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How to... be a pizza chef
Our entertainments reporter tries out a new activity: Ian Ray tries his hand at being a pizza chef at Pizza Express.
Our entertainments reporter tries out a new activity: Ian Ray tries his hand at being a pizza chef at Pizza Express.The last time I set foot in any kind of professional kitchen was as a distracted teenager working in a caf each Saturday.
I hated it. Not only was I totally rubbish at making those semi-translucent fried eggs they have in those places, but I was relegated many times over until I found my natural place in the order of things operating the dishwasher.
It was with a certain amount of trepidation, then, that I joined some of the staff at the city's new Pizza Express to learn a bit about how they put their meals together. Thankfully, my mentor for the day was Karim Khedri, head chef at the Stamford branch, who has a lot of experience training new staff, and isn't prone to the kind of anguished shouting that passed for "discussion" at my old Saturday job.
After getting changed into the stripey uniform, I started out by learning a bit about dough management. The dough that forms the pizza bases, garlic breads and dough balls served at the restaurant has to be treated well, and Karim explained that this is the first step in becoming a pizza chef.
"When people start, we have them working with the dough first, because getting it right is very important to the taste," he said.
Given the fact that I don't do much in the way of baking or pastry rolling at home, the opportunity to manipulate the Plasticine-like dough was a really enjoyable, tactile experience.
I started off making the dough balls, a fairly simple procedure, but I was soon pounding out some of the garlic breads and dough sticks that are served with the salads.
Karim is a naturally encouraging chap, and there was something fairly satisfying about watching them all stack up. After they'd been put into pans, the starters were all ready for the lunch service, which kicked off at noon.
Next, we had to prepare some of the pizza bases so they were ready in time to have toppings applied when people began to order. The key point here was that the pizza bases couldn't be made any earlier than 20 minutes before they would be topped, cooked and served. As I mentioned earlier, your lump of dough is a volatile creature, prone to drying out and becoming unworkable, so the bases had to be prepared as close to the opening of the restaurant as possible to ensure optimum taste.
Again, manipulating the dough was great fun, but tricky to get right at first. I realised quite quickly that the chances of me suspending a revolving pizza base above my head was unlikely as I struggled to make anything other than grossly mis-shapen bases.
Like anything, however, practice makes perfect, and after a number of botched attempts, I was able to get quicker and the bases were losing their elliptical character and becoming rounder. Each of the bases had to be put into different sized pans – a smaller one for the kids' pizzas the restaurant serves, a classic size and a very thin, larger pizza called the Romano.
By now, the other chaps in the open-plan kitchen were preparing all manner of different things, and the wonderful smells of basil and garlic were soon filling the place.At noon, customers began to make their way in, and the atmosphere in the kitchen quickly became many times busier as a tiny machine in the corner fed out tickets for the food people were ordering.
Getting the tomato sauce on the bases was incredibly satisfying –you simply put a splodge of the sauce on, hold the pizza on its side and shake it (the other guys had a particular action that gently pushed the sauce across the base).
The final element of course, was the topping, and I was given the opportunity to put whatever I wanted on a creation of my own. It was like being a kid in the proverbial sweetshop, and my first instinct was to pack it with anchovies. Having all of the ingredients in front of me meant that this wasn't going to be an easy decision, however. I decided to continue the nautical theme with some tuna, while satisfying my appetite for the Mediterranean touch with some black olives. The final, somewhat incongruous addition, was spicy sausage.
The finished pizza was a thing of beauty, and as it went into the super-hot oven I already knew it was going to be spot-on. After washing my hands for another time, I got changed into my usual work outfit and headed back to work to force my new creation on my colleagues.
I must admit to having a bit of a wobble about the combination of fish and meat, but the three people who chose to try a slice approved.
I had done well...
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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