The Best Pizza in Italy

Okay, maybe I'm being a little cocky, but I made homemade pizza today and it was the most delicious I've had so far.

Yesterday I went to a cheese store near the Rialto market. I was given Buffalo Mozzarella, which is mozzarella made from buffalo milk. It is the most delicious cheese I have ever tasted. I'm usually not a mozzarella person, just because it is sort of a bland cheese, but I could probably eat an entire ball of this cheese.

I preheated the oven as hot as I could (250 degrees Celsius) and waited about an hour for it to heat up. (I miss my convection oven). I kept a cookie sheet in the oven while it was preheating and sprinkled some bread crumbs (I didn't have any corn meal) on a piece of parchment paper.

 Making pizza dough seems pretty simple, but finding the right ratio of flour to dough to prevent a sticky mess proved out to be harder than I thought. I didn't even attempt to try to throw the dough above my head.
Now my pizzas weren't really round, but they turned out fine in the end. I ended up adding a lot more flour than the recipe said.
Also, it helped the dough rise to place the dough bowl in a bowl of warm water. My dough grew more in about 10 minutes than it did in 1 hour sitting on the counter.


I decided to make two pizzas. The first one with a garlic, rosemary and olive oil base with mushrooms and asiago and mozzarella cheeses. The second I made with a pesto base, spinach, mozzarella and sundried tomatoes. I put garlic olive oil on the crusts of both. I probably could have cooked the pizzas for longer but I like my crust thick and soft.

 

I like cold pizza, so I left it to sit while I went on a run. When I got back I took a quarter of each. The garlic mushroom was my favorite although both were good. The touch of rosemary in the crust and crunchy asiago were perfect.

Pizzeria Oke is OK

It's pretty hard finding restaurants to fit 18+ students in remotely the same eating area. Pizzeria Oke (Dorsoduro 1414, Venice, Italy) seemed like a great place with a large eating area and modern like pizzeria feel. Right on the zattere, a short walk from Casa Artom, everyone was hungry and excited to eat at a place we heard had really good pizza. If you didn't know before, Italian pizza, at least in Venice is very thin crusted with minimal sauce.

 My pizza had arugula, walnuts and pesto. The toppings were not cooked down and were so heavy I had to fold each slice into a burrito to keep everything together!

And no, I wasn't the only one who ate my whole pizza.

Although the pizza was delicious, there were some things that we were not so happy about. In Italy, there is a "coperto" or cover charge which includes the place setting, table, and service. It is usually a flat fee per person at sit down restaurants. If a waiter tells you that tip is not included, this is not correct, especially if the the coperto charge is written on the menu. Also, they do not like to split bills separately, so that meant that 10 of us had to pull out our change and pay our coperto charge. But, this restaurant had both a coperto and a service charge and the waiter insisted we pay both. A lot of times waiters take advantage of Americans because we are so used to tipping, but we had already learned about the coperto so were very frustrated.
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