On the face of it, it’s a simple question. What is pizza? We all probably have a similar abstract idea of what we call pizza. Dough with some red sauce smeared on it and some cheese melted on top. Sure, you can add more than that, but that is pizza in its most basic form.
What if you take one of those three ingredients away? Is it still pizza? Before I throw out my biased and haphazard opinion, I’m going to look at a brief history of pizza as told by Wikipedia…kinda.
I’m not going to get into super-old, 10,000 B.C., rock bread that Caveman Bob spilled woolly mammoth blood on but ate it still. Honestly, we can go back into a hundred different cultures and find a hundred different breads mixed with things…but none of it was pizza and I don’t want to talk about the great great great grandfather of modern pizza. I think we only need to go as far back as the father of pizza to get us where we are going.
Focaccia bread.
PHOTO: arifarca courtesy of pixbay.com
In my mind, the father of pizza is a lovely Italian flat bread that is sometimes kneaded with spices, herbs, and topped with some olive oil and other ingredients. In it’s texture and size, it is basically a thick pizza dough. Same basic ingredients and preparation. And if you were making some pizza dough (look forward to my pizza dough recipe soon), you could and should make enough for your pizza and have some left over to make focaccia. So when did focaccia become pizza? That’s where the lines get blurred.
Most experts would agree that focaccia came before pizza but if you ask ten of them what the difference between the two is, you might get 11 different answers. In my opinion, it’s pretty easy. If the dough is less than half an inch and the toppings are on top, then it’s pizza. If the dough is thicker and the ingredients are mixed in, it’s focaccia.
And now we get into the stuff that fights are made of. When do the toppings make it something other than pizza? I have my own opinions about what does and doesn’t belong on a pizza (pineapple *cough, cough*) but I’m going to try to keep those to myself. We’ll go back to the opening paragraph.
Is pizza, in its most basic form, just dough with tomato sauce and cheese on top? It turns out, it’s not so simple of a question after all. If what makes pizza different from focaccia is just its thinner dough, temp, and where the toppings are, then maybe we can challenge our notion of what pizza is.
Cauliflower crust pizza
PHOTO: elheavio courtesy of imgur.com.
Is cauliflower crust still pizza? Why wouldn’t it be? Its dough is thinner and the toppings are on top, and it sure looks like pizza. Might not be what you or I picture as pizza but it might be what someone who is allergic to tomatoes and has a gluten intolerance pictures when they think about pizza.
That’s really what this post is about. Loving pizza in all its forms.
Pizza has very few rules. You can make anything into pizza as long as you follow those rules, and even though you might not love it, someone else might. That is what makes pizza so great! No matter how diverse it can be, it will always bring people together because there will always be a slice for you. Life without diversity is boring.
Don’t be boring,
Jay
Real pizzas have pineapples!