It is difficult to think of a dish as widely and grievously abused as pizza. So often soggy with synthetic, red goo, a dumping ground for motley leftovers, cardboard-wrapped and cardboard-flavoured, it has done its wicked best to make us forget its noble potential to be crisp and captivating. But the travesties are losing ground. In Sligo for the past seven years or so, food lovers drove miles to sample Bernadette O'Shea's thrillingly original pizzas in Truffles restaurant. "The best I've ever tasted," says Paul Rankin of Roscoff. And now the secrets are out, with the publication this week of Pizza Defined.
Subtitled "Contemporary and Classical Interpretations of Pizza, Calzone And Focaccia", Pizza Defined combines clear and detailed explanations of the basic techniques and the traditional constituents, with countless examples of the inspired combinations of flavours that make O'Shea's cooking unique. Leek And Black Pudding Pizza, with mascarpone and pine nuts, Milleens Pizza, with sundried tomatoes and sweet, fresh herbs, Smoked Salmon Pizza, with scallions and cream cheese, Fennel Sausage Pizza, with a homemade minced-pork mixture - these are some of the recipes in which pizza is reshaped, reinvented, so that Irish ingredients can star. Alongside them are more Mediterranean flavours - Pesto And Aubergine, Provencal, Grilled Peppers And Roast Garlic. Funky east-west fusion food is represented intriguingly, too - in Hot Spinach Pizza, for instance, with its sizzling chilli-tomato sauce. But there is nothing faddish here - no random amalgamations of fashionable ingredients. You can tell, even just by reading the recipes, that each is carefully composed of elements that work brilliantly together.
Pizza Defined is also exciting to look at - a cookery book as stylish as they come, with outstanding photographs by Mike O'Toole and modern design in harmony with O'Shea's contemporary food. The result, I suspect, will be to make drooling readers roll up their sleeves and resolve to visit the O'Shea magic on unyielding lumps of dough. This will perhaps be some compensation for the abrupt closure of Truffles at the beginning of the year.
"People keep asking me why I closed when the restaurant was doing so well, and of course I absolutely loved it," O'Shea explains, "but I believe that if you are really passionate about what you are doing, it's vital to step back at a certain point and take stock. I'll be back with another restaurant in another place." It was stepping back and taking stock that led her into the restaurant trade in the first place, by a most unorthodox route. A theology graduate, she had been a secondary school teacher of English and Religious Education - and says she loved that, too - until one day she was ready for a change.
"My weekends were always spent cooking for people, searching for new flavours, so I thought maybe I should turn to the culinary world and be self-employed." Her brother James owns the West Street Grill in Litchfield, Connecticut and he arranged for her to go to New York - "a wonderful window through which I saw incredible imagination at work when it came to pairing ingredients". She worked both for Evelyn Slomon, who was making great pizza in a restaurant on the Upper East Side, and for Patrick Clarke at Metro, one of the hot new places of the time. "I was so greedy to learn that my eyes were popping out of my head." The defining moment came when O'Shea noticed, to her astonishment, that the expensive ingredients which filled Metro's larder were also those used by Evelyn Slomon. "All for a pizza? I just couldn't believe it!" She determined not just to master the technique of pizza dough but to come back to Ireland and demonstrate what a fine food it can be.
Why Sligo? No particular reason, except that she wanted to live in the country and happened to find premises when invited on a visit by a friend. "I suppose I thought that if people loved what I was doing they would come and eat, no matter where I was," she says. And come they did, working their way warily down the menu. "It was lovely to see people losing their inhibitions. At first they might say: `I miss the tomato sauce and the mozzarella,' but I'd give them Milleens and sundried tomatoes instead and it would grow on them. Pissaladiere was another that took time, but before long customers would be dying for those anchovies."
As she gave Sligo interesting new flavours, Sligo gave her superb local produce in exchange - seafood, pork, cheese and the organic vegetables and herbs which made her famous salads with up to 30 kinds of leaves.
Like all good cooks, she is passionate about using the best ingredients, as part of an overall philosophy which dictates that you do the job properly or not at all.
With this at its core, Pizza Defined is not a book for sloppy, short-cut cooks, as can be gathered from the fact that the recipe for pizza dough takes up six whole pages. What you gain is clarity (and O'Shea's enthusiasm, bubbling over her recipes like melted cheese. There's also the promise of sixty-something treats if the kneading and stretching business can be mastered. I'm off to buy fresh baker's yeast and a big terracotta tile.
Pesto with aubergine pizza
"One reason this combination succeeds is that aubergine is a vegetable that simply adores mint, and so it echoes the mint I use in the pesto," says O'Shea. "Over the years I began to add extra flavours - goat's cheese and pine nuts."
140g (5 oz) basic pizza dough (follow your own method or buy the book)
1 large or 2 small aubergines
Olive oil
2 tablespoons pesto (see below)
140g (5 oz) goat's cheese
25g (1 oz) pine nuts
55g (2 oz) parmesan, freshly grated Clove garlic
Very finely chopped parmesan shavings and basil leaves
Pesto:
140g (5 oz) fresh basil leaves
55g (2 oz) fresh mint leaves
115g (4 oz) pine nuts
70g (2 1/2 oz) parmesan, freshly grated
225ml (8 fl oz) or more extra virgin olive oil
Combine basil, mint, nuts and parmesan together and, using a pestle and mortar, grind to a paste while slowly adding the olive oil.
Place pizza tile on floor of oven and preheat to maximum for one hour.
To cook the aubergine: Chop into wedges. Toss in olive oil and bake in preheated oven until brown on both sides.
Assembling the pizza: Stretch the dough into a 20 cm (8-inch) circle, spread over the pesto, 10 mm (1/2 inch) in from the rim. Top with aubergine. Dot with goat's cheese. Sprinkle on pine nuts, parmesan and fresh garlic. Bake in the preheated oven for approximately 10 minutes. Remove from oven, scatter over parmesan and basil.
Milleens Pizza
"When Milleens is cooked and melts, it has a buttery, slightly nutty, sharp taste, and the perfect pairing for that is sun-dried tomatoes and a glut of soft herbs on top. . ."
140g (5 oz) basic pizza dough (follow your own method or buy the book)
basil oil or sundried tomato oil
85g (3 oz) sundried tomatoes, excess oil squeezed out, shredded into strips
85g (3 oz) cream cheese
85g (3 oz) Milleens cheese, very finely sliced
Fresh herbs (marjoram, oregano, basil, yellow marjoram, lemon thyme etc)
Rosemary oil or sundried tomato oil
Method
Place pizza tile on floor of oven and preheat to maximum for one hour.
Assembling the pizza: Stretch the dough into a 20 cm (8-inch) circle. Brush the surface with basil or sundried tomato oil. Scatter the sundried tomatoes on top of the base. Dot with cream cheese to prevent from burning. Cover with Milleens. Bake in the preheated oven for about 10 minutes. After cooking brush the outer edge of the pizza with either rosemary oil or olive oil from the sundried tomatoes and scatter over a generous amount of the fresh herbs.
Smoked Salmon Pizza
"We have fabulous smoked salmon in Ireland so it was inevitable that I would use it," says the pizza queen.
140g (5 oz) basic pizza dough (follow your own method or buy the book)
70g (2 1/2 oz) smoked salmon, sliced into thin strips
55g (2 oz) cottage cheese
1 tablespoon chives, chopped
2 scallions, thinly sliced
25g (1 oz) parmesan, freshly grated
70g (2 1/2 oz) cream cheese, crumbled
85g (3 oz) mozzarella, grated
Clove garlic, very finely chopped
Method
Place pizza tile on floor of oven and preheat to maximum for one hour.
Assembling the pizza: Stretch the dough into a 20 cm (8-inch) circle. Scatter over the mozzarella. Arrange the salmon strips on the pizza and dot with the cottage and cream cheese. Evenly distribute the minced garlic, the chives, scallions and parmesan on top. Bake in the preheated oven for about 10 minutes.
Pizza Defined by Bernadette O'Shea is published by Estragon Press; limited edition hardback £15.99, paperback £11.99.
The author will be signing copies in The Winding Stair Bookshop, Sligo, today from noon.