The Fijian love affair with pizza is a strange but welcome oddity of Italian cuisine in this country. In Australia, the post-war Italian migration during the 1950s introduced a totally new food to Aussies who were more accustomed to a British diet of soups, pot roasts and fish and chips.
In the pursuing decades, traditional Italian pizzerias and fast food pizza stores begun popping up all over the country and by the 1980s, pizza and spaghetti had been adopted into the Australian diet.
The ragu alla Bolognese had become “spag bol”— today a childhood favourite of most Aussie kids. In Fiji, the acceptance of all things Italian has been much slower but our love of pizza has ironically received an unexpected boost from not the local Italians or existing pizza chains, but the Koreans.
Sunny Pizza comes to Fiji
The expansion of Sunny Pizza stores across the island is testament that Fiji is ready for more variety in their diet, and the Grace Road Kitchen venture has been clever to capitalise on its ties to its organic farms and their iconic bright, family friendly restaurants.
With no commercial fizzy drinks in sight, and an accompaniment of fresh made sauces, melon juices and salads from their farms, Sunny Pizza has made the pizza experience more affordable with a welcome health twist.
Making your own pizza at home
With pizza now becoming a regular part of the Fijian diet, learning to make it at home will save you money from dining out and allow the family to enjoy pizza more often.
What was once a recipe enjoyed only at your local pizzeria, can now be made and enjoyed at home thanks to the availability of local pizza cheese from Fiji Dairy Ltd (the old Rewa Dairy).
This final piece of the pizza recipe puzzle has combined with our natural familiarity with dough (think roti), our knowledge of tomato-based sauces (think tomato chutneys, ketchup and curry) and our ability to chop fresh ingredients into small pieces (think chop suey, kokoda and salsa).
Many homes also have a herb garden with basil, thyme or rosemary — essential ingredients to many Italian dishes but especially pizza. Store-bought frozen pizza is of little resemblance to the authentic recipes of a thin-crust pie topped with well seasoned ingredients, so if you’re yearning to try a real Italian pizza without the gluiness of a heavy crust overloaded with too much cheese, let’s get started!
Use the highest quality ingredients, make almost everything from scratch, and take the time to do it right.
A brick, wood fire pizza oven is ideal but you can make the same great pizza that you buy at the pizza shop using your regular gas oven, a homemade wood-fire oven or even over a barbecue.
Start with a good dough
Like any good bread recipe, wait until your dough is well proven and is at room temperature. It’s worth it. I make pizza dough using normal flour, water, sea salt, yeast, sugar or honey, and extra virgin olive oil.
Frozen, store-bought pizza bases tend to taste like cardboard to me, so take your time to make your own. Let it come to room temperature (you want it to be malleable), and be sure to flour anything the dough touches, your table, your hands, your rolling pin to prevent sticking.
When you’re ready to roll out the base, unlike a roti, it doesn’t have to be perfectly round! In fact, it doesn’t really matter if its round, square, rectangular or a blob — it’s all about the toppings.
Simple sauce is better sauce
Homestyle pizza sauce recipes are easy to make and you don’t always need to use fresh tomatoes.
The trick for a good red sauce is finding good tinned tomatoes; from Italy preferably, and read the ingredients label to make sure they only contain salt and tomatoes — no other chemicals or artificial additives.
Some chefs prefer an uncooked tomato sauce of blended tinned tomatoes with seasoning, while others relish the chance to create their own distinct flavoured base.
There is no reason you can’t adapt the Italian pomodoro sauce to suit your family’s palate — this is Fiji not Italy — so why not try adding your favourite herbs and spices, chilli, cumquats or tamarind to make it a little more Fijian inspired.
Not just red sauce
Tomato-based pizza sauces are just the beginning when you’re creating your own recipe. Green pesto sauces made from basil, olive oil, garlic and pine nuts are a classic, but why not get a little more creative and try a green taro leaf palusami or vakasakera puree?
Vakasakera or palusami make the perfect bases for seafood pizzas, just as they are naturally eaten with seafood in Fijian cuisine.
And for curry lovers, consider pureeing your favourite curry gravy as a base for any combination of curry toppings. Consider a masala curry base for lamb pizza, coconut masala for chicken or a spicy tomato salsa for an Indian-inspired seafood pizza. They may not be authentic Italian pizza but they will be Fijian.
Know when to top
Most toppings such as tomato, onions, ham, cooked chicken, pineapple and mushrooms are best cooked from the start with the pizza, while others such as anchovies, fresh avocado, cured prosciutto and fresh basil are best added after the pizza has finished cooking and the cheese has browned.
The typical Fijian pizza is already covered in way too much cheese so adding these ingredients on the top adds freshness and contrast.
There’s nothing worse than eating cooked avocado on a pizza as it brings out its bitterness and why not try other fresh ingredients at the end such as nama (sea grapes), roasted peanuts or a fresh tomato salsa.
Meat should be minimalist
I know many of us are meat lovers but adding too much meat to a pizza just makes it top heavy and hard to pick up and eat, especially if you also prefer a traditional thin crust and not the thick crust dough.
When deciding how much meat to add to your pizza, slice the meat thinly to reduce each piece’s weight and remember that you don’t have to cover every surface of the pizza with meat. For a good homemade pizza, sometimes less is more.
A family affair
Making pizza at home is a great way to get the kid’s involved in cooking. They can help make the dough, prepare the ingredients and the most fun part, building their own pizza.
Pizza making gives opportunity to use up any leftover foods such as lovo or excess of vegetables, and transforming them into something very different which gets their creative juices flowing.
There are classic toppings such as ham and pineapple, barbecue sauce with chicken, but at home there is no hard and fast rule.
Whatever combination of ingredients works on the plate will usually work well on a pizza. It’s also an opportunity to follow the Sunny Pizza principle of making the pizza experience a more healthy one by not always serving pizza with carbonated fizzy drinks — and don’t forget a big bowl of salad.
