Monday, August 5, 2013

That's Amore!


"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie...that's amore".  Oh it is so true.  These days the cooking smells of fresh dough pizza drift from the Blue Bird's oven and out onto Green Street on a cold winter night.  It is the aroma of heaven if I do say so myself.  Not much compares with the smell of baking bread and as we use fresh bread dough to make our handmade pizzas, the cafe smells like a bakery on the evenings we are cooking pizzas.

We proudly make our own tomato Napoli sauce to top our bases so we know that it is fresh and made with real ingredients to our own recipe.  We make our own meatballs too that nestle on top of the cured meats on our Bavarian pizza.  And our Greek Lamb has been specially prepared for us by the local butcher and marinated to our own tastes in herbs and spices that we think evoke the flavours of Greece.  When our garden is abundant in basil, our Margherita pizza is made with our own fresh basil blended with Australian macadamias into pesto.

We aim to make the best pizzas possible because already, only a couple into our new careers as pizzeria cooks, we recognise that a pizza made with amore really is something very special.  And it shows.  The best pizza makers in Melbourne have made it their lifetime's work.  It's not just a flash in the pan job to them, they make pizzas night after night into their dotage.  They love and live for making pizza and now that we have entered the business, we have come to understand and appreciate a simple pleasure that belies the art of the pizza.  Watching the dough rise, handling it in its soft warm state, is a visceral pleasure.  There is a systematic skill to laying it out on the trays and spreading each with Napoli sauce, toppings and just the right amount of mozzarella to make melted strands of cheese without it being oily.  It is a sheer delight.

So if our customers enjoy our pizzas (and early feedback, not to mention repeat orders indicate that they do), it is because we enjoy making dinner for them.  And hopefully it shows.  After all
...That's Amore!