They toss pizza dough in the air, flipping and twirling to an audience that was hooked on their every move. Members of the Italian National Team of Acrobatic Pizza makers are performing daily shows at the Sharjah International Book Fair that will be held till November 14.Speaking about their beginnings, Alessandro Gullotto the group’s vice president said that they originated in 1987. “When I started this with Danilo Pagano, the group’s president, it was just a hobby. We tried to get the dough to be as elastic as possible and so we improvised by adding things like glue. High gluten flour wasn’t readily available. We would drive through fog and snow to meet and experiment, I only wish I had this filmed,” he said.The actual dough that is used by the team for their show is yeast-free - made out of strong flour, water and salt. “It’s important to select that right kind of flour and to maintain a cool temperature for the dough because if it’s too hot the dough may be spoilt,” said team member Piero Lovecchio.
However, since they are all, before anything, pizza makers at their own pizzerias, they are often asked by the clients to perform. “In the pizzeria we also play with regular dough that contains yeast. We don’t do it for a long time but somehow we manage,” said Lovecchio, who runs a restaurant in Puglia.“It is common to find requests for these shows in our restaurants because people see us on television and know that we are acrobatic pizza makers so sometimes they ask us to put on a show,” said Gullotto, who has won championships on a global level and who runs two pizzerias, the first in Modena, a city in the north of Italy and Taormina, a city in Sicily in the south.Training is key, as the performances require precision and complete synchrony with the music. One of the options available for training is fake dough made out of rubber. “But it feels different, you can’t extend it and it doesn’t respond like a regular pizza dough,” said Lovecchio saying that he prefers to train with the dough that they use during their performances.
During their shows, the team interacts with children and adults, who are always curious about their techniques. “Sometimes children want to touch the dough, to feel whether or not we are using actual pizza dough,” said Lovecchio adding that working as a pizza makers has always had a stronger allure when it comes to children, a lot more than a chef or pastry maker. He added that after their performances at the Sharjah International Book Fair he is planning to travel to Malaysia to teach a course.In the end, Gullotto pointed out that the pizza has Arab roots. “The first leavened and baked dough was done at the time of the ancient Egyptians,” he said.