At the London Pizza Festival, the making of a championship pie won't only be in the baking
A pizza's greatness is not predetermined by dough development and baking technique alone. The 2023 London Pizza Festival contenders prove that what goes on after-bake can make a champion, too
When seeking the right mix of pizzas and pizzerias for every London Pizza Festival lineup, I am guided by new dynamics shaping the indie pizza scene. The theme I envisioned for 2023 was marked by the sharp contrasts that emerged in post-lockdown London:
bendy vs crisp
thin vs puffy
round vs square
New York vs Naples
browned vs blackened
classic vs contemporary
London was no longer a Neapolitan-only pizza town.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Festival. As I traversed the London pizza landscape, seeking the best representatives for each side of the pizza wars, I was distracted by an important development shared by leaders of the opposing pizza tribes.
With much of best pizza now, the making was no longer in the baking alone: London had entered the age of the after-bake.
Not so long ago, toppings routinely applied to a pizza after baking were afterthoughts – last-second embellishments: A pizzaiolo drizzled olive oil over his finished pizza as if he were salting his scrambled eggs, not considering if any additional seasoning was necessary.
The great paradox of enhancements – in cooking and baking, as in art and design – is they don’t always enhance.
All five pizzerias participating at next month’s London Pizza Festival will be applying key ingredients after-bake. In his summer version of the classic Capricciosa pizza, Oi Vita’s Nicola Apicella applies only a base coat of cherry tomatoes to the stretched dough before depositing it in the oven. Only after it’s done cooking does he apply creative representations of a Capricciosa’s defining ingredients: proscuitto cotto, grilled artichokes, artichoke flakes, stracciatella, black olive powder.
If you watched Chef’s Table: Pizza on Netflix you’ll have observed how much importance influential pizza chefs like Gabriele Bonci, Chris Bianco and Franco Pepe give to the carefully selected ingredients they lovingly layer atop their pizzas after they’ve come out of the oven.
I recall Franco first inviting me into his kitchen ten years ago. As I watched him at work, he explained to me that, in order to retain the flavour, shape and texture of certain prized toppings, raw or pre-cooked, he held them back until the last moment. His signature Margherita Sbagliata, finished with painterly stripes of tomato and dots of basil, is arguably the most influential pizza of the 21st Century.
That isn’t to suggest post-production pizza completion is a new phenomenon. It is integral to two regional classics that will be featured at the London Pizza Festival: Roman pizza al taglio and the Detroit square. To complete the Classic Red Stripe he’s bringing to the Festival, Detroit Pizza London’s Ryan O’Flynn spoons two wide stripes of rich tomato sauce in the style of an American Marinara across surface of the cheese-encrusted pie.
His hope is that his American racing strips will defeat the Italians in much the way Ford beat Ferrari at 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966.