Since we’re all hungry for something, Ru and I have added a shiny new Food Porn section where we explore food and cooking in Sri Lanka, and beyond.
Text by Ruwani Hettiarachchi:
It has become apparent that a fairly delightful side effect of Sri Lankans’ penchant for all things Italian is that flat bread pizza is both popular and fairly widely available in Colombo. Ecco, Regina Margerita and Il Ponte’s gourmet pizzas regularly outdo themselves in serving up the thin-crust. A few honourable mentions should, however, be made.
We couldn’t possibly ignore the Bay Leaf. Harpo’s Authentic Italian has democratized the thin-crust pizza in Colombo. The new family sized 19” monstrosity is a perverse additional offering to its already constipated denizens, and there really should be a law against that much cheese. But this isn’t a hymn to the ostentatious; it’s a sonnet to the underloved.
Ah the Pizza Melanzane. This took me back to the California Grille Panini from the Corner Bakery in downtown Chicago. The Melanzane is an enchanting marriage of pesto, marinated and pan fried zucchini, roasted egg plant, mozzarella and tomatoes. Whoever anointed sweet basil the life partner of the tomato, and mozzarella cheese its mistress knew what they were doing. I’m no fierce herbivore, nor do I appreciate vegetables in principle, in fact I treat them with the indifference and hostility they deserve. But this delightfully roasted combination of the least offensive ones, brought together by a simple and intense pesto is a dream where I’m cross legged on a slice of Melanzane, taking a magic carpet ride through the night sky. Oh if Steppenwolf could hear me now.
Then there’s Michelangelo’s. Colombo has few, almost no obscure and chic holes in the wall to boast of, no smoky bistros lingering in an unloved part of town that explode with authenticity for one brief, shining moment before being destroyed by rave reviews. Though, if we were to come even close, it would be a suburban equivalent in Nawala. Now Dimuth, having once been associated with another Italian restaurant in town, will tell you that he’s starting out small, slow even. He wants keep a low profile, fine. But he’s built a little brick oven, his own hot hole in the wall, and he brings out flat-breads and thin-crust pizzas from this deep, red furnace that positively sing.
I love his idea of keeping his menu simple, a collection of crowd pleasing favourites to start off with, with the ever-present promise of an espresso machine tomorrow, a new bottle of Pinot Grigio the day after. And his pizzas are marvelous. He’ll put together any combination you desire, and I once drove him a little over the edge asking for a pizza made mostly from pesto. He’s a bread savant, with an almost spiritual connection to his oven, bending and twisting the dough till it yields to his will.
With our combined appetites, gourmet pizza can be an expensive habit, and it was only a matter of time before we tried our own. What with the oven as the third person in the relationship it’s only fair to lead it down that path.
The first challenge is of course the dough. I’ve never been one to toil away kneading and twisting my own dough, and some trade-offs in time and energy must be made in the quest for perfectly blistered, simultaneously crisp and mind bogglingly elastic pizza dough. We found our fix in frozen pita bread. It took a minute to decide and around five minutes to assemble home made thin-crusts, and it would be unfair not to have documented it in true food porn fashion.
We tried a combination of sausage—the gourmet pork Bockwurst, sweet honey roast ham, roasted red pepper, canned button mushroom with a little olive oil and chilli flakes bringing it all together. The base is MD tomato puree, a potent concoction that gulps and annihilates any ingredient in its murky, tomatoey depths. We use it sparingly and so should you.
Prep work.
Sausage, ham and cheese, just because we could.
Then there’s the problem of cheese. Frozen rubbery mozzarella just wouldn’t do, and Giules is a whore for Gouda, so we made our way to the Crescat Keells’ cheese section, where we managed to overcome our mutual cheese inspired arousal (more on that later) to pick out a selection of lovely soft, melty and homely Gouda that we estimated would work brilliantly on pizza.
Priya and Harean were coming over for dinner, and both my brother and I are complete fiends for thin-crust. My brother worked in Italian kitchens and the task of cooking for him has never been easy, so both Giules and I were keen on the verdict. They supplied a couple of jugs of Paul Masson and we sat around, picking out slices from the tray while getting a little drunk.
The result.
A vegetarian combination inspired by the Bay Leaf’s Melanzane with pesto from Michaelangelo’s and baby spinach.
And finally dessert: chocolate covered strawberries.
