Born into the Balinese family that owns the Casa Luna Group of restaurants, 27-year-old Krishna Suardana clearly takes cooking seriously. Krishna is the son of Janet De Neefe – the legendary Australian founder of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival and the Ubud Food Festival, and a Balinese father, Ketut Suardana – the hard-driving business cohort of De Neefe.
Krishna returned from tertiary studies at Melbourne’s Swinburne University to assume a management position in the family’s culinary concerns. And, although trained in management and commerce, Krishna abandons his office desk every weekend to lace up his apron and stoke the flames of the wood-fired brick ovens he personally installed at the Indus Restaurant in central Ubud.
Passionate about pizza, Krishna immersed himself in the art of Pizza Napoletana or Naples-style pizza during an extended trip to visit his sister studying in Italy.
Because of the Napoli genre of pizza’s hallowed inclusion on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage and protection as a Traditional Specialty Guaranteed Product (TSG) in the European Union, purists will argue that only pizzas assembled with tomatoes grown on Mount Vesuvius’ volcanic plain and made with Mozzarella di Bufala Campana can genuinely claim a Neopolitan branding.
And while these culinary purists have their point, the Neopolitan Pizza is, after all, the precursor of the world-renowned New York Style Pizza brought by Italian immigrants to the USA. In Bali, the close culinary cousin of the Neopolitan pizza now available in Ubud, comes courtesy of one of the Island’s native sons, after a careful and studious sojourn in Italy. And to earn the right to call their pizzas Neopolitan – no effort is spared in sourcing only the finest of ingredients.
Using precise ratios of hearty wheat flour and yeast, the resulting dough must be kneaded, ideally by hand, at a slow and steady cadence. Allowed to rise to a proper consistency, the dough is then shaped by hand to a thickness of no more than 3-millimeters, after which toppings and sauces are added to be cooked in a wood-fired brick oven at 485 degree Celsius for as little as 1 to 1.5 minutes.
While Krishna presents a traditional range of Neopolitan Pizzas, he also presents bold delicious local variants that include a locally inspired Crispy Ayam Kremes and Babi Kecap.
An outstanding pizza range is prepared by Krishna and his team at Indus each Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 12:00 noon until 9:00 pm.
Priced starting from Rp. 50,000 each, free delivery is available in the Ubud area.
From Bali Discovery
