Express course on how to eat like an Italian, Lesson 3
Lesson 3: know and love pizza (and alike), an introduction for beginners
Simple, you say! Not so simple!!!
History
Pizza was an ITALIAN invention. And that’s a proven fact, dating back to Etruscan times (without tomatoes of course!), but it became what we know now after we began to import tomatoes from the New World. The most ordered pizza all over Italy is Pizza Margherita: pizza dough with tomato sauce, buffalo mozzarella, basil and few drops of olive oil. It was invented in Naples, in the first years of the nineteenth century, but it was named Margherita only towards the end of the nineteenth century, in honour of Margherita di Savoia, Queen of Italy.
The ingredients and how to
- Base: a good pizza dough, best home made, it’s best with 500 g flour, 12 g fresh yeast, enough water to make the dough (300 ml aprox), salt. If you want a fluffier version, add a mashed boiled potato to the dough mix. Let it raise for at least 1 hour, better 2.
- Toppings: basically anything, there are (almost) no rules, but if you are going to cook pizza for an Italian mind that mozzarella is the only cheese accepted (except if you cook a 4 cheeses pizza, in which mozzarella has to be one of the 4 cheeses) and that pineapple, eggs, sauerkrauts, hemmental, any kind of fruits, meat (that has not been previously cured in some way) are not an option! Remember always to leave a 1 centimetre border free of anything. As it is an Italian dish remember the basic philosophy: less is more, so do not overload your pizza with too many toppings.
- Cooking: best way to cook it in your home oven is to use a spotted rounded non-stick baking pan, so the heat is uniformly distributed. Oven temperature must be maximum.
Different types of pizza
Pizza can be declentioned in many many ways, practicly at least one for each Italian region and many for each southern Italy region. But the basic types of pizza are:
Pizza bianca: pizza without tomatoes of any sort, with basically white topping, as mozzarella, cream and other white cheeses.
Focaccia: double the amount of pizza dough than normal pizza, olive oil and only one other ingredient, as olives, lard or fresh herbs (like rosemary, thyme) and flaked salt.
Calzone: a closed pizza, with no topic on the outside, but only in the inside. It can be declined in many many ways, and it can avoid to follow the basic pizza rules, as, sometimes, mozzarella is substituted by ricotta.
Panzerotto: basically a deep-fried calzone, typical from Puglia.
