Despite the simplicity of pizza – a food that at its most basic is comprised of flat bread, tomato sauce and cheese – feelings about this beloved food are complex. After all, pizza is food. And eating is a sensual experience that not only sustains us physically but also is inexorably tied to memory and emotion. The qualities people most appreciate can also be strongly influenced by the region in which they grew up or where they first had pizza. There is a surprising diversity of pizza-making methods in the US and, like salmon instinctively returning to home waters to spawn, people tend to go back to the flavors and textures of childhood. This can complicate efforts to calibrate opinions on what constitutes a great pizza.
My own preference for pizza is informed by the experience of growing up in an Italian-American household in the Boston area and, later, from living in New York City. It would be impossible to tally the number of different pizzas I’ve tasted in my life ― from limp, freezer-to-microwave pizzas, to slices grabbed at hockey games, to assembly line delivery pizzas from corporate chains, on up to pizzas handmade by my Naples-born great-aunts, pizzas baked in coal-fired ovens in New York’s Greenwich Village, even pies I’ve eaten in Italy.
Spend five minutes with anyone discussing this simple, accessible food and you’ll quickly learn how complicated the subject of pizza can be. It is fitting, then, that trying to distill the origin of pizza is a similar exercise in futility, as historians have widely divergent opinions about its provenance.
What experts do agree on is that pizza was probably born centuries ago around the Mediterranean. Records stretching back to the ancient Greeks, Romans and Persians contain references to flatbread on which oils and a herbs were cooked and eaten. Tomatoes – a completely New World food – were brought back to Europe sometime in the 16th century. But they didn’t make it onto the flatbreads until years later, as their relation to the Nightshade family led many to consider them poisonous. (Thomas Jefferson is often credited for helping to dispel that myth.)
When bread, tomatoes, herbs and cheese were finally united, only then did pizza cement its place in culinary history. Today there is still great regional diversity in the interpretation of pizza, even in Italy, the relatively small country that gets the most credit for inventing it.
Our modern pizzas are probably most closely related to those that originated in Naples and made by Italians who immigrated to the Northeastern United States in the early 20th century. At its genesis, pizza was made simply with a few cheap, readily available ingredients. But as with most American food, pizza was quickly appropriated and then re-imagined. Its popularity exploded around the middle of the last century, especially when GI’s returned from Italy after the war with a taste for what they had sampled abroad. Greek immigrants put their own spin on it and helped to spread its availability nationwide. Whereas Italian immigrants preferred a thin, stone-oven crust that could be folded, Greeks added more oil to the crust and baked their pizzas in pans.
As it proliferated, pizza was adapted regionally to suit local tastes. Some Rhode Islanders grilled their pizza crusts. In Philadelphia, a cheese-less version with only tomato and herbs became popular. Chicago came to be known for its deep-dish version. In the 1980s, California cuisine introduced Americans to Thai chicken pizza, taco pizza, BBQ chicken, and even a bacon-cheeseburger version. Multiculturalism brought together Canadian bacon with Hawaiian pineapple for a savory-sweet pizza that is now wildly popular in Australia. What took Europeans centuries to develop, the bounty of America advanced and amplified in only a few decades.
However, with reinterpretation and innovation also came commoditization. In order for corporate chains to get pizzas on every street corner and in supermarket freezers, the noble pizza had to compromise its flavor, quality and nutrition. What started in Italy as healthy thin-crust pizza, with fresh ingredients, low-fat mozzarella cheese, olive oil, and lycopene-rich tomatoes, eventually devolved into salt and fat-laden monsters.
Fortunately, pizza has recently rediscovered its artisan roots, and has enjoyed something of an authenticity renaissance over the past several years. Here in Seattle there is no shortage of pizzerias – places like Via Tribunali and Tutta Bella – that with wood-fired stone ovens have endeavored to celebrate the classic qualities of authentic Neapolitan pizzas.
Though there are still many pizza diehards who lament the fact that Seattle's pizza falls far short of their experiences with New York City pizza, many native Seattlites eagerly recommend pizzerias tucked into obscure places all over the City. "Rubbish" say the East Coasters who seem to harbor the fatalistic notion that Seattle does not have any pizzas that even come close to the best pizzas they’ve had in New York. They reason that the composition of the water prevents the crust from being right.
There may be something to this hypothesis. A recent article in Wired Magazine chronicled the trails of chef Mario Batali, who is trying to perfect a NY-style pizza at his Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles. Much of his focus has been on the chemical composition of the water. His work has also analyzed the harder-to-quantify taste characteristics that are imparted to pizzas by coal-burning ovens in which pizzas have been baked for decades.
That someone of Batali's stature is working on it is comforting. The only thing that is certain is that it is an exercise in futility to try to get people to agree on a definitive pizza experience, simply because people have had lifetimes of vastly different pizza experiences and tend to favor those style that they knew from near home. And whatever its origins, in the way that American culture has of appropriating the best parts of the world, pizza has in modern times become a food associated with the USA.
Perfect homemade pizza was never that easy to make; read the article below:
http://hubpages.com/hub/-The-Perfect-Homemade-Pizza
Posted by: shahzad yaqoob | May 31, 2010 at 02:32 PM