Piola - Making pizza in Buenos Aires

Last Tuesday at Piola next to our hotel we enjoyed pizza, salad and a bottle of Mendoza Malbec. Piola is a large and successful pizza bistro, one of two in Bs As.We met Julian, the tattooed manager from Northern Italy. I have no Spanish but his English was pretty good so I thought I would try to hatch a plan with him. I showed him a folded sandwich bag I had brought with me containing some sourdough starter I'd borrowed from the Berkeley Cheeseboard Collective about 14 years ago. I told him I thought he'd like the sourdough crust better than a plain dry yeast starter, and if he would like I'd give him this starter to try. After a moment of disbelief, and a futile lecture on how Argentines like their pizza only a certain way, he expressed some modest interest in trying a sourdough crust. He wanted to know "how much dough? how much warm water? what are the proportions of everything?" Anna, fluent in Spanish, chimed in and said, "Allen can show you."

I was soon admitted to the kitchen where I proceeded to mix up a bowl of starter. I left instructions to cover it and leave it in a warm place, and that I would come back in the morning to see if it was still alive. (We'd been gone a week or 8 days and it had not been refrigerated.) That was Tuesday.

Several times during the week I walked next door to Piola...first to check on the starter the next morning (bubbling! which means alive but too hot) and again a day later to mix up a large bucket of dough. I said to Alex, the chief cook, we will make pizza on Friday after being assured that both he and Julian would be on duty. That assurance turned out to be completely wrong,

Communications all along were spotty and difficult. That may be why my preposterous notion that I could bring this off had half a chance. Julian would say, "I'll see you tomorrow." and when I arrived I found out he "won't be in today". The day manager, Lucrecia, is a tall, friendly and very helpful person. Still, I felt welcomed but that I was intruding.

Saturday night I arrived at 8 to check on the dough. Piola was not quite open and no Julian.  Lucrecia

Lucrecia and Alex

showed me into the kitchen to check on the dough. It had suffered somewhat because of the hot starter, maybe I used too much?  Apparently it had been refrigerated but flowed over the sides of the bucket.  The usual elasticity had not developed and so the dough fell apart easily.  I mixed in more flour and kneaded a batch. Then I left feeling doubtful that I could produce using this dough. When I  came back at 10pm, there was Julian who said, "Are you ready to make pizza?" "Si!", I said, hopefully.

I prepared two simple pizzas with julienned green onions and a small bit of mozzarella. For the second one I added a very thin layer of pesto right to the dough itself under the onion.

Unexpectedly, I got lucky. Julian shared the results with Lucrecia and the cook staff.  I took a seat in the room with a view of the oven/cooks and ordered a bottle of Malbec and a Piola pizza. Almost immediately Julian brought me three slices (on the left) of the sourdough. Lucrecia stopped by my table to tell me, "I like it. It's good!"

I left the starter fed and refrigerated for Alex, along with the rest of the dough in the large bucket. I thought the pizza turned out OK. I think it would have been better had I cooked it, brushed on some garlic infused, organic olive oil and a dusting of parmesan. But it was a very satisfying experience altogether. I gained a great deal of respect for those cooks. The oven was heated to 450 C (over 800 degrees Fahrenheit) and their pizzas cook in 60-90 seconds. Altogether Piola is a very impressive operation.