Sunday, April 22, 2007

L'odissea delle pizze

It's already been two weekends ago, but I couldn't not post about this. Jeff, i.e. Lucas's boss organized a pizza party at his place, inviting about 50 guests. Guess who was going to make all those pizzas? Well, of course, the Italians! Giancarlo and I were the most experienced, so we leaded a team of brave people (not only Italians) and produced about 20 large pizza pans. We also made ice cream (with my wonderful ice cream maker), two tiramisu, and Ellif brought some delicious Bakhlava.
It was a really intensive experience (I guess this would be my first real 'cheffing' experience, I never cooked for so long and for so many people). We made all this dough in the morning:
And while it was rising, we prepared the sauce, the ice cream, and the tiramisu (in the meanwhile I left for an hour to prepare my Torta Pasqualina and my Crescia, since the day after it was Easter). Then we starting rolling it down and preparing the pizza toppings at 3 pm.
Unfortunately I was so busy cooking that I couldn't take many pictures. I stopped in order to take at least the picture of the first pizza that came out from the oven, a pizza with various types of cheese on top:
As I said, we made 20, with lots of different ingredients (some were focaccia, without tomatoes, some had grilled zucchini, some had onions, pesto, capers, olives, some had cheese, some didn't, some had grilled peppers.. so, anything our fantasy was inspiring us).
Here are few snapshots of the party, mostly taken by Vardha (thanks!!): the table with the rolling-down and pizza-cutting section.. at last the cooks get to eat a few pieces!
Lucas rolling down one pizza :)
And here is me in the middle of the big mess making all the toppings.
This big operation was really possible thanks to the fact that Jeff has a very nice house, with a big kitchen where we could cook even though there were plenty of people around.. and two amazingly good ovens that could bake about 5 pizzas at a time!
Everyone loved the pizza. In the end, we didn't use all the dough.. there was too much even for all the guests. The desserts were also very appreciated (actually, the strawberry ice cream was delicious, I'll have to make it again soon :).

1 comment:

Unknown said...

wow, what you did was really really amazing!