h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Pizza, the best food in the world. - A1079633
Author: Zarking Fardwarks - U226723

Pizza mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm tasty.

Hello

Just a quick comment straight off the bat, but isn't Italy (or at least a collection of traditional italian restaurants in Rome) trying to get Pizza defined as a some sort of protected food, so only correct topping types cooked in a traditional pizza oven gets called pizza. As you can imagine the US pizza company is throwing every senitor they own at the US government to get them to try and stop this.

Researcher PSG

I think that this could be regarded as an update to A137657.

My first suggestion would be to change the title to just 'Pizza'. 'The best food in the world' is certainly subjective, and Edited Entries should be impartial.

RhoMuNuQ

Opinion? The first line of A137657 is 'Pizza: the second most important invention on Earth.'

A lot of earlier entries were very opinion driven

If A137657 was submitted to Peer Review today, it wouldn't be accepted for the Edited Guide without a total rewrite! That's why I'd regard this entry as an update to it.

RhoMuNuQ

I know. It would be a nice update. Perhaps submit this to Update hq?

In order for this to be a comprehensive entry on the formidable food that is pizza it should include more information on pizzas as a whole, not just in Britain. You mention that it originated in Italy and was greatly expanded upon in America but most of your facts concern only pizza in Britain.

Likewise I can only offer information on pizza in America because that's the only place I've experienced it. Here are some things you might consider including:

Pizza is commonly available in 8" 14" and 16" sizes as well, and can be round or square (rectangular). Crusts also come in a variety of styles, among them thin (like a cracker), hand-tossed (literally thrown in the air instead of rolled out on a board, this tends to rise a bit during baking), pan (very thick, usually at least an inch thick), and deep-dish (made in a pan but only a quarter of the thickness with more room for toppings). Pizza can be cut in wedges or squares and some people are very picky about which kind of cut they prefer.

In your popular pizza toppings section you've listed Mozzerella and String cheese, in my opinion these are the same thing. Provolone is another popular cheese for pizzas, as is cheddar. Also, while I don't have any statistics to back this up I would guess that sausage and pepperoni are the two most popular toppings.

Including a recipe is a great idea , but you might also mention that you can get pizza crust mix or whole pizza kits (but the kits are never as good as home-made or parlor-made).

You mentioned that pizzas are available in most grocers (i think), but over here they can be 'deli-style' pizzas which are made in-store and sold fresh for baking OR they can be 'frozen' which are pre-packaged and distributed by a number of different companies. You also completely failed to mention delivery, without which most Americans would probably never eat pizza.


On the other end of all this is Italian pizza, which I've never tried. I know that America didn't invent pizza, but we do have a standard and I've been told that real, true Italian pizza is indescribably bland in comparison. I've always found that a little hard to believe since most other Italian food is so wonderfully flavorful. Could you include something about how different kinds of pizza compare to the "original" Italian style?

Hope I've given you some helpful information . The entry you have is a great start, but I think it lacks a lot of information that would make it *the* definitive entry on Pizza. Good luck with it! If I can help at all I'd be happy to, just ask

(by the way, none of the information I gave is included in the original pizza entry either)

As shown in post 7, this entry's also not yet ready for the Edited Guide. I personally think it would be best to let it, and similar entries, go through Peer Review in the same way as any other entry before replacing the existing entry with the update.

RhoMuNuQ

I think this one really needs a lot of work yet...

"Pizza is a brilliant food, it can be any flavour, look any way you like and will always taste absolutely delicious."
No it jolly well won't. I've had plenty of *really* bad pizzas, mostly from pizza delivery companies, often from establishments who have the nerve to call themselves pizzarias. The stuff they chuck at you resembles a pizza the way that a bowl of petunias resembles a sperm whale.

"Pizza is originally an Italian dish..." and then "...an Italian food originating in the Mediterranean in Italy or Greece"
Which one?

"Pizza comes in many forms, here are a few."
The list given are all processed, convenience food type pizzas. How about a mention there of home made pizza? I'm a little dubious about describing pizzas simply by size or microwaveability. When asked to describe what forms pizza comes in, I would be hard pressed to describe anything other than 'round'.

"3. Tomato puree, soft blended tomatoes, usually found in tubes."
Heavens no . The tomato you put on pizza should be a cooked tomato sauce. You really shouldn't squeeze tomato puree out of a tube onto pizza dough. What a ghastly suggestion!

"9. Mushrooms, not poisonous ones."


"Originally they were thought to be poisonous, but later became accepted and added to pizza."
So pizzas were around before tomatoes? What was put on them before tomato sauce?

"Pizza fact.
It is estimated that Americans eat 9 ACRES of pizza a day."
If it's estimated, it can't be a fact.

Here are two pizza-related quotes from a tv chef who is actually worth his salt (no pun intended) and who deserves some respect - Alton Brown :

"Americans spend about 20 billion dollars a year on pizza. That would suggest that about, oh, 19 billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million of that actually goes towards placebo pizzas: palate deadening disks who long ago, sold their soul in the name of fast food. Which is kind of ironic when you consider the fact that time is one of the crucial ingredients of quality pizza."

and...

"Please repeat after me, "toppings do not great pizza make." Behold, the American pizza. More often than not, all these strata - raw vegetables, salty meats, insipid cheese foods, and innocuous sauce - really only mask a deeper deficiency that's right here - crust with all the flavor and texture of a mouse pad. Truth is, if you start with the right crust, it will take very few toppings to get you to pizza perfection."

And here's his pizza recipe:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_13823,00.html

>>When asked to describe what forms pizza comes in, I would be hard pressed to describe anything other than 'round'...

If I should ever have the honour of meeting you, Gosho, I should be delighted to take you for a 'square' pizza

>>"toppings do not great pizza make." Behold, the American pizza... Truth is, if you start with the right crust, it will take very few toppings to get you to pizza perfection."

Then again, sometimes all that junk just tastes good together, whether it be because of or in spite of the crust .

Now I'm stuck on pizza again, I guess I'll have to make one for dinner this week.

>>When asked to describe what forms pizza comes in, I would be hard pressed to describe anything other than 'round'...

If I should ever have the honour of meeting you, Gosho, I should be delighted to take you for a 'square' pizza

>>"toppings do not great pizza make." Behold, the American pizza... Truth is, if you start with the right crust, it will take very few toppings to get you to pizza perfection."

Then again, sometimes all that junk just tastes good together, whether it be because of or in spite of the crust .

Now I'm stuck on pizza again, I guess I'll have to make one for dinner this week.

The honour would be all mine Miloso

I've had a square pizza as it happens - a delivery pizza, about 20 years ago, in Detroit. Too long ago to recall whether it was any good.

I wouldn't say no to another though


Scout

While the original edited entry on Pizza might have been opinionated and short, it was much better written than this one. There are a lot of places where it needs to be tidied up. For example, you say that pizza is basically an Italian dish which comes from Italy or Greece. If it comes from Greece (which the Greeks claim), then it can't be Italian. If it comes from Italy (which the Italians claim), then you don't have to say that it is Italian.

Cheese is not an essential ingredient of pizza. While almost all pizzas do in fact have cheese, there are some that don't, and they are still pizzas. Tomato, on the other hand, is essential. If it doesn't have tomato, it is not called pizza.

The most important factor in good pizza is the base: this is what makes Italian pizzas so much better than the type that the guys on motorbikes deliver.

Just a personal account note:

The only thing in my experience that is necessary for a pizza to be called a pizza is the crust. Even this can vary in grain or be flavored (garlic, parmesan, etc.), the crust can be flavored or stuffed, and can be any shape you can shape it (and I've seen large ones cut into diamond shaped pieces).

There is a tradition of a tomato sauce based sauce which could be added before or after toppings, and cheese is a not quite necessity.
A lot of vegetarian pizzas are sold alongside meat-lover's pizza.

Possibly deserving mention (as a humourous sidebar):

Has anyone seen "Return of the Killer Tomatoes"? There pizzas were exotics like Peanut Butter and Jelly, Cream Cheese and Pineapple, Marshmallow and Chocolate, etc. It can be a versatile food form, like the Sandwich, which though it may have started out as meat in two slices of bread, has certainly expanded to include just about anything only almost always in bread, and only normally between slices.

One important 'ingredient' in a pizza is the oven it is baked in.

A traditional wood-burning oven is essential for a genuine pizza. Discuss.

And talking about round doughey things from the Med, is there a connection between pizza and pitta?

That's why the Greeks claim to have invented pizza.

Pita is not much different than any other flat-bread, and those have been made by most every culture since we left the trees. They may as well have claimed that they invented chewing. The same goes for the Italians; one can only "claim" so much based on developments that resulted from improving on those of previous generations.

A good, stone, hot oven can make a great pizza, but I have had excellent pizzas made in gas ovens as well.

Gnomon wrote: "Tomato, on the other hand, is essential. If it doesn't have tomato, it is not called pizza."

Actually, the pizza places here in Seattle would all disagree with that. The only ingredient that appears in every pizza, no matter what, is some form of crust.

Some pizzas here use other bases rather than a tomato sauce, such as a pesto sauce -- pesto definitely doesn't contain tomatoes. Virtually every pizza place in Seattle (with the exception of Pizza Hut, which is pretty low on the food chain) has at least one or two pesto-based pizzas on their menus. At some of the places, the pesto ones are more popular, especially since they tend to be very veggie-laden. I've also seen sauces I couldn't identify used to create pizzas.

Myself, I'm a traditional pizza, with sausage, kind of girl. But I'm not going to say that somebody else's doesn't count as a pizza just because there's is a different flavor -- especially because it still *looks* like a pizza.

As usual it is difficult to make any definite statements about something as generally available as pizza. What I said about tomato sauce appears to be true in Europe. There are a number of flat bread foods made with the same base as pizza available in Europe (France, Italy and Greece) which don't have tomato on them, but they are not called pizza; they all have different names. Pesto and feta on a pizza base is common enough in Greece, but it has a different name which I can't remember. In France there's one with creme fraiche. So my statement about tomato would appear to be correct but only in Europe.

And then there's Turkish pizza - pide, which is made with flattish, but leavened, Turkish bread, and lahmahcun which is floppy and made from a sort of floppy flatbread...