Showing posts with label Pizza. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pizza. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Voyage au centre de la Pizza (9):
Pizza romana
This week-end we've been visiting Rome, so it's finally time to update my brief compendium about pizza.
And finally, after two episodes (I, II) talking about not Italian pizzas, I can finally talk about a real one!
So...
Pizza in Rome is pretty different from the usual Napoletan pizza.
Its round pie is very thin and crusty, much more than its sister from Naples.
The dough is made by wheat flour, water, yeast, olive oil and salt (so not other American crap such as vegetable oil or high proteinic content flour) mixed together to give a very hard and steady dough.
One of the most tipical kind of pizza you can find in Rome is the so called pizza Napoli, guarnished with tomato, mozzarella and anchovies. The funny thing is that this kind of pizza is called pizza romana elsewhere in Italy, but not in Rome.
Then of course you can find all kind of toppings on you pizza.
Honourable mention the pizza al taglio.
This is pizza cooked in rectangular metal pans and sold in square slices.
The dough of this kind of pizza is usually more watery so to resist longer and not to become dry, and to be also re-warmed up without loosing any taste.
The pizza al taglio is actually sold all over around Italy (and nosonly) but in Rome it's very particular.
It's in fact prepared with the usual crunchy roman dough that makes it very tasty, with a thin ciabatta-like shape.
It's then usually sold by weight and not by slice.
So then, after two years in Holland I really enjoyed a (couple of) real good pizza.
And the pizza in Rome was pretty good indeed, even if I probably preferred the one al taglio.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Voyage au centre de la Pizza (2):
New Haven-style apizza
Two weeks ago I was fighting boredom watching growing little turkeys out of my window at the BNL dorm. After getting acquainted with a couple of them I decided my life needed something more.
So I contacted Ji, a Chinese friend of mine working in Massachusetts, and we decided to meet somewhere in between his place and Long Island.
After a quick check on Wikipedia I found the perfect meeting point: New Haven, Connecticut.
Besides being the city of the Yale University, this small city is also the home of the "best pizza out of Italy": the New Haven-style apizza.
This pizza is served by a series of small restaurants in the town's Little Italy, most of them owned by the descendant of an Italian immigrant, Frank Pepe, that in 1925 brought his Naples-style pizza in Connecticut.
A funny thing is that this geographically limited style of pizza is known as apizza, obviously coming from the dialectal form a pizz.
So we went there (pics are here) and we tried the famous white pie and the Mozzarella pie from Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana.
New Haven-style apizza is different from the other "pizzas" you can have in the States.
Firts it's not perfectly round but it has a more usual (in Italy) irregular rounded form.
It is traditionally baked in a coal- or wood-fired brick oven and it presents a thin crust with a dark, “scorched” crisp crust (more Italian like).
It is typically sold whole rather than by the slice.
At the end the New Haven apizza is technically pretty similar to the pizza we're used to in Italy, the only problem remaining the ingredients: the flour for the dough is still to much Amerikan style and they drown the pizza with a load of vegetable oil which makes it very heavy and it ruins the taste of an otherwise pretty good dish.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Voyage au centre de la Pizza (1):
New York-style pizza
According to a relevant number of physicists, pizza is the best dish in the world.
Moreover it's the pillar on which our marriage is based; so I decided to start a series of posts about it.
Yes, I know that the only real pizza is the one from Naples but as you should know every journey to the center of something starts with one step from far far away, that's why I started from NY (even because last week I was there and I was deadly bored so I needed to find a reason for life).
So... of course pizza is pretty popular in the U.S. due to the wide influence of Italian immigrants in American culture and they (the Americans) developed (shall we call this development?) a large number of regional forms of pizza, some of them scarcely resembling the real one.
One of the most famous un-real American pizzas is the New York-style pizza.
It differs from the Italian one in both shape and ingredients.
The shape is typically perfectly round due to the fact they cook it in a wide (round) pan. To me this makes it loose a lot of its lovable rough appearance, but ok, they are perfect so they have to cook a perfect shaped pizza.
It is also huge and usually served in slices.
The other main difference are the ingredients of the dough (what they call crust). American pizza has vegetable oil or shortening mixed into the dough; moreover it is made with a very high-gluten flour (13–14% protein content).
This allows the dough to be stretched rather thinly and the pizza becomes not so thick even without using a wood stove (which is btw never used).
But of course this make the pizza very fatty and tasting like a bagel rather than a real pizza.
About the toppings: the typical New York-style pizza is the pepperoni pizza which does not mean it's made with bell peppers (peperoni in Italian) but with a spicy salame (salamino piccante in Italian) and some loads of vegetable oil.
At the end it's not the worse pizza-like snack I tasted out of Italy (and this says a lot), but of course it's not pizza.
PS: I'd like to stress that I'm strongly convinced that Naples' pizza is the only real one. But since I'm from the north of Italy my judgments could be biased (my reference point is the epic and heartily missed Pizzeria da Ciccio in Monfalcone). So if someone feels to object on some bullshit I said, please feel free to do it. The world will be thankful.
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