Pizza is iconic even overseas
Let’s be honest, although pizza is a traditional Italian dish, the first consumers in the world are Americans. United States have the world record of pizza consumption with an average annual quantity of 13 kg per person, twice the quantity consumed by Italians.
Neapolitan pizza firstly entered America during the Second World War, when in 1944 an article dedicated to pizza was published in the New York Times. “A pie made of leavened dough and covered with various toppings, but always with tomato. You can find cheese, mushrooms, anchovies, capers, onions and more”. Seen at first as a typical Italian dish and far from American tastes, its success arrived when the first U.S. soldiers came back home and started to promote small Italian-American restaurants producing pizza.
From that moment on, pizza entered by right in the list of the most loved and consumed foods overseas and today in the city of New York alone there are more than one thousand places specialized in the production of pizza.
It is a pizza mainly made with a flour rich in gluten (often 13-14% of proteins) and vegetable oil or edible fat mixed to the dough. Often tomato sauce is substituted with a garlic or onion sauce and, besides the classic fiordilatte cheese, provolone, cheddar or pecorino romano are also used. Among the ingredients for its topping, pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms and bell peppers are used.
Besides the dough, there are different types of pizzas according to the geographical location. In New York, for example, pizza is served by the slice, it is tall and topped with original ingredients such as corn and béchamel sauce, up to the much feared pineapple. Cutlery is banned. The slice of pizza must be eaten strictly with hands and shared, thanks to the convenient “to share” format created by the U.S. chains Pizza Hut or Domino’s, in order to divide a single large pizza among diners. In Chicago, Deep Dish Pizza is surely the most famous one, whereas in Detroit the best known pizza is a rectangular type one with a thick crispy crust, traditionally topped with a Wisconsin typical cheese. Even Greek emigrants in the USA created their own version of Italian pizza, in which olive oil is part of the topping, besides being used to grease the pans and make the crust crispier.
We do not know why pizza has become a true icon in the world. What is certain is that eating pizza means happiness, whatever form and type it takes.
