IF YOU’VE eaten at Benvenuti Cafe Restaurant, then there’s a good chance you’ve eaten the best meat pizza in Australia.
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That’s not just the rumbling stomachs of Leeton talking, Bruno Catanzariti and his mouth-watering masterpiece took out the meat and poultry section at the Global Pizza Challenge on Sunday. What makes his pizza reign supreme? Well a little motherly advice never goes astray.
“I made a pizza for a family get together and mum started eating it and said ‘your pizza is good... but you have to do this and do that’,” Mr Catanzariti said.
“The secret of the day was the tweaks my mum gave me about the dough.”
While you could imagine he has his own secret recipe (which will remain that way), it’s not just the ingredients that make the food what it is.
“Anybody can make a pizza,” he said. “But It’s not just slapping it together and hoping people like it. I care about how I’m going to make it and I think about whether I’m going to like it or not.”
It wasn’t just the one pizza he got into the finals either.
His seafood pizza and best interpretation of a meat, cheese and pineapple also made the top ten.
This made for a pressure filled day of cooking, but nothing he wasn’t used to.
“There’s a lot of pressure, for one you had to use a rolling pin for the dough, so there was no electric roller like what we have at Benvenuti’s,” he said.
“I also had to make 12 pizzas in a row for all the judges and everything was winding down, so there was that time pressure. At the restaurant everyone usually wants their pizza in five minutes anyway so it’s normal,” he joked.
Not only was it his first time competing, but he also set a new benchmark for rookies.
“One of the organisers came up to me and told me that it was the first time a first timer had won,” Mr Catanzariti said.
Now he’s got his eye on defending his crown.
“They’ve already told us that next year’s competition will be in Melbourne so we’ll see how I go,” he said.
For someone who’s only been making pizzas for four years, that’s not too shabby.