Pizza – the real deal

Italian pizza has many imitations, usually bad, and is second only to the burger as the world’s most popular fast food. For a taste of the original Neapolitan pizza you only have to journey to the tiny village of Huapai north of Auckland. By Alan Titchall. 

Kevin is waiting inside Dante’s, a tiny pizzeria in the middle of a modest retail block on SH2 that has become so popular that customers are known to drive from Hamilton to tuck into one of its traditionally crafted pizzas certified by the European Union. He doesn’t look so much Italian as someone who could play a Cockney extra in a Guy Ritchie movie.

“My father is English and my mother Italian. He was a bit of an East End boy until he met my mum and thought he had better develop a passion for cooking, otherwise he might miss out.” 

By the time Kevin came along, his dad had become a chef. His maternal grandfather, Dante, had a pizzeria in Genoa where the family spent their holidays. You don’t need to know more family history to see the connection with Italian pizza, but why Huapai? Why New Zealand? 

That question is answered by Tanya, Kevin’s partner, who was raised in Island Bay Wellington, also by an Italian mother and Kiwi dad. The pair met and married in London 16 years ago and settled in Kumeu in North West Auckland, through one of those ‘girl brings boy home’ stories that would leave New Zealand’s hospitality industry a lot poorer if it wasn’t for social globalization and the lure of the great Kiwi OE. 

They bought an existing business - an American take-home and cook-yourself pizza business, already popular with locals. The pair gradually built this take-away into a “real wood-fired pizza’ outlet serving the very ‘anatomy of a Neapolitan pizza’, as its website says. Dante’s was launched in March 2009 with fortuitous publicity on Campbell Live (TV3), and magazine accolades shouting ‘Auckland’s best pizza’. The queues haven’t diminished. During our interview a customer arrives who has driven up from the Bombay Hills some 50 kilometres away, and regulars include top Auckland chefs Michael Meredith and Simon Wright. 

“I hope you are hungry,” warns Kevin as the hand-made, brick-lined oven imported from Naples reaches a furnace-like glow of over 400 degrees Celsius. In Europe, these ovens are fired by fruit woods and grape-vines. In New Zealand they work just as well with split, thigh-sized blocks of manuka. 

“Depending on whether it is winter or summer, it takes two or four hours to stoke the oven to this heat, and every oven has its own personality with hot spots that the operator gets to know.” 

In a very Italian way, every pizzaiolo guards their oven zealously, he adds. Pizzas goes back to that murky cuisine history where crediting invention is ‘inutile’, suffice to say the original was probably a simple flat bread flavoured with olive oil (or lard) and a bit of salt and a few herbs, and quickly baked in the hot temperatures of a wood-fired oven. 

Neapolitan bakers are credited with being the first to use, on their flat bread, the tomato fruit from the ‘New World’ of South America. One of the original tomato-smeared pizza recipes on record is the ‘marinara’ and it has nothing to do with seafood. The name is a reference to the Neapolitan fishermen who snacked on this light treat before hitting the hay after a long-night’s fishing. The flat bread is simply garnished with crushed tomato, olive oil and dried oregano. 

By the mid-19th century vendors were selling a variety of pizza on the streets of Naples. When Italy’s royal couple visited the city in 1899, Queen Margherita was keen for a slice of the local take-a-way. The pizzaiolo commissioned for the royal delivery (and it wasn’t in a box – that invention came much later in the US after WW2), is recorded as Raffaele Esposito from Antica Pizzeria Brandi - a restaurant still operating in Naples. He presented a pizza smeared with crushed tomatoes, knobs of buffalo mozzarella, and fresh basil leaves (the red, white and green colours of the national flag) and named it in her honour. 

Over the past century the Neapolitan pizza has traveled widely, morphing into shapes and pantry toppings that would make Carmen Miranda’s hat look plain. True pizzaioli call these imposters ‘cheese wheels’, as they are just any hard dough base smothered, mostly, with cheese, says Kevin. 

“The flavours aren’t defined and they are often oily and greasy and leave you with that post-pizza heavy feel when you finished eating it.” 

The dough for my sample pizza preparation is the size of a side plate, smooth and about four centimeters high. The pizza dough preparation is the first of many big differences between the ubiquitous chain pizza and those made under the membership rules of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, a DOC as strict as any in Europe, including winemaking in Champagne. I don’t think I heard Kevin correctly when he says it takes five days for the dough to get to this stage. 

“The dough is most important part and it’s a slow, five-day process to let it relax and enhance and the glutens to break down. To qualify for the DOC endorsement the dough can be only made of flour, salt and water and natural yeast. It contains no additives common in commercialized versions and is not worked by machine.” 

He deftly stretches the dough disk by hand until it webs out in front of him about a metre in width. 

“You don’t use a rolling pin or dough press because it come out like a like a cardboard disk.”

The mat-sized, elastic circle of dough contracts back into the size of a dinner plate before Kevin smears the top with skinned cherry tomatoes. 

“The tomato is only crushed, not pureed. There’s no tomato concentrate or paste. That’s very important as the oven cooks the tomato while it’s on the pizza base. The crushed tomato is simply seasoned and no sugar is added.” 

Next comes a few generous dollops of buffalo mozzarella imported from Italy, and a few freshly picked, aromatic basil leaves. It is pulled onto the blade of the pizza oven ‘spade’. 

“That’s another Neapolitan tradition. The blade is not pushed under the dough.” 

Coming in from the side of the oven, Kevin maneuvers the blade and its cargo close to the ember pile glowing from the left inside of the oven and squints into the fierce heat as the dough buckles and blisters. My pizza bakes directly on the floor of the brick-lined oven and Kevin has only 90 seconds to get those bread borders high and soft, blistered black and the contents melted into a thick, soupy, rich topping. 

Out it comes. Prego - Margherita DOC, the queen of all pizzas! 

Pizza in Italy is usually sold by the slice, or the weight in Rome where the base is thicker. Kevin’s pizza wheel deftly divides up my Margherita into four wide quarters. By bringing up the sides of the slice with the thumb and middle finger, and then folding the tip of the pizza into the centre with the index finger, so the slice closes into a mouth sized parcel – it can picked up with one hand and shoved into your mouth. This is, after all, is street food. The filling is much more fluid than the cheesy, claggy mess found on most commercial pizza, while the thin base is dry and crisp. 

My second pizza sample is the simple Marinara DOC. 

“Toppings should never, never take precedence over its crust,” says Kevin, dressing the smear of hand-crushed tomatoes with a sprinkle of dried oregano and a clove of garlic or two. Not a strand of cheese, shrimp or anchovy in sight. 

“You use dried oregano because fresh would burn and be bitter. The heat brings out the oil in the dry herbs.” 

Kevin makes one concession to the tradition in Naples of placing a whole glove of garlic in the centre of the pizza, and spreads garlic slices around the filling. Into the oven and 90 seconds later – delissimo! 

There are three DOC pizza made at Dantes with the other on the menu a choice of imaginative toppings aimed at the Kiwi palate, but all with the same traditional dough and baked in that fierce heat.

Like other associations around the world that protect local food and beverage brands from exploration and inferior imitations, the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana was set up by a group of Neapolitan pizza makers in 1984 with the support of the Italian government. They were concerned the traditional pizza from their city would disappear under the fast foodism of the 20th century. A long list of exacting specifications has to be adhered to before an operator is granted Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) status. Members are bound to uphold the standards of the association and their venue is reviewed every year. There are around 300 current members of the association including Dante's, which is one of just two venues in the Southern hemisphere (the other is in Sydney). 

The story of how Dante’s in Huapai got its certification is a testament to the owners’ perseverance with the Italian association. It involved video conferences and demonstrations of their methods and a trip to Naples for Kevin to undergo training. “I was the first person since 1984 that the association has certified without a reviewer visiting the premises.” 

Dante’s has only three staff, which includes Kevin and Tanya. The ‘slow-food’ dough process limits them to 100 pizzas a day for quality control and to maintain the ‘passionale’ that drives a good culinary business. 

Looking at the future the pair is talking of expansion options, such as moving into Auckland city with a big enough premises that will allow customers to eat insitu. 

www.dantespizza.co.nz.

Summer 2009 - by Alan Titchall

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