A Tuscany adventure - #6, Comprare per la pizza!

Comprare per la pizza!

My hosts here in Montemagno, Tuscany have had a pizza oven built in their garden. This is a wood fired, traditional oven, and we are all excited about trying it out.

Today we went shopping for pizza ingredients, and then it dawned on me that shopping in Italy and Norway are two very different experiences. In Norway, you go into a shop get what you want, pay for it and walk out, possibly without exchanging a single word with anyone. Not so in Italy.

We went to several stores to get what we wanted, and my host, being a rather talkative fellow explained what we were going to do. Immediately we got advice from all the staff about how to make the perfect pizza. Even fellow customers chipped in. This, of course is also due to the fact that Italians care much more about what they eat than Norwegians do. It is in their soul and blood. There is only one way of doing a pizza, and that is the way their mothers did it. Nothing else will do.

So we set out without ingredients or recipes or anything, really, and came back as knowledgable pizza chefs (or so we thought, anyway) with the car full of good stuff. Ham, two types of cheese, salsicce (a sausage), olives.

This being the first time we try out the oven and the emphasis is on learning how to use it, we even opted for ready-made pizza dough sold frozen as individual blobs, each perfect for a normal pizza.

And now for the main task: Firing up the oven!

There will be pizza tonight.

Hopefully.