Pizza Mashup

Da Michele is reputed to make the world's best pizza. Determined to taste it, we walked out of the Naples train station last October and approached two polizia, asking, "E siguro camminare qui? (Is it safe to walk here?)" They reassured us, saying, "Si, si, e siguro. Momentito. Non portano gioielli? Non c'e problema. (Sure, it's safe. Wait a minute. You are not wearing jewelry, are you? No problem.)" Following their expressive hand gestures, we entered the maze of gritty streets and, after getting hopelessly lost, asked a shop keeper for Da Michele. Of course, everyone in Naples knows Da Michele and everyone is happy to point and suggest, "Camina un po e poi chiede un'altra persona. (Walk a little this way and then ask another person.)" After several rounds of this, we easily recognized Da Michele by the crowd of people, mostly locals, waiting outside the door. A kind woman advised us to go inside to get a number, which we did. Later, we passed on the same essential advice to a Japanese woman whose English was only slightly better than her Italian and whose husband spoke only Japanese. When she returned with her number, she asked us to pronounce it for her in Italian several times so that she would recognize it when it was called. Da Michele is famous indeed.

After waiting about 20 minutes, we squeezed inside to sit at one of the long tables that crowd two small dining rooms. The waiter gave us a choice of pizzas: margherita or marinara, regular or large. That was it. No sausage, no peppers, no nothing else. Needless to say, the pizza was splendid. However, we couldn't help but notice that the dough, delicious as it was, appeared to be made entirely of white flour. Bella, on the other hand, makes her dough entirely of semolina. That gives it more flavor, more body, and a beautiful golden color. Da Michele makes the best pizza in the world, but we like Bella's pizza better!

Following the masters at Da Michele, Bella makes two red sauces, a sweet sauce for pizza margherita and a spicy sauce for pizza marinara. Whether for pizza or
pasta, margherita or marinara, San Marzano tomatoes are the best for red sauce. That is what they use at Da Michele and that is what we use at home. We grow 10-20 San Marzano plants in our summer garden, producing hundreds of sweet, long, gently pear-shaped, densely-fleshed tomatoes. We grow enough San Marzanos to make fresh red sauces all summer, enough to puree and freeze in quart containers for winter, and and enough to make several quarts of "sun-dried" tomatoes in our dehydrator. (In fact, we already have dozens of San Marzano seedlings flourishing next to the windows in our garage. More on this later!) We also grow basil for our margherita pizzas and oregano for our marinara pizzas. Last week, we made a sausage and caramelized onion pizza, with marinara sauce from San Marzanos we grew, pureed, and froze last summer and fresh oregano from our winter garden.

Of course, not all of our pizzas have red sauce on them. In fact, the current family favorite is a four-cheese pizza. You can find many great "recipes" for the four cheeses. We got ours at a restaurant in Venice several years ago. It actually includes five cheeses: gorgonzola, fontina, ementhaler, mozzarella, and parmegiano.

After our visit to Da Michele, we decided that we wanted to eat a lot more pizza. So we started making double recipes of pizza dough and freezing a few one-pizza balls for future use. We can take out one to make an hors-d'oevre or first course for dinner. We can take out five or six to make a variety of pizzas--margherita, sausage, peppers, anchovies, olives, eggplant--for movie night in the family room.

Recently, we've been feeling more inventive. For example, Bella fondly remembered the "clams casino" she used to enjoy at the Jersey shore and thought it might be fun to make a clams casino / pizza mashup--her all-semolina dough, marinara sauce with frozen San Marzano puree from our summer garden, barely steamed fresh clams, chopped garlic and pancetta, and fresh oregano from our winter garden. Mmmm. Deliziosa!