The Story Of Pizza

Pizza is a staple food, so basic in goes back to Neolithic era, long before the Latin word showed up, even longer before the Italian coined it as their own. The idea of flat bread topped with “stuff” to make it taste nicer is exactly as old as it sounds, it predates the oven and is prolific through the fertile crescent and into Europe and northern Africa.

Where Pizza started and how it got to modern times?

In the 6th century its recorded that Persian soldiers made a version of pizza, using dates and cheese, on their shields when they were out on quests, as well as it is a common food among the nomadic tribes of the middle east where it was first baked on an inverted metal pan called “saj” and later in a built clay oven called “taboon”, it is unclear when the food traveled to what is now the Italian regions, but the first use of the word “pizza” is recorded in Latin in the 10th century under the Byzantine empire, probably as sister-word for the Greek “pitta”, meaning flat bread” which is still in use today.

What we consider today as pizza was made, as the story goes, for queen Margherita, by a napolitana pizzaiolo in 1889, he offered her three variations of the meal, and her favorite had the Italian colors on it; red as the tomato sauce, white is the mozzarella and green was the basil. From that point onwards pizza was a thing, so much of a thing that it is now a registered UNESCO preparation ordeal.

The Beauty of Italian cuisine through pizza

This food, this basic ingredient, and their variations, symbolize something very basic in the Italian cuisine, its ability to be simple, by only using a few ingredients, yet complex because those ingredients are well prepared and take time and process to mature. It was the French who created modern cooking, building brigades and putting order into the chaos that was early cooking, but it was the Italian way that conquered modern cooking, by paying attention to the ingredients long before they are to be used. By taking the complexity that time gives to produce and combining it simply and elegantly. We can look at the margherita pizza to understand.

The dough- thought of in advanced, prepared in a specific way and given a day to mature and develop flavour, this blank canvas is what the painting would be drawn on, and like a canvas, it needs to be done in a certain way, certain thread count, certain fold and elasticity, it is the texture on which everything rests.

The sauce- picked older tomatoes, those that are sweeter and about to spoil, are cooked to maximize their flavour, than reduced to allow them to intensify, bottled up and set to rest for a future that awaits.

Mozzarella- if it is fresca or buffalo, the mozzarella gives the contrast to the dough, if the dough is crispy than the cheese is soft and melty. It will take a few days to make it, from curding the milk to resting and shaping it.

Basil- just from the garden, put on top, without being too smart with pesto and other variation, the basil binds everything, it is the freshness to the maturity of the other ingredients, it is the sweetness to the acidity of the sauce, it is color and fragrant, so small, yet so much of it is there.

And that is pizza, it takes a week to prepare, but only 2-3 minutes to cook for your guests. The contrast of textures between the crust of the dough and the stringiness of the cheese, the contrast of flavors between the sour of the sauce and the sweetness of basil. The contrast of long preparation of ingredients and the instant moment it takes to actually make a pizza. It is Italian cuisine at its simplest form, the play on timely and rapid, the balancing of textures and flavours using just a few, well thought, ingredients.

We try and bring that forward, in modern Australia a pizza took a different turn, as it kept evolving further into more complex and regional way, but I believe that as long as it could be remembered where it came from, the concept of what made it so popular would live on.