10 pizza trends, explained in 10 pizzas

Pizza is no longer what it used to be, and luckily! You can miss everything, grandma’s cakes and the flavors of the past. Hardly pizza: maybe we are writing this article from Milan, but objectively speaking, pizza has improved dramatically in the last 10 years – from North to South, and even abroad.

Pizza is part of our identity, one of the most loved and consumed foods in the world, a social ritual even before being a gastronomic one that we all observe more or less frequently. Going out for a pizza is like meeting for a coffee, a lifestyle, but if before it was synonymous with an occasion-economically-not-demanding, today eating a pizza has the same value as going to a restaurant.

What pizzeria? Which pizza? What pizziaiolo? What do the guides say?

The “Gourmetting of the pizza” has arrived inexorably together with that of the kitchen and hamburgers, enrolling the pizzerias in all respects among the research (and trendy) places to be marked on the agenda and in which to have a respectable gastronomic experience. Doesn’t the Michelin Guide give you stars? It doesn’t matter, because the waiting lists (in the North) and the queues (in the South) certify the Italians’ love for quality pizza and their propensity for real gastronomic pilgrimages to once unknown villages such as Caiazzo or San Bonifacio. Margherita or Capricciosa? The choice is no longer limited to the usual suspects. By now, pizza has learned the lesson of haute cuisine and can be defined as real gastronomic trends.

In principio fu la pizza gourmet

The first to have shaken consumer habits and public opinion it was gourmet pizza, that of I Tigli by Simone Padoan, a “focaccia” already cut into wedges and stuffed out of the oven with real recipes, served in an elegant and refined setting: we were at the beginning of the new millennium. This is how pizzas to share in slices, the idea of ​​a menu, and the revolution started from the North, or rather from Veneto, thanks to Padoan and Renato Bosco.

In the early 2000s they also open Gabriele Bonci in Rome, with its revolutionary Roman-style pizza in pan, and in Naples they work on top quality ingredients. The use of mother yeast is affirmed, electric ovens are cleared and within a few years contemporary pizzerias flourish throughout Italy. It is not a trend of those that pass because the pizza has now reached a point of no return and ideas run fast. Being a pizza chef is like being a chef, Gino Sorbillo and Gabriele Bonci they have become real media characters, Franco Pepe through pizza he has revived an entire country but apart from individual cases, the raising of the level of the best has turned into a mass phenomenon, leaked up to Autogrill and frozen food.

Lievitazione: the next big thing

Today there is no doubt that research has focused on doughs, the flour, the digestibility of the finished product. Today pizza is alveolate, light, crunchy. «The market keeps asking super hydrated products obtained from doughs with structured flours with a high protein content, which now seem to have become an essential must. On the other hand, places with very high customer volumes that need to “rotate” the menu are moving towards a varied offer of seasonal pizzas, which leave 3-4 weeks available on average, with beautiful and well-kept gourmet proposals. from an aesthetic point of view. Others, on the other hand, focus on extremely ripe doughs – up to 100 hours – made mainly with type 1 and 2 flours with a high protein factor, to enhance their remarkable digestibility and lightness. In any case, the investigation of substitutes for traditional yeast appears through not only the sourdough but also the search for yeasts in the air, such as lycoli, or alternative fermentations with buffalo milk or gelling of the polysaccharides present in broken wheat (the so-called spontaneous leavening) », he explains Gianluca Pasini, miller and careful observer of the phenomena in the sector.

Here then are 10 industry trends explained thanks to 10 pizzas from as many pizzerias