The setting was sumptuous and Mattei’s work in the large vegetable garden together with Davide Rizzi, an expert in biodynamic agriculture, was laudable.

Once the area dedicated to food will be set, it will be operating when they open again in the spring, the gourmet restaurant will be equipped with an open view oven. But there’s an oven already, where they bake every leavened product, starting from the pizzas served in the establishment’s second restaurant, Treehouse, a sort of high quality Tuscan tavern.

Here the resident pastry chef, Diego Poli, born in 1988, created a dough for pizzas “signed” by pizza chefs Daniele Paladini and Alessandro Anastasio: selected flour, long maturation of up to 48 hours, 81-years-old mother yeast to which they add a tiny bit of brewer’s yeast, «when we roll out the dough, we add a little semolina, wheat flour and chickpea flour», says Mattei.

The topping often changes, so as to include, on top of the classics, other pizzas based on seasonal ingredients. We tasted a delicious pizza with the first porcini in the season.

Why serve pizza in a Relais & Chateaux?
Mattei explains: «We want to offer our guests, mostly foreigners, a thorough experience of Italy’s great cuisine, and I believe pizza is truly a part of it».

Still, at Borgo San Pietro they pay attention to every leavened product. The bread is naturally leavened, the result of many tests made by Poli.

They make their own grissini and savoury biscuits, the latter with a special technique «our friend and pizza chef Massimo Giovannini, of Apogeo in Pietrasanta taught us». 

You basically recuperate the discarded mother yeast, blend it with water, roll it out, put in the oven so as to make delicious savoury biscuits, served with a cream of smoked sheep’s milk. The sheep are from Borgo San Pietro, of course. Some royal snacks indeed.

Carlo Passera
source: http://newsletter.identitagolose.it/email.php?id=628

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