A Niche Thing: Conversations about Pizzas with Chef Alex Sanchez

Pizza is perhaps one of the most popular foods of the millennium. What with being worshipped by pop culture, it has attained cult status. You either love pizza or you really love pizza, there’s no other degree of measure to gauge the adoration for this exotic combination of sauce and bread. Pizza is art, pizza is poetry, but most of all, for Chef Alex Sanchez, pizza is life. He talks about it as a lover does, both with a pure devotion and a fanatic romanticism – “Depending on where you're from, pizza is just something that feels right. It's not just flat bread with cheese, it’s something where I think, when you bite into it, you recognize it for what it is. You can endear yourself to people by making food that they really like, food that speaks to them. And most people, most people really like pizza. I don't trust people that don't like pizza.”

Welcome to A Niche Thing with Aneesh Bhasin where we explore various subcultures, concrete interests and hobbies. So far we’ve covered the aromatic world of coffee and the hip world of streetwear, and now we’ll take a look at the delicious world of pizza. Our host Aneesh loves pizza and in the third episode of A Niche Thing, he takes a cheesy dip into all things pizza with old friend Alex Sanchez, Chef and Co-Founder at Americano, a friendly, neighbourhood restaurant in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda area that was recently named under Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2022 list!

Aneesh mentions that pizza is easily one of the most ordered food items in the country and wherever you go in India, you will find some version of a pizza being consumed. “What I really want to understand is, what makes a pizza pie great. I love Alex’s pizzas. I will travel one hour, twenty minutes each way to go to Americano to get the pizza he makes.” Aneesh and Alex discuss various kinds of pizzas, from the square Detroit style pizza, the Roman pizza al taglio with a super thin crust to pizza Bianco that’s got no tomatoes and pizza marinara that’s got tomatoes but no cheese! They also touch upon the importance of the ambience and place setting where one is eating pizza, especially how the experience differs when one is in a premium pizzeria in Naples as compared to a grungy street corner in New York, half-drunk, cramming down a slice at four in the morning! According to Chef Alex however, as long as you’re anywhere that serves pizza, you’re in the right place.

A humble chef, Alex declares that he is by no means a trained pizzaiolo and is still learning. As someone who has been training for it his whole life, he found it difficult to find his ‘ideal pizza’ so he decided to take a little bit from here and there in every recipe he found. He walks us through the many different techniques of making a pizza, the physics behind dough management and what goes into making the perfect dough, how imperative it is that the toppings should be in balance with the quantity of the dough, how the key to a great pizza lies in its volume and the experience of going from making one or two pizzas a day to making almost two hundred a day and executing each one to perfection. He also shares great advice on how to bake your own bread, what kind of oven to use, how to gauge the apt temperature your pizza will need - helping us understand the relationship between the heat of the oven and the hydration in the dough - higher hydration usually means more flavour; how he wanted his pizza to be crispy and as someone who came from San Francisco, the sourdough is everything. But most of all Alex passionately looks down upon eating your pizza with a fork and a knife, “It's got to be folded and eaten. Tilting your head to the side and eating with your hands. That's kind of how pizza was intended. That's how God intended pizza to be eaten.”

‘Americano is a vibrant neighbourhood restaurant by Chef Alex Sanchez and Restaurateur Mallyeka Watsa.? Since its hotly anticipated debut in March 2019, Americano remains a destination for its creative cuisine, genuine hospitality, and expertly crafted cocktails.’ The description showcased on the restaurant’s website does it no justice and if like us, you love pizza too, this is the place to be. Tune in to this episode of A Niche Thing with Chef Alex Sanchez and Host Aneesh Bhasin to explore the yummy world of pizzas.