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A: Welcome to another show of VOV24/7’s Food Delight. We’re……

B: We’re so excited to be here every week with lots of cooking tips and variety of recipes. 

A: I’m thinking of a country with a shape like a boot. Guess what?

B: Yeah, I got it. That’s Italy.

A: I highly appreciate your geography knowledge.

Italy’s cuisine is famous worldwide for its simplicity but still is typically flavored thanks to the quality of the ingredients.

B: And we don’t have to go too far to enjoy Italian cuisine cause, with us on today’s show, we invite Italian chef Fabrizio Aceti, who are in Vietnam as a guest chef at Angelina, the Italian restaurant and lounge in the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi.

A: Hi Fabrizio Aceti and welcome to our show. How long have you been here in Hanoi?

Fabrizio: I’ve been here for 1 month, I’ll be here for 2 months.

B: Surely, Fabrizio will introduce us some Italian recipes.

A: I guess, it may be some kind of pizza.

B: When mentioning Italian cuisine, it’s impossible not to mention pizzas and pastas. Chef Aceti has created new dishes, featuring innovative pizzas and pastas, as well as other classic Italian dishes.

Fabrizio: Today, we have Burrata pizza with burrata cheese.

A: Burrata? I’m so curious about that. I’ve heard of Margherita or Hawaiian pizzas but “Burrata” is strange to me.

Fabrizio:  “Butter” in Italy we call it “burra”. It feels like butter when you taste it raw this cheese. Usually you eat this cheese raw, but you can also do a little bit cooking on pizza, it’s nice. Why we call it “burrata”?

As it’s said the cheese is mature, shredded then it is mixed with more cream, the cream has high value of fat, when it’s mature together inside the burrata, it feels like a little bit butter and cream. That’s why we call it “burrata”.

B: So, burrata pizza may be buttery and creamy, I guess. What ingredients do you use for burrata pizza? Is it much different from a classical pizza?

Fabrizio:  A basic pizza has the dough, tin tomato, mozzarella. From then, people started to change to different things.

The base is tomato. There is another option, the base is not tomato. It has only mozzarella, and the rest of the garnish you want to put: basil, cooked ham, mushrooms, olives. Some people request in Italy pizza Bianca, we call it white pizza, because they don’t use tomato. There are two options.

What we present today is classical pizza with the dough, tomato raw, from the tin.

A: So, it is a kind of classical pizza. Fabrizio, how is the dough made?

Sometimes we make pizza at home with the ready-made dough we buy at supermarket.

Fabrizio: The dough is fermented for 3 days. 2 days, we do the initial dough which is flour, water and a little bit of yeast. You leave it outside the dough to ferment it until tomorrow. It grows the enzyme, bacteria for the enzyme and leave it until tomorrow. Then tomorrow, we do another mix with flour, oil, water, and salt. When it reaches nice consistency, then we put together. We mix it again, we add some other ingredients: salt, oil, water, yeast. Usually, the yeast is beer yeast.

B: We need basic ingredients like flour, oil, water, and beer yeast and it takes up to 3 days to ferment the dough. It’s not simple as I think. What factors may affect the quality of a pizza dough?

Fabrizio: The dough changes everyday, because it changes the humidity, the temperature. Why is pizza different everywhere, because the water composition is different. We ferment it for 3 days, so it’s lighter to digest. 

A: Ah I see. That’s the dough. Ready to make a pizza. The first step, cover the pizza surface with tomato sauce. I love tomato. Should I use much tomato sauce for my pizza?

Fabrizio: The more tomato you put, the more wet things you put on the top, it impacts your dough.

B: I see here Fabrizio has prepared a number of things for the topping of burrata pizza: burrata cheese wrapped in mozzarella cheese like a ball, capers, olives, some salad. Let’s see what he does.

Fabrizio: You can put capers and olives. And we top it up with arugula salad. Capers and olives already salty. That’s why you don’t put a lot of salt on the top because you put in the items like the capers and the olives, they are already salty.

Basil leaves around and then mozzarella on the top of the basil leaves. Basil leaves will not burn while cooking, and it also flavors the mozzarella. The arugula salad, it’s raw, you keep it in the other side, you cook the pizza, when we take out pizza from the oven, the arugula salad we mix it with a little oil in a bowl, then we put it on the pizza.

A: What about the baking process? How much time do we need to bake it?

Fabrizio: You cook it in the oven at 450 DC for 1 minute. It also depends on your oven and the pizza dough. With small oven, the temperature is about 250 DC and it takes you longer. At home, sometimes people make the dough, they pre-cook in the oven for a few minutes, take out, garnish the pizza, then later put it back.

B: I think I will try some day?

A: Some day? I think you must also be patient enough to become a good cook. Anyway, you can try some day and let us know your result. See you next time on VOV24/7’s Food Delight.