I was going to reply the same thing! Pineapple and anchovies are simply fantastic on a pizza! I also like hot sauce for a splash of heat. I know what I'm having for dinner tonight!!
I prefer my pizza without fruits, thankyouverymuch. Also I'm not a fan of cheese and I like a dough with more yeast to raise for longer, at least 2/3 inches. This way I can slice it and spread whatever topping I want after it cooks. I call this pizza Pane.
Why do people want thin pizza? I think its because they are used to shitty dough. The dough is 1/3rd the of magic on a good pizza and I want to enjoy it. Could you imagine people demanding thin toast? Thin bagette? It's a ludicrous idea to me.
> I think its because they are used to shitty dough.
Whaaaaat? The best and only original Pizza is the thin stone oven baked one, please visit Naples to experience it.
The thick fake ones you can also call pizza because they are round, but it is just stuff on shitty sugar white bread, ludicrous to me you just don't eat a toast or a baguette then
> Pizza is an American invention (at least as we eat it now).
"We" meaning Americans, which are a minuscule part of world population, and a less minuscule but still small amount of world pizza eaters. It's like Venezuelans claiming baseball is a Venezuelan sport.
> Italian pizza is a completely different thing and America has spent a lot more time refining the idea of a pizza in the first place so American pizza is more advanced.
I see you got confused and used the wrong words. Instead of "refining" you probably should use "defiling", and instead of "advanced" you probably should use "degraded".
> So those flat pizzas aren't really what pizza is anymore.
I'm afraid the land of deep fried, sugar imbued everything is not in any position to claim what pizza is or is not.
This is probably the most blatant case of appropriation I've seen ever. You have every right to take a pizza and pervert it as your pleasure, but to claim that now you make the true pizza is so smug, and so ignorant that it baffles me.
As I said in other comment, I don't know why, but it is a typical American trait for some reason, being smugly ignorant.
Ignorants are everywhere, but that cultural thing, "we are the best country in the world, the chosen people" that seeps through American culture, makes American ignorants specially smug.
Perhaps you're not aware that the number of Italian-Americans is almost half of the population of Italy. My two favorite pizza shops in my town? They're both owned and run by Italian families. This is the norm, not the exception. They even grow their own tomatoes! This isn't always the case for the national pizza chains, but you'll be hard-pressed to find an American claiming these chains are their favorite pizza (sadly, they do exist - but they're not the majority!)
It was Italian Americans who developed the New York Slice. It was Sicilians who developed the Chicago Deep Dish. You call it cultural appropriation. I call it immigrants bringing their food with them and further developing it.
Does that make pizza American? Well, I've noticed most of what the english-speaking world calls "pizza" is actually a pizza of Italian-American origin, not the Neapolitan pizza hailing from Naples. I think this is what the OP was referring to.
Things have changed! I did a search of best pizza in London and all the pies pictured, save for one, was definitely Italian pizza. The one that was not was described as US-style. On the plus side - it looks like you have a lot of great pizza available to you! You can even get US-style pizza if you so desire and thank goodness it appears to be my favorite kind of American pizza - the NY slice! (they claim you can get it at Joe Public). I have the opposite problem - getting a bona fide Italian pizza in my part of the world is difficult. Then again, getting a good NY slice is difficult around here. I'm in the U.S. Midwest and our local pizza options are dominated by the Chicago style, Detroit style, and Columbus style. But the NY style and Italian styles are my favorites! You've got it made, mate!
I have been to both USA and Italy and ate the specific style of pizza in each country. I regard American pizza as a regression. When someone says pizza I assume Italian style. They can shove the American style in a place where the sun does not shine (oven!) as in I ain't paying for it. I will pay a good amount for an Italian style pizza though.
According to Wikipedia [1] the dish chicken tikka masala is thought to have been invented by Bangladeshi chefs working in the UK in the 1960s. Doesn't that make it at least somewhat British? It was invented by chefs in a different country than their own, likely then adjusted by those chefs to what they perceived that the local market wanted. In contrast, I mean, to being cooked "The Way It Has Always Been Done" in their country's tradition?
The Wiki page even mentions more classical/historical dishes from the norhern Indian area, that are thought to have inspired tikka masala. That, to me, makes it even more clear that the dish is new.
If I, as a Swedish person, move to the US and compose an awesome recipe for pizzaballs [2] where I combine Swedish meatballs with the American love for all things pizza [3] and it becomes a huge hit which is exported to the rest of the world, would that make the dish Swedish?
[2]: I'm just making up an example here on the spot.
[3]: A love which is, of course, shared by large parts of the rest of the world in our own fashion, not trying to point the finger at (a nuclear superpower of 330 M people) y'all in any way.
>According to Wikipedia [1] the dish chicken tikka masala is thought to have been invented by Bangladeshi chefs working in the UK in the 1960s. Doesn't that make it at least somewhat British?
First of all that is not a well-established origin story, but more like an urban legend. There are multiple conflicting versions of this same urban legend where multiple different restaurants claim to have invented the dish in the same way. And the restaurant chain (Moti Mahal) from one of these versions had been serving a virtually identical dish in their Delhi restaurant since the 1950s, ten years before any of these supposed origin stories. I will let you come to your own conclusions about what scope for authenticity that leaves for these stories.
>If I, as a Swedish person, move to the US and compose an awesome recipe for pizzaballs [2] where I combine Swedish meatballs with the American love for all things pizza [3] and it becomes a huge hit which is exported to the rest of the world, would that make the dish Swedish?
In your case at least you will be doing some "fusion" or "innovation" right? What exactly is the "fusion" or "innovation" in chicken tikka masala? Can anyone of sound mind actually claim that chicken tikka masala and butter chicken are two completely different dishes?
While we are making up examples on the spot, here is a more accurate one. If I start making pizzas in India and because mozzarella is hard to find here, just use processed cheese instead and may be put more chilis on top to suit Indian tastes, does the dish stop being pizza?
There has to be some reasonable limitation on how little you modify something before you get to call it a new "invention".
> If I start making pizzas in India and because mozzarella is hard to find here, just use processed cheese instead and may be put more chilis on top to suit Indian tastes, does the dish stop being pizza
No, but if you call that pizza something like Pizza Kalari would it then be wrong to say that Pizza Kalari is an Indian invention?
>No, but if you call that pizza something like Pizza Kalari would it then be wrong to say that Pizza Kalari is an Indian invention?
I already answered your question in the next line in my comment -- There has to be some reasonable limitation on how little you modify something before you get to call it a new "invention".
Besides, no Indian would feel the need to do that because, unlike the British, we are quite comfortable in our culinary identity. And most Indians would not respond well to such marketing. In fact, things like Pizza and Burger fill pretty much the exact opposite niche in India where eating very crappy versions of these western foods seems to have an aspirational value to it.
Recipe for butter chicken: roasted pieces of tandoori chicken in a tomatoey butter based sauce.
Recipe for chicken tikka masala: roasted pieces of tandoori chicken in a tomatoey cream based sauce.
As is often the case with cultural appropriation, the real innovation by the appropriator was the marketing. In my view, this is what probably happened: multiple restaurants found the fake origin story a profitable and interesting marketing tool and judging by how popular indian food is in the UK today, it obviously worked.
I have the perfect example for discussion here. "Swedish meatballs, IKEA style", by an Indian Youtube cook, made out of chicken and with ginger, garlic and garam masala. By all means, they are meatballs, but Swedish, they are not.
Well, it was created by Bangladeshi people according to Wikipedia so I'll have to go with Bangladesh. If I hade not known this then my first guess would have been India, but I prefer not to guess so I ask instead.
Oh, it says so in the Wikipedia. It certainly must be true!
Although it this case, it is not even true that the Wikipedia actually says that. Did you even read the article or are you just here to troll? Did I accidentally wander into reddit by mistake?
[The Wikipedia recounts several different versions of the urban legend. Three different sources with three different versions one where the chef was Bangladeshi, one where the chef was Indian, and another where the chef was Pakistani.]
You are free to go through my comment history and draw your own conclusions.
So now it can be from Bangladesh, India or Pakistan. It doesn't really help your case that it's an Indian dish, perhaps we should call it a Southeast Asian dish instead?
>You are free to go through my comment history and draw your own conclusions.
I can also just draw my own conclusions from the interaction I am having with you right now.
>So now it can be from Bangladesh, India or Pakistan.
No, the urban legends noted in the Wikipedia say that it could be from those places.
Butter Chicken was actually invented in Delhi in a restaurant called Moti Mahal in the early 1950s by Punjabi migrants. CTM is too similar a dish to Butter Chicken to be called a new dish, let alone an "invention".
> I can also just draw my own conclusions from the interaction I am having with you right now.
It does explain your first emotion of being offended, you seem very easily offended.
> Butter Chicken was actually invented in Delhi in a restaurant called Moti Mahal in the early 1950s by Punjabi migrants. CTM is too similar a dish to Butter Chicken to be called a new dish, let alone an "invention".
Now Chicken Tikka Masala is the same dish as Butter Chicken. Alright then.
My argument has not changed from my first comment. These were the last two sentences from it:
>If I start making pizzas in India and because mozzarella is hard to find here, just use processed cheese instead and may be put more chilis on top to suit Indian tastes, does the dish stop being pizza?
>There has to be some reasonable limitation on how little you modify something before you get to call it a new "invention".
How have I moved the goal post?
In fact I never called CTM and Butter Chicken the same dish - I called them virtually identical and too similar etc, it was a strawman you created and you then proceeded to say that I was moving the goal post when I reiterated my original position.
Please try to keep the quality of discussion higher. If I wanted to have endless discussions with argumentative people who have no ability to read, I would go on reddit.
> Can anybody of sound mind make the claim that they are completely different recipes?
!=
> Can anybody of sound mind make the claim that they are different recipes?
You seem to have it backwards, those were your words. Not mine. A little ironic for someone claiming I can't read, but alright. It would be nice if you could keep your emotions in check though, both for your and my sake.
I of course agree that they are similar, that is pretty evident. But that doesn't matter to call it a different dish, e.g. an egg sunny side up is a different dish compared to a scrambled egg even though the ingredients are exactly the same and it's prepared in the same way too, with the only difference being that the egg is mixed/destroyed.
For the sake of argument we can pretend that the sunny side up was invented in India, now a Taiwanese dude comes along and decides to scramble it. Is the new dish an Indian dish? I would disagree with that.
Also which white people? Do the Greeks or Romans count? Because if they do...
The movie industry in the united states is a culture exporter. Probably uncountable examples from just that alone. Surely some of that is both OP's definition of 'White' and appropriated outside its original countries.
I mean it's really not cultural appropriation. Pizza is one of the great American inventions. It was brought over by Italian immigrants and evolved into a main stream staple served the world over, and that's based on the American Pizza, not the Italian one. Hot dogs are similar in that way.
Sorry, but this is absolutely false. The US was not the only country to receive immigrants during the two Italian diasporas [1], and so you are not the only country to develop a taste for Italian cuisine.
Australian pizza descends directly from the Italian style. We do have the American style as well, but it's a minority preference. Our pizza usually looks like this [2]. It's also notable that Starbucks failed to make a dent here [3], because our coffee culture is truer to its Italian roots than yours.
Given the circumstances in which this happened here, it stretches credulity to imagine that the preferences for pizza across Western Europe, South America, and Africa have been filtered through American preferences when Italians have been there making pizza for just as long. Please check your exceptionalism, thanks.
I'm really, honestly curious what reasons you have to believe this. I can't imagine any. It is so much different from my view and the view of the people I usually talk to, that I can't fathom where it comes from.
Is it something you read, something you saw on youtube, your experience travelling to some countries? How do you base your assertions? I'm honestly lost and I'd like to understand.
How can you assert that "Pizza served all over the world is based on the American Pizza, not the Italian one"?
In which other countries would people think of "pizza" as the American style?
Maybe two or three in Southeast Asia. Maybe Canada, but they're weird and mostly their own thing. Don't know anything about Africa, but I would guess they're more like the rest of the world.
Almost all countries have their own variations of pizza. It's a lovely dish.
No, you have really no idea about what you are speaking about.
Doing a proper pizza is quite difficult, all the botched attempts around the world look very similar and are just an awful subpar imitation that you call pizza.
Tomatoes and peppers came from South America, so Italians (and Indians) have been using them for less time.
I think it's just best to accept the fact that almost all food was fusion at some point in time, and there's no reason to think it won't become part of a new fusion going forward.
>I think it's just best to accept the fact that almost all food was fusion at some point in time, and there's no reason to think it won't become part of a new fusion going forward.
What was the fusion in chicken tikka masala?
And come to think of it, what other new dish has the British Indian restaurant industry come up with in the 50-60 years after the chicken tikka masala. Such amazing creativity right at the very start (only a coincidence that it is 99.9% same thing as another dish being sold in Delhi for at least 10 years before) and nothing since? What an incredibly sad story.
> And come to think of it, what other new dish has the British Indian restaurant industry come up with in the 50-60 years after the chicken tikka masala.
But 50-60 years is not a long time. Things do move a lot quicker now that food import routes have made it possible to get most exotic components to most elsewhere places without growing them on-site. But take a step back on what you look at as quintessentially "local" food anywhere and there's always movement. Nations form, crumble and split, peoples migrate, etc.
As does Butter Chicken which was invented in a restaurant in Delhi at least 10 years before CTM's appearance in Britain. Butter Chicken and CTM are 99.9% the same dish. So again, I ask, where exactly is the "fusion" in CTM?
The Portuguese arrived in India in 1498 and brought tomatoes with them. It was used in Indian cooking for centuries before the invention of the CTM. Our recipes did not have to travel to Britain for them to have tomatoes.
SMH. You guys have absolutely no idea how infuriating this is. Trying to teach me about my culture as if you know anything about it.
Winner for most American comment in the thread. There are more people in the EU than the USA, and I think you'd struggle to find many who prefer Chicago Deep Dish to a nice flat Italian. But I wouldn't be surprised if one of them replied to me telling me how wrong I am.
New York is full of the more traditional base but different toppings. Lots of places in Australia are also doing the same. But grand parent is right. The popular vision of pizza is what Italian immigrants exported from the US not what was exported from Italy. And if you want to play the numbers game, go to Asia and ask them what a pizza is.
I’m not sure many people prefer the Chicago deep dish style or “Sicilian pizza”. I’ve not tried either. But dominos and Pizza Hut seem to be some in between thing.
Edit: Rereading mlidners comment and other comments, it's a bit too dismissive of Italian pizza. Italian pizza is still pizza. It's just that American pizza is also pizza. And Swedish pizza is pizza. This is what happens when food is popularised and spread across the world.
'Detroit style' ... shudder technically still pizza, but I don't get the cotton candy like dough or the typical choice of spices.
New York style is fine. California tends to have weird toppings but is also OK. Though IMO pizza requires a 'bread', tomato (usually as a sauce), and cheese, in a 'flat bread' style format.
Thick or thin can all be good, and every type is going to have it's fan, even if that person happens to hate some component or another.
I think the tomato is not totally necessary. You can get a pizza with a white sauce (Bechamel?), ricotta, and garlic at some of the places around here. I don't think it is a weird American chain thing, if I remember the story correctly my mom first encountered it overseas...
"Pizza Bianca" is very common kind of pizza in Italy: no tomato, with mozzarella, sometimes ricotta; commonly offered with a variety of toppings, often prosciutto.
There are more American types of pizza than Chicago Deep Dish (though I do love that as well). And yes the most common type of Pizza in Europe is also based on the American invented version, not the Italian one. It was reverse imported back into Europe from America.
As someone who has been looking all over Sweden for American pizza (specifically NY style for sake of variation) closer than the few Dominos franchises which exist, I'm rejecting that claim.
Neapolitan pizza is great, American pizza is great, Swedish pizza (both kebab and otherwise) is great, it's just that if you're going to claim something is "more" pizza than something else, I'm going to give it to Italy.
The only thing that the Americans invented is that cardboard stuff full of toppings that you outrageously call pizza, because you were not able to cook a proper pizza.
Nah, there are a bajillion ways of making pizza in Italy, it’s just that the thick and soft one is never round, but even the round one can be thicker or thinner depending on the local preference. It would actually be interesting to find out if the American style of pizza was influenced by a traditional Sicilian pizza called “sfincione” which is still very popular, given the strong Sicilian component of Italian immigration in the US.
My two favorite pizzas (Grimaldi’s brick oven and Giordano’s stuffed) have excellent dough and thin crusts. The crisp crunch and carbonization of a brick oven crust adds texture and flavor. The buttery decadence of a stuffed pizza crust is not unlike a pie crust - a bit of salt and carbs to offset the sweet acidity of the filling. My mouth is watering just thinking of them.
I can imagine people demanding thin crackers, or thin tortillas.
The dough must be pretty thin to be 1/3 of the overall pizza, if the sauce is too thick, you have essentially pizza soup -- and Chicago deep-dish pizza is an entirely regional affair.
For most pizza I think the flavor is in the surface rather than the volume.
Surely you don't think I meant that you MUST split a pizza into 1 third dough, 1 third sauce, 1 third cheese. That would be hilarious, and yeah pretty close to maybe Chicago style (which is excellent), but not at all what the intent of my comment was.
And I've had pizza soup. It was a soup made with standard north american pizza ingredients. It was marvelous.
Man, you seem to have a lot of hot takes on pizza here with zero evidence. As a Canadian I will take my thin pizza, not everything needs to be "American". Disgusting.
As European that looks like very very small salami almost closer to kielbasa, I'm regularly preparing pizza, maybe if you used bigger salami (diameter) it would be less likely to curly, smaller the diameter, more likely to curl. Salami (6-7cm?) curls for me very little while kielbasa (~3cm?) is much more likely to curl, naturally this can be avoided by cutting thicker pieces.
Just let me say what a disappointment it was when I ordered a pepperoni pizza after a long flight, expecting lovely sausage but got a bunch of bell peppers on there instead...
I can imagine it must be just as bad for a vegetarian experiencing the reverse situation.
What it should look like is [...] "picture of burned pepperoni". I don't eat pepperoni but either way we disagree here. Yes sometimes parts of a pizza get burned. We don't eat those parts. But whereas that appears feasible with a part of dough, it does not with a topping like that.
What the US call "pepperoni" is "salame piccante" in Italy.
Peperone (without the double p, one peperone, two or more peperoni) is the green/yellow/red (not spicy) vegetable that in english is called pepper (undistinguished from "pepper", the spicy grains that in Italian are called "pepe").
Salame piccante in italy has 0% to do with the crap passed as pepperoni in US pizzas. It's a traditional salami (cured meat). The same way Sprite is not champagne.
>Pepperoni does not exist as an Italian word.
I know, I speak the language. Peperoni however, where the name for the topping was copied from, does, and is the plural for a kind of pepper (bell pepper).
Peperoni or pepperoni (which is often referred in both "p" and "pp" version in the US), is obviously a copy of the italian word "peperone", out of context, to make it sound as this crap is some traditional italian ingredient.
>The terms bell pepper (US, Canada, Philippines), pepper or sweet pepper (UK, Ireland, South Africa, Zimbabwe), and capsicum (Australia, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) are often used for any of the large bell-shaped peppers, regardless of their color. The fruit is simply referred to as a "pepper", or additionally by color ("green pepper" or red, yellow, orange, purple, brown, black).[6] In the Midland region of the U.S., bell peppers, either fresh or when stuffed and pickled, are sometimes called mangoes.
>Most cured meat products are ways to preserve cheaper cuts of meat for a long time.
Which is neither here, nor there. We're a long from that being the only case, in italy, france, spain, etc. there are cured meat products that cost more than your house (well, close enough), as well as tons of excellent, well prepared, well aged, high quality cured meat.
"Pepperoni" is not that. It's the cured meat equivalent of spray cheese.
And there is absolute crap cured meat in those countries too. The most disgusting pizza I've ever had was a Dr Oetker's frozen pizza with gross salami as topping. Seems like the brand is sold in Italy: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2005856/Ristorante-...
My point is that every country has good and bad food. You can find some of the worst “cheese” in the us, but also amazing artisan kinds that is is exuberantly priced. American country ham has won over Parma and iberico in blind tests by experts. There isn’t one Italy or one United States or one Sweden. It all depends on where you look…
I don't remember the exact chemical reaction names, but pepperoni shouldn't really be heated like this anymore. I think the reason is that some of the resulting chemicals are cancerogene.
Heated like what? Do you mean in an oven, or in a manner in which part of it chars?
I haven't heard anything specific to pepperoni; but I have heard that about charred meat generally (primarily beef), but there are so many confounding factors in everything from genetics to temperature to cooking method to cut of meat it's all but a worthless statement.
As with all things the size of the effect matters. There are many risks I’m willing to take and unless the expected value of eating a pizza sometimes is going to take years off my life, I just don’t care (and I’m thinking of buying a motorcycle so it’s not like very many risks actually matter any more)
The charring, yes. Some of the salts used in curing salami undergo some unfavourable reactions what I remember. So it is much more specific than red meat in general.
The only way to avoid this is to cook meats low and slow - which results in frankly unfavorable texture characteristics for pork products like bacon and pepperoni.
