Pizza, together with the pasta, is one of the most known Italian meal. This post follows the series Eat Italy about Italian food, today to give you more insight about this specific meal.
Pizza is not part of the classic sequence of a meal mentioned by @ermest , however it is a unique dish on its own just like the Piatto unico.
First of all let’s discover a bit more about the Pizza, do you know where is it coming and what’s the story behind it? Well the real origin is not fully known as there are traces in the history about kind of “focaccia”, so a very similar product of the Pizza, in the ancient cultures of Greeks and Romans. First traces about the word Pizza, instead, are about the X century nearby Gaeta, a sea village between Rome and Naples, very close to the north border of the province of Naples. The known Pizza today comes very late in the years with the known story of Queen Margherita di Savoia mentioned in my other post La Pizza Napoletana.
However this part of the story is also unsure as theories says this is just a legend and not the real story.
What’s very important for a proper Pizza is its base, the dough. Even if we speak about a simple mix of flour, water and yeast, there are many different types which gives the final result a totally different shape.
For a good dough the leavening must be at least of 36/48 hours, together with its ripening. Having reached a good level of dough the next step is to make it very digestible so that the Pizza won’t feel you heavy and, for this, the important factor is the humidity of the dough which should stay around 62-64% to keep enough water helping the digestibility of the product.
The dough gets prepared on the spot in few minutes with the clap method typical from a real pizzaiolo napoletano.
The next step is the topping, and here the Italianity is very important! The Italian Pizza doesn’t have everything on it, doesn’t mix all ingredients together and doesn’t use at all any pineapple.
The rules are very basic: Pizza con be rossa or bianca. Rossa means with tomato sauce, always the 1st ingredient, while Bianca means without sauce so the base is mozzarella otherwise the dough will be too dry after cooked.
Then you can mix few ingredients on top of this base topping Rossa or Bianca. Be aware that ingredients are also selected to be part of the either one of them and here we have the ingredients rules.
The first rule is that salami don’t get mixed with each other, and when they are pre-cooked (e.g. prociutto cotto) they go into the oven as well while if they are raw (e.g. prosciutto crudo) they keep raw as well as they are topped when the Pizza exits from the oven.
Vegetables are always on the Bianca one, they don’t get mixed into the tomato sauce otherwise they will lose their taste.
Cheese also loves the Bianca one while the meat takes both according the type of meat and if there is any other ingredients it will follow the previous rules: example the Salsiccia and Friarielli is Bianca because of the vegetables (friarielli).
French fries are always topped at the exit from the oven since they are fried separately and they would lose their freshness if cooked in the wooden oven.
Mozzarella, well here we can have the standard taste, the buffalo version or in replacement the Provola, still a milk cheese product but different than the Mozzarella. Provola can be standard or buffalo as well. Mozzarella must be of a really good quality otherwise it will release lot of water when cooking making the Pizza too “wet”.
Olive Oil, that’s fundamental and every Pizza gets olive oil on it whatever flavor it is, just before entering the oven at the end of the ingredients topping.
The last part of the preparation is the cooking, strictly by wooden oven preheated before so that the heat is uniform and it won’t “burn” or “smoke” the Pizza.
After following the complete making of, now it is time to eat my delicious Italian Pizza: Salsiccia e Friarielli con Provola.
And you … do you Pizza?
Do you have any questions about the Pizza? Feel free to ask to #TeamItaly below in the comments.
This is a collaborative post by #TeamItaly included in the #TeamChallenge proposed by @ermest. The post is part of the series about Italy: Italian culture between ancient and modern and Eat Italy - the Italian way of food
. Really a great job.
. I believe it is very close to the one you posted about Saizeriya, the look and feel was very very similar which proves it is a good Italian restaurant 
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. And nope about the “all meat”, as you well mentioned it is against the Italianity of the ingredients … actually the reason is that for us we mix all tastes and you can’t fine taste every ingredients while we like to feel the taste of every single element of the dish, that’s the basic reason behind the simplicity and the way how ingredients are mixed in a simple combination to each other. Am I right 
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