Books

New Pizza – Stefano Manfredi (Book Review)

A whole new era for the world’s favourite food

After reading about two pages of New Pizza, the new title by renowned Italian / Australian chef Stefano Manfredi, I had to put the book down. Not because I wasn’t enjoying it. I had to stop and make a pizza immediately. Manfredi’s passion for pizza is infectious to say the least.

In New Pizza, Manfredi talks about the ‘New Wave’ of pizza sweeping Italy where old methods are being used with new techniques to create a brilliant fast food that is tasty, healthy and of the highest quality. It is turning around the devaluation of pizza as a cheap and nasty take-away food and taking it to the next level. Manfredi reveals how this New Wave Pizza movement is inspiring better pizza bases from different types of flours, fermentation and maturation techniques, with quality and often more experimental topping.

Having 3 decades of history running top quality restaurants in Sydney (Restaurant Manfredi, bel mondo, Pizzaperta) and leading exclusive food tours in Italy, Manfredi is well qualified to pen the 248 page coffee table and recipé book that is developed with hands-on research and extended with profiles and recipes of five top pizzaiolos on the New Wave (Enzo Coccia, Patrick Ricci, Simone Padoan, Gabriele Bonci and Antonio Pappalardo). This qualification is backed up by the fact that these famous pizzaiolo he now calls friends and that he visits the Italian producers of Pizzaperta’s tomatos, mozzerella, anchovies, olives, capers and oregano to develop culinary relationships. For produce he can’t import, he’ll go and taste the originals before finding good Australian equivalents. 

The book is beautiful with atmospheric local Italian images from Bree Hutchins and a tangible, airy design by Vince Frost.

Did you know that Rome’s probable first pizzeria went out of business as the Romans were too posh for the Neapolitan street food? You’ll also find out that Italy serves 56 million pizzas a week!

And best of all it’s instructional and easy to follow- you’ll learn how to make various forms of bases from Neapolitan to Roman, there’s a chapter on fried pizza and dozens of delicious topping ideas. Finally, needless to say, New Pizza is extremely appetising.

Bon apetito!

New Pizza is out 1st August 2017 published by Murdoch books.

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