At Tonino, Chef Sumant Sharma sprinkles a 16-in pizza with roughly chopped mozzarella, basil, spinach, artichokes, black olives, cherry tomatoes and also adds pine nuts for crunch

How would you like to try out a thin-crust pizza with a hilsa topping? Yep. That’s shorshe ilish gone Italian. Or would you rather settle for a pizza topped with an exotic bird —say turkey or quail?

Mozzarella is so passé. You have to start thinking in terms of blue cheeses like the Gorgonzola and the creamy and flavourful Tallegio. Today you’ll get pizzas delicately trimmed with exorbitant white/black truffles. And more often than not, they’ll be cooked in wood-fired ovens. The prices of New Age pizzas can easily shoot to Rs 1,000 (for a 16-in one).

Welcome to a world of gourmet pizzas that are not just upper crust, but often come bristling with good health (and hence minus the guilt trip).

Menus at fine dining restaurants are making more room for this Italian bite, also ensuring that pizzas dump their notorious ‘junk’ tag. Chefs are experimenting with ingredients and bases to put the calorie-conscious at ease.

A speciality at Afraa is the healthy, duram wheat-base pizza that’s topped with fresh pesto, sundried tomatoes, goat cheese and a sprinkling of feta cheese

“To elevate the humble pizza to gourmet class, the ingredients have to be the finest and freshest,” says chef Ravi Saxena of Sevilla, the Mediterranean restaurant at The Claridges in Delhi. The pizzas here are loaded with string chorizos (sausages) flown from Spain and fresh truffles.

The traditional mozzarella pizza has been around for long and is poised to be dethroned. Foodies clearly want more. So, chef Sumanta Chakrabarty of Afraa in Calcutta is busy changing the recipes for his pizza bases and sauces while doing radical things with the toppings.

He’s created a duram (wholegrain wheat) base with high gluten content as well as paper-thin bajra, jowar and ragi bases. His current hotseller is the Afraa Pizza with a duram base — a rhapsody in pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, goat cheese with a sprinkling of feta cheese. Afraa’s offerings include a whole range of meats from Pancetta to smoked Black Forest and Parma hams. A variety of fish is also being artfully put on the pizza.

For a taste of some more thin-crust pizzas cooked in a wood-fired oven, make your way to Fire & Ice on Middleton Street, a small eatery started by the Neapolitan Anna Maria Forgionne.

The Pizza Bianco at Sevilla has four different kinds of natural cheeses and is touched with white truffle oil and garnished with white or black truffles

“Pizzas are cooked in the Neapolitan style which turns out slightly thicker pizzas than the paper-thin crust,” says Forgionne, who prices them between Rs 250-Rs 380 for regular sizes. But she infuses a local flavour — like the red hot Fire of Bengal pizza with mutton and loads of green chillies and coriander leaves.

Then there’s the newly opened Casa Toscana near Chowringhee. Pizza lovers swear by the ultra-thin pizzas and fresh toppings served at this fine dining restaurant owned by Saket Agarwal.

At Delhi’s fine dining Italian restaurant, Tonino, the oven is fired with mango wood to bake smoky pizzas where chef Sumant Sharma rolls out the dough and ‘paints’ it with tomato sauce.

His regulars love the wafer-thin pizzas. Now that winter is here, Sharma intends to add the Shellfish Pizza to his menu with mussels, shrimps and clams thrown in. The 16-in pizza is priced at Rs 1,000 (depending on the toppings).

And what goes into the making of the Pizzas of the Moment? The best ingredients, of course.

Chef Wladimiro Gadioli at the Hyatt Regency in Delhi keeps experimentation to the minimum and sticks to classic recipes like the Margharita

Bite into a Pepperoni pizza at La Piazza in Hyatt Regency, Delhi. Chef Wladimiro Gadioli, the Italian chef de cuisine believes in sticking to tradition. However, he does fly in juicy Italian Pelati tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella and ham from the Parma region in Italy.

Executive sous chef Mohit Khanna is also not too crazy about experimentation at the Hyatt Regency’s La Cucina in Calcutta. So, he imports almost everything — the olives, tomatoes, cold cuts, cheeses and herbs — from Italy. Try his mean Pizza Nettuno that’s all about tuna, capers, black olives, red onion slices and mozzarella with a tomato base.

At Sevilla in The Claridges, Saxena recommends the Pizza Bianco that’s made with four different kinds of natural cheeses — Tallegio, Parmesan, Gorgonzola and fresh buffalo mozzarella. He touches the pizza with white truffle oil and tops it with white or black truffles. These cost between Rs 625 and Rs 750.

Meanwhile the Apple, Tallegio and Honey Pizza at Italia — a fine dining restaurant at The Park Hotel in Delhi — is a tangy treat. Chef Arindam Jana gives the pizza a slightly sweet taste by adding apple slices to the tomato paste and adding imported cheeses like the creamy soft Tallegio and the hard pecorino. A basic Margharita here is priced at Rs 525.

But the hallmark of a great pizza, say the chefs, is this: it should never have too much of any ingredient. Says Chakrabarty: “Not the bread, the cheese or the toppings. The key is in striking the right balance.” 

Photographs by Rupinder Sharma