Italy's top pizza innovator arrives from Verona with few words, many originals

New Delhi: He is from Verona, the Italian city where William Shakespeare set his immortal play, 'Romeo and Juliet', yet Renato Bosco is a man of few words.

Bosco makes up for his lack of knowledge of English with his radiant smile, his perfect namaste, and of course, his pizzas -- but they are not your popular Neapolitan kind.

On his website, Bosco describes himself as a 'pizzasearcher', a title he can justifiably lay a claim to because he's considered to be one of Italy's foremost pizza innovators.

And if all those whom the 56-year-old chef fed at Sorrento, the popular Italian restaurant at the Shangri-la Eros New Delhi, on Monday evening, couldn't stop wondering why his pizzas were so light and airy, it is because Bosco has perfected the art of making the dough.

Bosco's dough formula is to pair a kilo of flour and 60 per cent water. It is this water-flour balance that ensures the airiness and elasticity of the dough.

For his famous 'crunchy' and 'double crunchy' pizzas, Bosco makes a 'preferment' by adding wild yeast and beer, and keeping the dough overnight in the fridge before starting to roll and pound and stretch it the next day.

And for the 'mozzarella di pane' (or bread mozzarella, which looks like a ball of mozzarella or a Chinese bao, whichever way you like to describe it), the dough is first immersed for some time in mozzarella water, then steamed, and finally opened up with fine cuts at the centre to accommodate the stuffing.

At Sorrento on Monday evening, the stuffing was amatriciana (pasta sauce that is made with pecorino cheese and guanciale, or pork cheeks) for the non-vegetarians. Stracciatella, the soft cream cheese from the Apulia region, was the alternative.

The chef's creative repertoire also features the 'padellino', or what we call a pan pizza, which comes from Turin, but with Bosco's feathery touch. His pizzas don't leave you with any guilty feeling because even the toppings are light yet wholesome -- from pineapples marinated in mustard and prawns to mortadella (an Italian sausage), burrata cheese and seasonal vegetables.

Unusual pizzas may lead Bosco star cast, but his ensemble also included an unforgettable risotto in a pumpkin gorgonzola sauce and pumpkin 'paccheri' (pasta that resembles flat tubes) wrapped in a crab meat sauce.

Bosca is in New Delhi till Sunday, February 25. If you check him out, he'll open up a new world of pizzas for you and leave you hungry for more.