Looking for Pizza in Larnaca? Start With How the Dough Was Made
A map can tell you which pizzeria is closest. It cannot tell you what happened to the flour two days before you sat down.
"Pizza near me" answers the easy part
If you typed pizza near me and ended up here, the search engine did the simple half of the work. It measured distance. Distance is the one thing about a pizza that has nothing to do with the pizza.
The harder half is not visible on a map, and it is not visible in a photo either. A photograph shows the top of a pizza. The part that decides how it eats — how it folds, how it chews, what it tastes of when the tomato is gone — was settled two days earlier, in a bowl, before anyone knew you were coming.
So here is a different starting point. Ask how the dough was made. It is a question you can ask in any pizzeria, in any town, and the answer tells you more than a rating ever will.
What a biga is, in plain words
A biga is a piece of dough you make before you make the dough. Flour, water and a small amount of yeast are mixed stiff and left alone. Later that mixture goes into the final mix. Bakers call this kind of head start a preferment; Harold McGee describes the family of them in On Food and Cooking, along with why time in a dough is not dead time.
At Filomena the biga runs for 48 hours. That is the whole trick, and it is not a trick. Fermentation is slow work by small organisms, and slow work produces flavour compounds that fast work does not have time to produce. You can raise a dough in two hours with more yeast. It will rise. It will taste like a dough that rose in two hours.
You do not need to remember the word biga. You need to know that somebody decided to wait two days for something that could have been done before lunch.
77% hydration is a ratio, not a grade
Hydration is the weight of the water compared with the weight of the flour. At 77%, there are 77 grams of water for every 100 grams of flour. That is a wet dough. Wet dough is slack, it sticks, and it does not sit politely on a bench waiting to be shaped.
The reason to accept that trouble is what the water does in the oven. More water means more steam, and steam is what pushes the rim up and leaves the open, uneven holes you see when a slice is held sideways. A drier dough is easier to work with and comes out tighter.
So the number is a choice about difficulty, not a score. Nobody is winning anything at 77%. Somebody is just doing more work with a stickier dough.
The things that do not change between visits
The tomatoes are San Marzano and the mozzarella is fior di latte. Both come from Italy. The oven is copper, gas-fired, and runs at 400 degrees — Neapolitan pizza is a form built around a hot oven and a short bake, which is why the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana writes its rules around the oven at all; they publish them at pizzanapoletana.org.
The pizzaiolo is Daniele, born in Naples in 1989. He does not take the shortcut that saves ten minutes. That is the single sentence that explains the 48 hours.
What does change is the wine. The natural wine list rotates, so no page here will tell you which bottle is open tonight. Each bottle and each grape has its own page instead, and you can read them before you come or ask when you are sitting down. Not knowing is a normal way to arrive.
Come and eat, then judge
Filomena is at 1 Aristotelous, Larnaca. We are open Tuesday to Sunday, 18:00 to 22:00, and closed on Monday. The site is written in English, Italian and Greek, so read it in whichever one you think in. If you want to see what came out of the oven lately, that is on Instagram at @filomena.pizzeria.napoletana.
Questions people bring to the table
Q.What is a biga?
A stiff mixture of flour, water and yeast made before the final dough and left to ferment, then mixed in. It is a head start given to the dough. Filomena's runs for 48 hours.
Q.What does 77% hydration mean?
Seventy-seven grams of water for every hundred grams of flour. It makes a wet, slack dough that is harder to handle and produces more steam in the oven.
Q.Do I need to know anything about pizza or wine to eat here?
No. You can order without a vocabulary and ask whatever you like at the table. The pages on this site exist so that knowing is optional, not required.
Q.When are you open?
Tuesday to Sunday, from 18:00 to 22:00. Closed on Monday. The address is 1 Aristotelous, Larnaca.