PIZZA MY WORLD
Pizza My
World Brigi Stamber (pictured right), pizza chef and company manager at Pizzaface (named Pizza of the Year at the Casual Dining Magazine Pizza Awards 2019).
MORNING First thing in the morning I usually head to our Kemptown store. The Kemptown store was the first Pizzaface opened just over a decade ago. We now have three stores spread across Kemptown, in Central Brighton, nearby Hove and Worthing, which is a neighbouring town a few miles along the South Coast. We see ourselves as one big family and take pride in looking after our team. Kemptown looks so tiny with a small upstairs where this is just about enough room for the oven and the staff. Downstairs, however, is pretty huge. There are two walk-in fridges, two kitchens and a large storage area. We tend to get most things delivered by pallet, and have a fold down slide that goes down the stairs and makes things so much easier to get in. 28
I go through the walk-in fridge and check all of our ingredients and rotate the stock. Sourcing high quality fresh ingredients is extremely important to us. We get all our Wild Boar and Lamb prosciutto direct from Sardinia, and only have a one to two-week lead time on placing the orders, which means that we have to keep well on top of the stock levels to ensure people have delicious toppings for their pizzas. There is a large delivery of flour that has arrived from Eurostar Commodities. We’ve worked with Eurostar for many years because they share many of our values. They are a family business based in Yorkshire, but they have been bringing in fine and high quality ingredients for more than 25 years. They exclusively distribute very
high quality flour from Grandi Molini Italiani in the UK. We’ve developed our own recipe and mix for our dough (which is secret of course!), but what I can say is that we’ve been very impressed with their Pizza Dorata, Verace and Italiani flours. We also source high quality Italian tomatoes from Eurostar Commodities Della Terra range, and we find that these are really excellent tomatoes. We use them just on their own, and we also have some additions that we add to give our pizza our signature flavour and taste. They are a really excellent base for sauces and we find Eurostar Commodities totally reliable and consistent. We make dough every day. The technique can vary because we find Kemptown is very hot, and the other restaurants are not so much so we November 2020
