Italian chef spins pizzas in acrobatic style at Chennai mall

CHENNAI: Spin, twirl, fly and float… the things dough can do in the hands of pizza acrobat Pasqualino Barbasso! The chef, known world over for his skills with pizza dough, was brought in to Phoenix MarketCity on January 31 to show off his range of gravity-defying moves.
Barbasso was awarded Sicily’s Acrobatic Pizza Championship in 1998 and famed World Champion in 2001 and 2002 consecutively.

Barbasso says he started practising acrobatic pizza when he was 17, in his family restaurant in Sicily. “It was the beginning of my career and started off just as a past time. Now I not only gratify a customer with the taste of my pizza but also with my acrobatics with it,” says Barbasso, who adds that hundreds of hours of practice have gone into making him a master at the craft.



The widest pizza he has spun has been two meters in diameter, but it isn’t the size of the pizza that fascinates his customers but is the performance. The dough he uses in his pizza jive is different from the one he uses to create his pizza bases. The former needs to be tougher to withstand being thrown about.