channel DigaMaria tells us. It was first brought to Brazil in the 19th century by Italian immigrants and in the 1970s entrepreneur Sérgio Della Crocci created the all-you-can-eat pizza business model that is still popular in Brazil. “Waiters circulate the dining-room offering slices of pizza fresh from the oven, and the patrons eat what they can. Frequently this becomes a competition among friends.” Fixed, low prices (less than half the price of a pizza in a traditional pizzeria) has opened up the genre to a much wider audience. Now pizzerias compete with one another to find the most weird and wonderful toppings, with some offering anything up to 50 flavours, including Stroganoff, chicken heart, barbecue, banana with dulce de leche, cheesecake, passion fruit mousse, guacamole, hot dogs, French fries, hamburger, and anything else the imagination can summon. The new pizza is following trends that are establishing themselves in western countries: naturally fermented dough, wholemeal flour, and ingredients imported from Italy (cold cuts, cheeses, wild oregano). And the zero miles concept is also taking off, with ingredients supplied by small-scale local Brazilian producers (cheese from the Serra da Canastra area, for example).

Photo by Carissa Gan.