“A few months ago in Hong Kong, a journalist asked me the fateful question: ‘Will you ever make a pineapple pizza?’” And this, according to Franco Pepe, gave birth of a new “heretical” classic: pineapple pizza, the AnaNascosta (a word play with ananas, meaning pineapple, and nascosta which means hidden.) Today it can be enjoyed at Pepe in Grani, in Caiazzo (not far from Caserta in the Campania Region), the best pizzeria in Italy and the world. Franco presented it at the Identità Golose 2019 congress that was held in March in Milan, as the iconic dish of the main theme “Creating new memories.” Is pineapple pizza a provocation? “No, it’s a reflection, it’s a symbol of a philosophy and of how we are currently working on pizzas with all kinds of ingredients.”
Hawaiian pizza: it’s all wrong
For Italians Hawaiian pizza, a margherita with pineapple and ham, is a version of pizza that is too far removed from the original. “The pineapple is a fruit with a very pleasant taste and many important nutritional properties, so why is this prejudice so strong?” Franco Pepe asks. “I did some research. I asked myself what doesn’t work or didn’t work. Was it human error or is there truly no feasible combination? So I discovered that the first pineapple pizza was baked in Canada in 1961, but the combinations were probably too risky: the pineapple was combined with tomato! Double acidity, which invariably resulted in a weak taste and poor digestibility. In addition, the pineapples were from cans, pre-cooked under syrup with a huge addition of other sugars.” Acid tomato, excessively sweet ham, poor quality and sweetened pineapple... the problem with Hawaiian pizza lies in its execution.
It’s all about the ingredients “I thought about going to work directly on the ingredient, that is, on the fruit and on how to make it reach people’s palates. Definitely not hot. On the contrary, I wanted to take advantage of the freshness of pineapple by wrapping it in San Daniele prosciutto, exploiting its natural flavor and placing it inside a fried cone whose inside surface is ‘whitened’ with 12 month-old Grana Padano DOP fondue... all dusted with licorice powder.” The pineapple is fresh, the Grana Padano is not simply grated but worked, like in a kitchen, the frying is light and not greasy, which is not a liability as often happens when oil is misused.
Creating new memories Cooks don’t just cook. With their work and their ideas, they go far beyond merely executing recipes and ideas. Actually, they think and write new dishes with the hope that they will become new collective memories, new traditions. Creating new memories is the theme of the 2019 edition of the Identità Golose congress, which this year uses a quote from the composer Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” A tradition is nothing more than a successful innovation, and in an age of conflict and fear, of closure and boundaries, even the culinary world wants to remember that new things give life to innovation, to the future and with it to new dishes and new flavors. With new memories, including a pineapple pizza.