Listen up Perth: Here’s the pizza order to test your maker’s skill

What pizza should you order to test the skill and ability of the maker?

The people who answer this question can be divided into two categories: those who say it’s marinara, and those who are wrong.

Andrea Brunelli of Maestro: creator of extraordinarily crisp, featherweight dough, owner of an extraordinary moustache. Credit: Tori Lill

“But what about the margherita?” I hear purists cry.

It’s a fair point. In addition to repping the tre colori of the Italian flag, the combination of tomato sugo, mozzarella and fresh basil is as delicious as it is simple. But therein lies the problem. Once you add mozzarella – or any cheese, really – to a pizza, the focus suddenly shifts from crust to curd.

“On any pizza where there’s cheese or some sort of topping with fat in it, it’s easier to hide behind those things and still make something that tastes great,” says Paul Bentley of recently opened Casa Pizzeria.

“But a marinara is the purest form of expression when it comes to pizza. Because it’s one of the lightest pizzas in terms of toppings, it has to be the most balanced. Everything has to be on point; otherwise, it doesn’t taste good.”

So what, exactly is the marinara? As with many Italian foodstuffs, it depends. According to the Associazone Verace Pizza Napoletana (True Neapolitan Pizza Association), a marinara is a pizza that’s topped only with peeled tomato, extra virgin olive oil, garlic and oregano. (“The addition of a few leaves of basil may be appreciated”). In Rome, it is common practice to slip a few anchovies onto a marinara.

A wine importer friend of mine, who grew up in Emilia-Romagna in Italy’s north, insists capers are a non-negotiable part of any marinara of note. The make-up of some elements are open to interpretation, too. Some pizzaiolos place their faith in minced or crushed garlic; others slice the bulb into translucent, barely-there strips with a razor blade, Goodfellas-style. Regardless of the many variants a marinara might take, one thing is undisputed: It is a pizza built on less-is-more thinking.

What a marinara isn’t, however, is a pizza with seafood on it, as the name is commonly interpreted. According to Italian food historians, the name marinara – “seafaring” in Italian – is a reference to its ingredients being shelf-stable and, thus, something sailors and merchants could prepare while on the sea. (A similar what-do-I-have-at-hand mentality sits at the origin story of the puttanesca pasta sauce.)

The sparseness of a marina can also be traced back to pizza’s peasant origins. According to Andrea Brunelli of North Beach’s Maestro Sourdough Pizza, it wasn’t until Queen Margherita visited Naples in 1889 that people started adding cheese – an expensive, luxury ingredient at the time – to pizzas.

“At the time, the pizzas you could buy around Napoli were mainly marinara as pizza was a very poor and affordable food,” says Brunelli. “So marinara is the real pizza and it should have more respect. Even before 1800, pizza around Italy only talks about a flatbread with tomatoes and vegetables or anchovies.”

At Casa Pizzeria, more is more.Credit: Lajos Varga

The marinara pizzas at both Casa Pizzeria and Maestro, incidentally, speak to both venues’ approaches to the benchmark. At Casa, high-walled bases slicked with a sparse, cheese-less topping shines a spotlight on the intense house sugo: typical of Bentley’s more-is-more cooking, while the addition of kombu oil also speaks to our man’s love of Japanese cooking.

At Maestro, it’s very much marinara by-the-book: all the better to admire Brunelli’s extraordinarily crisp, featherweight dough that puffs and floats like helium balloons at a baby’s gender reveal party.

I also recently tasted a very good marinara at the recently opened and very promising Da Napoli in Como. The pizzas are good, very fine-boned – certainly one you’d want to eat in-situ rather than out of takeaway box if possible – and despite having to shoulder the additional weight of cherry tomatoes and anchovies (which come standard-issue: be warned) the base held up admirably.

While a trad marinara isn’t exactly commonplace – I was saddened to hear that Marcello Segalina recently took the marina off the menu at Mount Hawthorn’s spirited Il Falco due to customers’ confusion about the pizza’s lack of seafood – its presence on a menu speaks, I believe, to a certain intent and respect for tradition. After all, isn’t knowledge part of a pizzaiolo’s skill and ability too?

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