8 hours ago, Chris Hennes said:First, this isn't their "Neapolitan" recipe, it's their "Modernist Neapolitan" recipe. Second, what characteristic of the pizza do they change so much that it is no longer recognizable as "Neapolitan" pizza? According to the book the two ingredient essentially counteract each other in the final product. The lecithin is added as a dough relaxant to make shaping easier, and the polydextrose to counteract the lack of crispness that the lecithin causes. Here the Modernist twist isn't designed to change the end product, it's designed to make the dough easier to work with.
Jimmy Beard used to think that if you added soy sauce to a dish, it would make it Chinese. You couldn't really fault him for it much because it was a very different time. But chefs have historically had problems with cultural awareness. They exoticize, they oversimplify, they guess, they throw figurative darts at dartboards to see what sticks, and the end result has always been ignorance. As time goes by, and cultures mingle, and native representatives set the record straight, this kind of myopia is far less pervasive, but it still exists. Heston Blumenthal is the patient zero of the most recent incarnation of the Neapolitan pizza ignorance virus. Much like Reinhart almost a decade before him, he donned his outsider goggles, peered at this cultural treasure that he had almost no knowledge of, made a bunch of very wrong guesses, and the modern misperception of Neapolitan pizza was born.
The viral vector tracked from Heston to Chris, Chris to Nathan/Modernist Cuisine, then to Andris (Baking Steel) and Kenji, and collectively, these voices were able to spread this misinformation to millions of ears. Sure, you have quite a few domestic Neapolitan pizzerias creating authentic offerings, and you also have an online obsessive pizza community that knows their stuff, but this is all just an infinitesimally small drop in a bucket compared to the millions of page hits Serious Eats sees in a month.
If Modernist Bread were the first book, and they presented the idea of 'fixing' the handling ability of Neapolitan dough with novel ingredients, I might say something along the lines of "Ummm... are you sure that Neapolitan dough needs to be fixed?" and left it at that. But Nathan and friends have played a very critical part in the dismantling of Neapolitan culture, and this further hubris only excavates an already deep wound.
Nathan, to his partial credit, took most of my criticisms to heart and eventually (and quietly), made corrections to his book, and, while I'm happy to be vindicated, even quietly ;), it doesn't alter the overall damaging impact on the collective knowledge of pizza.
Reinhart, as I mentioned, did a great deal of damage in his own way with American Pie, but, imo, he gets to play the Jimmy Beard it-was-a-different-time card, and, to his vast credit, he has, for the most part, atoned for his sins. Until Nathan and friends recognize the impact they've had and publicly come to terms with the part they've played, I am going to continue to go out of my way to shine a light on their cultural insensitivity, regardless of how slight the current infraction might be.
The idea that Neapolitan pizza dough needs to somehow be 'fixed' is preposterous, but there is far more to this than just that.
