Cooked at 1,000 degrees Celsius: Guatemala’s volcanic pizza

Guatemala’s Pacaya volcano has been erupting since February, protecting local communities and authorities on high alert.

But for David Garcia, the streams of molten lava oozing down the mountainside hang change into his kitchen.

Garcia, a 34-year-used accountant, serves up “Pacaya Pizza” cooked on the smouldering volcanic rock to awed tourists and locals.

“Many folks at the present time attain to revel in the abilities of ingesting pizza made on volcanic heat,” Garcia told AFP from a rocky mutter that outcomes in the Pacaya crater, and which he’s converted into his put of living of enterprise.

In his makeshift kitchen, Garcia spreads the dough on a steel platter that can face up to temperatures as much as 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit), slathers it with tomato sauce, a generous serving to of cheese and pieces of meat.

Carrying protective clothing from head to his military model boots, Garcia locations the pizza on the lava.

“It be done, appropriate let the cheese soften some more,” he announces 10 minutes later.

“That pizza looks so factual!” exclaims one in all the tourists because the cheese bubbles.

Garcia’s kitchen has change into a focus for tourists that work up a shuffle for food ice climbing the huge volcano—one in all three moving ones in Guatemala—located appropriate 25 kilometers (15 miles) south of the capital.

‘Easiest’ in Guatemala

He first began baking pizzas on the mountain side in 2013 in microscopic caverns he chanced on amongst the rocks.

“I did no longer sell much the first few days,” stated Garcia, whose reputation has now unfold all the diagram by diagram of social media.

In fresh weeks, with Pacaya in most cases spitting out molten rock, he began cooking the pizzas at as soon as on the provocative lava, about a of which has attain discontinuance to population services.

It be a doubtlessly hazardous endeavor given the plumes of volcanic ash blasted into the sky by the wrathful beast, to which some local villagers pray, pleading with it to desist.

“Having a pizza cooked in the embers of a volcano is suggestions-blowing and unfamiliar in the total world,” stated Felipe Aldana, a vacationer attempting out one in all Garcia’s specialities.

He chanced on about in regards to the pizza joint on Fb and conception: “I truly hang to hang this abilities.”

“It be ridiculous appropriate pondering that you simply can be pleased one thing cooked on lava, nonetheless it is one thing that it is doubtless you’ll presumably well presumably also glimpse finest right here” in Guatemala, stated Kelt Van Meurs, a Dutch visitor.

© 2021 AFP