Neapolitan pizza at 2,300 metres: why Italian cooking belongs in Savoie

A Neapolitan pizza in the middle of the Tarentaise can come as a surprise. It is easily explained, though, once you understand what altitude does to dough and why the Alps have always looked towards Italy.

The Alps have never been a culinary frontier

Savoie was Italian, or more precisely Piedmontese, until 1860. That history left traces in the kitchens on both sides of the watershed: crozets are not so far from the short pasta of Piedmont, polenta is eaten on both slopes, and the Little St Bernard pass has seen more recipes cross it than treaties.

Serving Italian food in Val Thorens is therefore not borrowed exoticism. It is the continuation of an old exchange, with one extra ingredient: altitude, which makes the pizzaiolo’s work considerably harder.

What altitude does to pizza dough

At 2,300 metres, atmospheric pressure falls to roughly 76 per cent of its value at sea level. In practice, dough rises faster and further: the gas bubbles produced by the yeast meet less resistance. Without adjustment you get a dough that swells quickly, falls just as quickly, and bakes into a hollow, dry crust.

The answer lies in three settings. You reduce the yeast, often by half compared with a recipe written for the lowlands. You lengthen the fermentation, which is done cold over twenty-four to forty-eight hours: time replaces yeast and develops the aromas. And you hydrate the dough slightly less, because water evaporates faster at low pressure, both in the oven and during the rest.

None of this is settled once and for all. Dry winter air, a dining room heated hard from six in the evening and the daily coming and going of the kitchen door all move the dough on, which is why the timings are checked each morning rather than written up and followed. A pizzaiolo who has worked a season at this height reads the dough by hand before reading the clock.

The bake: the real marker

A Neapolitan pizza is baked very hot and very fast: around 430 to 480°C, in sixty to ninety seconds. That thermal violence creates the cornicione, the puffed rim spotted with brown that Italians call leoparding. It also gives a base that stays supple in the middle and folds without cracking.

The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana has codified these rules since 1984: soft wheat flour, yeast, water and salt in the dough, and nothing else; San Marzano tomatoes or peeled tomatoes of equivalent quality; mozzarella di bufala or fior di latte. It is not a doctrine to follow to the letter in the mountains, but it is a sound yardstick for judging a pizza.

Recognising a pizza that is properly made

Three signs are reliable. The first is the rim: it should be puffed, open in texture, unevenly coloured; a uniformly golden rim points to a bake that was too slow. The second is the base: slightly supple, never brittle, with scorch marks underneath. The third is moisture: a Neapolitan is wetter in the centre than a Roman one, and is often eaten with a fork at first, then folded.

What you should not see: a pool of oil, a topping spilling over the edge, a base that cracks when you fold it. Those are the marks of underfermented dough or an oven that was not hot enough.

Our pizzas, and why they are what they are

Our list runs to about a dozen pizzas, served at lunch and at dinner alike. Some follow the Neapolitan tradition exactly: the Margarita, tomato and mozzarella, and nothing more. Others accept the alpine crossover, like the Savoyarde, with cream, Reblochon, potato, onion and bacon, a pizza Naples would never have invented but which the mountains call for.

Between the two sit the pizzas that name a particular Italian region: the Bronte, mortadella and pistachio cream, comes from Sicily, where the Bronte pistachio grows on the lava flows of Etna. The Tartufo belongs to winter: cream, truffle, burrata, rocket and shaved parmesan. We look at winter truffle in more detail in our piece on truffle in Italian cooking.

The products that make the difference

A pizza is a matter of three or four ingredients: there is nowhere to hide. Buffalo mozzarella brings the fat and the acidity; burrata, creamier, is placed after baking so that it does not melt away. Parmigiano Reggiano matured for twenty-four months gives the salt note and the crunch of tyrosine crystals.

It is those products, more than any trick of the hand, that explain the gap in price between a resort pizza and an industrial one. On the plate, the difference shows in three mouthfuls. The same logic governs our pasta, which we make fresh each day, as explained in our note on fresh pasta and dried pasta.

Our chef and our pizzaiolo are both Italian, which is the plainest reason of all for the shape of the menu. If you want to compare the Italian side of the house with the Savoyard side, the dinner menu sets the two out together.