Colored Dough Spices Up Pizza

Via Della Pace Pizza in New York City has jumped onto the multicolored food trend with its red, yellow, black and green pizza doughs.

New Yorkers appear to be over the rainbow for multicolored foodstuffs right now, The Village Voice reported. Cake pops, milkshakes, and bagels have all turned Technicolor, appearing in vibrant splashes in contrast to the gray doldrums of winter. It was only a matter of time before pizza got in on the act.

“We’re thinking big, thinking crazy,” admited Giovanni Bartocci, co-owner of Via Della Pace Pizza and self-confessed pizza fanatic. “I’m pizza addicted! I could keep talking about pizzas for hours. I think about it all the time. I’m from Rome, so I’ve been making pizza most of my life. I just thought, how about trying something new?”

For Bartocci, that something is colored pizza dough. And not subtly hued either: it’s bold red, sunny yellow, pitch-black, and vivid green, the Village Voice reported.

“How the world is right now, we need some brightness in our lives,” explained Bartocci to The Village Voice. “That’s when we started experimenting.”

While these pizzas seem gimmicky, quality ingredients and sheer craft keep them mostly on the right side. “Just like our regular pizzas, they have a thin, crisp base with some light char, and beautiful fresh, seasonal toppings,” said Bartocci. “The color just adds to the fun. And, honestly, adds to the flavor, too.”

“We use only natural colors, of course,” Bartocci said. “We started by using the same ingredients we would use to color pasta dough. Squid ink for black, spinach for green, saffron for yellow. Our chef, Giovanni Nasti, really wanted to do a red dough, but beets still looked washed out, and not as vibrant as we wanted. He worked really hard on it, eventually discovering that we could keep the beets in, but also replace the water with a great Barolo from Italy. You can really taste it in the finished pizza. It’s not just there for color. It’s got a freshness and a lovely deep flavor.

“I think people might order these pizzas as an experiment at first,” said Bartocci, “but then, they stand up for themselves. They make you think again. The dough is light, and the toppings sing out. Right now, I love the black ink pizza with salmon, red cabbage, poppy seeds, sour cream, and chive. Not at all traditional, but very interesting and beautiful, and most important of all delicious!”