The literal translation of pizza bianca is “white pizza” but you might see the term “Pizza Bianca” or “Pizze bianche” on a typical pizzeria menu anywhere in Italy. This indicates that the pizza is not “rossa” – covered with tomato sauce, and therefore the pizza is just the plain pizza dough base with the toppings indicated on the menu.

Pizza bianca in Rome, however, means something a little different in that you won’t find pizza bianca only in pizzerias, but you’ll find pizza bianca ready to be sliced all over the city at various forni (sing. forno) breadmakers.

Pizza bianca is just that: fresh, crusty, crackly, pizza dough sprinkled with salt and brushed with wonderful, high quality olive oil. They are cooked in (ideally) wood-burning ovens in long, rectangular slabs which are typical of pizza al trancio (pizza by the slice) in Rome. Pizza al trancio is definitely one of my favorite street foods in Rome.

Perhaps the most famous maker of pizza bianca, and rightly so, is the Forno Campo de’ Fiori, located in the famous piazza of the same name. When they’re baking you’ll often find the door directly to the forno open.

It’s a pretty nondescript place, from the outside, with a large wooden “FORNO” announcing its presence . After you enter, make your way to the crowded counters and request pizzas bianca. The baker will inevitably place his knife on the long slab of pizza bianca to indicate where he intends to cut. Use your hands to show how wide of a slice you’d like. You’ll receive a “scontrino” receipt with the amount that needs to be paid. Take it to the cash register, pay, and either return to pick up your piece of pizza bianca from the bread counter or if it’s already been given to you, now it’s time to eat!

Sometimes you’ll even peek them putting the pizza bianca into the oven.

This is one of my first stops when I arrive in Rome. I always underestimate how much pizza bianca I want and always have to come back later and get another piece. I suggest getting more than you want and then you can snack on it throughout the day!

Let’s get a closer look at pizza bianca.

or from the other angle. See that crispy, golden, crunchy oily surface sprinkled with salt? You’re going to pray to it in your sleep. I can’t wait for the next time I get to eat pizza bianca!

When you see pizza bianca in others’ hands, try to resist and NOT steal it from them.

Forno Campo de’ Fiori
Campo De’ Fiori, 22 – Vicolo del Gallo, 14
www.fornocampodefiori.com

• Ready to make your own pizza bianca? Try this recipe at Serious Eats for Pizza Bianca
• Or if you’re coming to Rome, here’s two more Roman forni and their pizza bianca to try

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Related Articles at Ms. Adventures in Italy:

• Pizza in Naples: The Best in the World? Napoletana Pizza at Di Matteo Pizzeria
• Some history on More is Better
• Inside a Pugliese Forno (Breadmaker), part 2: Into the Oven!
• Spoleto: A Second Look
• Eat to live, ready to die?

About six months ago, a lot of you gave me very valuable feedback when I launched When I Have Time.com. The tagline for the blog is Tips, Info and How-Tos to Bridge the Gap between Meek and Geek – and that’s the aim – to share information in an accessible way for curious people who are continuously learning and sharing.

Today I’m here to tell you that I feel it’s been very successful so far and I’m so glad that I decided to launch it! My initial goal was to get away from answering these types of questions via email for a few people and open it up to whoever might have interest. (Email: select few; blog: needy masses)

I’m an organizer for the Girl Geek Dinners in Milan and we’re working hard on raising awareness and sharing information about technology and the internet among women in Italy, but you’d be surprised how many people who are already prolific on the Internet are afraid of words like router, copyright, DNS, server.

Many of the posts are driven by readers’ questions or conversations I have with people learning about technology. So if you have a question, make sure to let me know. I’ll try to answer as best I can. If you’re interested in sharing something through a guest post on When I Have Time, contact me with your idea!

Here are a few highlights in case you’re interested in seeing what kind of content is being produced on When I Have Time:

• The Quick and Dirty Guide to Getting Started with WordPress
• How to Install and Try WordPress on your Home Computer
• A Guide to Ebooks : Advantages/Disadvantages, Devices/Readers, Formats, Resources
• How I Organize my Email, Lists and Brainstorming: My Holy Trinity of Productivity
• How to Buy a Domain and What to Do With It
• A Guide to Podcasts and 5 Food and Cooking Audio Podcasts for Food Lovers
• Monthly Blog Maintenance Checklist

and from my popular “Ask the Geek” series

• Ask the Geek: How Should I Monetize my Website? Advertising And Understanding Website Conversions
• Ask the Geek: How Do I Copyright my Photos? And Should I?
• Ask The Geek : How Do I Start Building My E-Commerce Site?

And be sure and add the When I Have Time RSS feed to your blog reader! http://feeds2.feedburner.com/WhenIHaveTime or signup with your email address to receive posts via email – there are only a few per month, so you’ll have time to digest and act on what you’re reading.

Thanks to everyone for your support!

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Related Articles at Ms. Adventures in Italy:

• Announcing My New Project: When I Have Time.com
• Girl Geek Dinners Italia – Italy
• Video time…
• 101 American Foods to Try in the USA: Ebook!
• Snapshots of Italy

I’ll try not to turn this post into a rant, but I think we need to spend some time thinking about what pushes us to find the “best” of things in the world – the best pizza, the best gelato, the best cuisine? I think the last category is one that worries me the most and a discussion I encounter often living in Italy. Italians are rightly proud of their cuisine, and my ex-students often cited it as their favorite cuisine.

But often they extended it to the best cuisine in the world. This is not an attack against Italians in any way (it’s obviously not only thought or vocalized by them or just in this country), but a discussion on the need to classify, exclude or diminish the greatness of other cuisines in the world.

Best, traditional, favorite.

I personally try not to say one cuisine is better than other. I love many cuisines – Italian, Indian, Thai, Mexican, Chinese - how can you choose? And do you have to? And though I’ve traveled quite a bit (24 countries and counting) how do you judge a cuisine? By what you’re exposed to in your own country? by eating what natives cook for you? by visiting the country directly and experiencing?

I think this is the spirit with which I face “the best pizza” which is considered by many to be Napoletana pizza (sorry to pick on you, poor pizza). The birth of pizza is often attributed to Naples and it’s with a great deal of pride that Napoletana pizza is searched, consumed, and lauded. And they have a right to! It’s very very good.

Is saying American/NY pizza, very thin Roman pizza (and pizza bianca!!!) or deep dish Chicago pizzas are also very good diminish the greatness that is Napoletana pizza?

I personally don’t think so. But what do you think?

On to the napoletana pizza. We couldn’t pick a better place to start than Di Matteo pizzeria in the heart of Spaccanapoli.

My favorite pizza – in this perhaps I’m quite American – I love “pepperoni” pizza – in Italy salame piccante, please – and the hotter, the better. I even add hot oil if it’s not hot enough. They call it the “Devil” pizza – Diavola Pizza and this one was very spicy and (it was so hot, and delicious!) Look at those hot pepper – pepperoncino flakes!

Mozzarella di Bufala pizza – with mozzarella so fresh it was milky!

Here is the real attraction in Naples: the prices. Napoletana pizza is ridiculously cheap, even when compared to Milan – a Margherita will cost you double what you see below – 3 euro! Here, the price list at Di Matteo Pizzeria – a Marinara pizza for 2 euros, 50 cents!!! Tonight, we dine like kings!

If you’ve never had a fried pizza, at least one in your party should order it, just so you can have this enormous fried, steaming dough arrive at your table and you can then say to yourself, “How on earth do I start eating this?”

You don’t have to go inside Di Matteo to eat – there are numerous wonderful fried things available outside, too, and that’s the friggitoria part of the Di Matteo pizzeria.

Fried pizza eventually comes down, and is still very very delicious. Here are some smaller ones for just one euro. Forget the Euro menu at McDonald’s – this is where you can really stretch your euros.

Arancini rice balls – and crocchè - mashed potato crocchette rolled in breadcrumbs and fried – you can’t eat this cheap anywhere else!

Fried pasta – Frittatina

Small (but not that small) marinara pizza for just 1 euro

We ate way, way too much at Di Matteo – first while waiting outside and snacking on fried treats, then inside with our own pizzas and more fried treats. But it’s a wonderful problem to have.

Perhaps even the best.

Di Matteo Pizzeria
via dei Tribunali, 94, Naples

Recently Nicole from deliciousdays was in Naples and at Di Matteo, too! Check her pictures: Headed south – Naples

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Related Articles at Ms. Adventures in Italy:

• Pizza Bianca at Forno Campo de Fiori, Rome, Italy
• Some history on More is Better
• Best of Pavia
• How to Make Pappardelle Pasta
• Snapshots of Italy

One of my favorite parts of Naples is Spaccanapoli, a neighborhood deep in the heart of Naples that is full of interesting places to eat, people watch, and of course, buy figures for your presepe, Christmas nativity scenes.

There are two main streets lined with these presepe shops (as well as other touristy-like businesses). Via San Gregorio Armeno is one of these streets and the shops in the weeks leading up to Christmas approach a near frenzy of activity with the crowded streets packed full of hopeful shoppers.

The presepe is normally made of wood, and you can see some craftsman making them right in their open-door shops as you walk by. After you have the structure of your presepe, you have to fill it up! There are of course the more classic figures that you’d expect to see in a nativity scene: baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the 3 kings, and all the animals in the manger.

But why stop at just the manger? Many Italian households will build entire cities around their presepe and will take up entire tables or floor spaces with the nativity scene. Some of the nativity figurines will move like these below – taking bread out of the oven, chopping wood and doing other nativity-like activities. You can build entire populations and stories if you so desire – get crazy with your imagination!

The important thing is Baby Jesus is absent from the manager until midnight on December 24th. Usually the youngest person present will bring the Baby Jesus into the manger as the others look on.

Perhaps you hadn’t planned on adding Barack Obama to your nativity scene, but you definitely can! Below Mr. President are the words “Sono bello, sono giovane, sono abbronzato” – (I’m handsome, I’m young, I’m tanned) – words that Obama has obviously never said about himself, but Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has said this regarding Obama, directly after he won the presidency.

Sometimes though, when I looked down a particular market street, I lost track of where I was. It almost seemed like the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul, with some covered porticoes and alleyways that never end.

In Naples, the edicole sacre (sacred shrines) – also called madonnine, madonnelle, nicchie votive, santelle, capitelli  votivi, and tabernacoli – are where certain saints or other religious figures are displayed, embedded directly into buildings, courtyards and corners and become integrated with the neighborhood. Offers of prayers and candles can be placed directly at the base. The religious figure, the focus of the shrine, is usually enclosed in glass and protected slightly from the elements as you can see by the green awning above this one (below). There are so many that often you have to be looking around and up otherwise you can miss them!

This edicola sacra is obviously color-coordinated for a reason. Not all spaces are consecrated or will be devoted to the Madonna (Mary) such as this one below, but you can sometimes find local patron saints (Naples has 50!!) and photos of local residents that have passed away tucked inside the space. This resident decided the door should match the protective awning which matches Mary’s cloak.

Have you been to Naples? Love it or leave it?

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Related Articles at Ms. Adventures in Italy:

• Pizza in Naples: The Best in the World? Napoletana Pizza at Di Matteo Pizzeria
• Christmas is Coming…
• Another behind the scenes look in Puglia
• Milan Duomo at Christmas and Namaste
• Warm Fuzzies and Chocolate Easter Eggs

SARA ROSSO: Julia, you’ve had such an interesting career path: Yale, Berkeley, Stanford; from mechanical engineer to management consultant and MBA grad to bakery owner to food writer! Do you see any common themes to your career choices, and why did you decide to finally make the leap and change careers?

JULIA USHER: Well, Sara, my answer depends on which career change you’re talking about! I’ve certainly had more than my fair share. My internal logbook registers three fairly significant transitions over the years (engineer to consultant, consultant to bakery owner, and bakery owner to food writer), but let’s focus on the second one (consultant to bakery owner) since it probably appears the most radical and least explicable of the bunch.

Back in 1994 at the time of this shift, I had just moved from San Francisco to Boston to be closer to my former college sweetheart (now husband). While I was trading up in my personal life by making this cross-country migration, I unfortunately traded down professionally. I was working in a small entrepreneurial office of Bain & Company in San Francisco, but when I transferred with the company, I found myself in the much more unwieldy and bureaucratic flagship office in Boston. I suddenly had layers upon layers of bosses and much less decision-making authority. Basically, I fell off what was a fast-paced path toward promotion in San Francisco and felt lost without any senior-level support and advocacy in Boston. It became very difficult to justify working 100-plus hour weeks for the firm when the rewards were becoming increasingly fuzzy.

So, in a nutshell: I found myself pretty darn miserable, and decided that if I was going to work hard at something, it ought to be at something I love to do. I had always been an avid avocational cook and foodie, and I fortunately had some natural aptitude for baking that was cultivated from cooking alongside my mom from a very early age. With so much else changing at the time (new relationship, new residence, new outlook on life), I actually found it pretty easy to throw another ball in the air. In 1995, I quit Bain and enrolled in the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. Since then, I’ve never looked back or missed my work as a consultant – except for the nice pay, that is!

To the other part of your question about common themes: as radical as this change may seem, it really wasn’t because the success factors for each of these jobs are very similar in many ways. In order to be a great pastry chef, you need to be exacting and detail-oriented (winging measurements rarely cuts it); at the same time, you have to be resourceful when recipes don’t work out as planned, and in tune with outside influences in order to sharpen your creative edge. Likewise, with consulting, my recommendations to our corporate clients were always fueled by in-depth, detailed research. There was a lot of fact checking and re-checking involved. I was also constantly surveying and testing the marketplace to define sustainable strategies for my clients – exactly the same steps I took to develop the business plan for my bakery.

SARA ROSSO:Do you have any advice for people that find themselves at a similar crossroads?

JULIA USHER: Yes, look before you leap – that is, do your research, talk to people who have made similar forays in the past, and know what you’re getting yourself into. A transition, big or small, can be emotionally and financially unsettling if you don’t have the backing of a significant other or family members – or the money to support it. I used my savings from Bain & Company to fund my explorations at culinary school and also to jumpstart my bakery. Without these reserves (and the support of a very patient husband), my path to pastry chef would have been a lot more challenging.

On the other hand, resist over-analyzing the situation as that can lead to paralysis. Weigh the facts, but learn to trust your gut as well. You only live once. There’s no sense in going through the motions miserably or working in a job because you think it will bolster your resume or impress your friends. Work and happiness shouldn’t be mutually exclusive; the more you love what you do, the more successful and fulfilled you’ll be. Pardon me for waxing philosophically, but finding the courage to pursue my passion was a critical life lesson for me.

SARA ROSSO: The cutout cookies in your book are beautiful and exquisitely detailed – what tips do you have for someone on a) efficiently cutting / baking cutout cookies and b) using such intricate designs and color combinations?

JULIA USHER: First of all, thanks! It’s nice to know that this labor of love of mine is appreciated. You know, there’s not a lot that’s complicated about cutting, baking and decorating sugar cookies. Success with both tasks is largely dictated by proper time management and practice, practice, practice. A few technical tips can help though:

1. Don’t rush the chilling time of the dough (this gets to my time management point). The dough will roll more easily and cut more cleanly if thoroughly chilled. Proper chilling will also allow you to get by with less flour on your work surface – a good thing, as excess flour can toughen the dough and diminish flavor. I frequently re-chill the dough during the cutting process to make sure it’s at the best working consistency.
2. I also handle the dough as little as possible to keep the cutout shapes from morphing. Always transfer cutouts to a cookie sheet with a wide offset spatula that fully supports the cookie.
3. I prefer baking on the backside of thick gauge baking sheets, and ideally on a silicone baking mat. It’s easier to slide the cookies onto the backside of the pan without the sides getting in the way; plus, I find that the cookies generally bake more evenly this way. Even heat distribution is also one reason I like to bake on a mat. The other reason is that parchment paper can buckle and misshape in the heat of the oven, sometimes distorting cookie shapes.
4. As for decorating, I use royal icing for much of my work, as opposed to confectioner’s icing that others sometimes use. The protein content of the egg whites in royal icing causes it to dry much more rapidly. The egg whites also give it a higher tensile strength (here’s where my engineering background comes in) that allows the icing to stretch and behave in ways that confectioners’ icing simply will never do. Essentially, royal icing permits much finer, detailed piping work.Consistency is king, however. For best results, you’ll need to adjust the consistency of the royal icing, depending on the decorating technique you’re attempting (I describe 11 techniques in my new book Cookie Swap). Marbling, for instance, requires all icing colors to be at the same consistency. Beadwork requires a relatively loose consistency, outlining generally calls for a thicker texture, and so forth. I could go on and on here. My best advice is to check out my book, where I give recommended consistency adjustments for each of the 11 techniques.
5. One last tip on tinting icing: because consistency adjustments can take time, I prefer to use liqua-gel, gel, or paste food coloring. All are concentrated and thick. A little goes a long way, so unlike liquid food colorings, these dyes are less likely to impact the consistency of your icing. However, my favorite coloring of all is the liqua-gel type. Because it gets dispensed through a dropper, I find it far easier to control the quantity of dye added than with paste or gel food colorings. (The latter colorings most often come in lidded containers and must be doled out with a toothpick – a much less precise and often messy endeavor!)

SARA ROSSO: What about organizing this sort of decoration in a group, or doing a group decoration party like Drop-in and Decorate?

JULIA USHER: Sure, decorating in groups is always fun. I regularly teach hands-on cookie decorating classes where I set up small work stations (about 5 people per station), each equipped with all the necessary tools. This makes sharing of scarce items a little easier. Each person decorates a dozen or more cookies to take home using the various tools and cookie trinkets (sanding sugar, luster dust, stencils, etc.) at their station. A lot of the fun comes in comparing what the different people and stations end up with.

I believe I’ve heard of Lydia’s concept (Drop in and Decorate); my only caution is that many food shelters will not accept food unless it is packaged or canned or made in a certified (DOH-approved) commercial kitchen. I’ve never been able to donate cookies made in my own home – or even my commercial bakery – to a St. Louis shelter, for instance. Here, they don’t want to receive unpackaged materials.

Thank you, Julia! Cookie Swap is available at Amazon and other independent bookstores.
Julia’s photo by Karen Forsythe.

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Related Articles at Ms. Adventures in Italy:

• Fig & Chocolate Oatmeal Bars Recipe from Cookie Swap Book from Julia Usher
• The Best Holiday Cookie Swap Ever
• Pignoli Cookies from Field Guide to Cookies for Eat Christmas Cookies
• A New Project, and Needing Your Input
• Dolce Italiano: Sicilian Pistachio Cookies