Pizza Belongs To Us

Here is an excerpt from Alan Richman's article in GQ where he talks about the United States' takeover of pizza. Richman has hunted for the country's best pizza, a challenge too large for me (until later). Read what he has to say and comment on what you think. Also, don't forget to vote on the poll related to the article. I personally think he makes a strong argument.

Alan Richman:

"Italians are wrong. Not about cars or suits. About pizza, and they’re not entirely mistaken about that, only about crusts and buffalo-milk mozzarella. They’ve got the tomato part right. Pizza was created by the Italians—or maybe by the Greeks, who brought it to Naples, but let’s not pile on the bad news. Right now it justly belongs to us. We care more about it. We eat more of it, and unlike the Italians, we appreciate it at dinner, at lunch, and at breakfast, when we have it cold, standing up, to make hangovers go away. Italians don’t really understand pizza. They think of it as knife-and-fork food, best after the sun goes down.

Pizza isn’t as fundamental to Italy as it is to America. Over there, it plays a secondary role to pasta, risotto, and polenta. To be candid, I think they could do without it. Not us. Over here, it’s one of the few foreign foods we’ve embraced wholeheartedly, made entirely our own.

The simple truth is that pizza in its most primal form—cheese, tomato, crust—is perfect food. It’s good for vegetarians, even though it contains no vegetables. It’s good for us meat eaters, chiefly because we don’t care much for vegetables but also because pizza is one of the few foods where the absence of meat isn’t missed. (Although, when I think about it, a little sausage never hurts, especially if it’s crumbled up rather than sliced.)
It’s the absolute best food for sharing (unless you’re in love, in which case we’re talking about an ice cream cone). It’s the healthiest of treats; the strictest mother wouldn’t argue that pizza is bad for kids. It’s the most versatile delivery food, because it reheats much better than Chinese, and if you accidentally burn it, pizza is still good. Most important, at least to me: Pizza gives pepperoni a reason to exist.

A word here about Naples, the home of Italian pizza. That’s supposedly where the pie reaches its pinnacle, in a distinct and idiosyncratic style that some American pizzamakers—let’s resist calling them pizzaioli, as the Italians do—are trying to emulate. They’re going for hotter ovens, puffier crusts, and weepy buffalo-milk mozzarella on top. I’m not impressed. Not by the genuine pies in Naples, and usually less by American imitations, although the mission has a certain nobility of purpose.

I’ve eaten in Naples. From the ancient, brutally hot ovens emerge pies that most Americans wouldn’t recognize. The crust is charred and puffy in spots but tragically thin and pale beneath the toppings. The sauce is chiefly chopped tomatoes, sometimes fresh and sometimes canned, but almost always vivid and bright. (Those San Marzano tomatoes are as good as advertised.) The cheese is mozzarella, but the Italians are proudest when they can substitute fresh mozzarella from the milk of buffaloes and label their pies Margherita DOC. (It sounds like a wine thing, but it’s also a pizza thing.) In my opinion, buffalo mozzarella is pizza’s second-worst topping, exceeded only by whole anchovies—no hot, smelly fish on my pies, thank you. After that, those pizzaioli guys add oil, lots of it, and more liquid is precisely what tomato pies do not need.

This is what happens when a Neapolitan pie comes out of the oven, after it’s been cooked a remarkably short time: The nearly liquefied glob of buffalo mozzarella—now resembling a snowman melting on a warm March afternoon—has become runny. Water drains from the tomatoes. Oil joins the flood. All that excess liquid has to go somewhere, which is why the bottom crust turns to mush, not that it was ever particularly crispy.

This is why Italians need a knife and fork. This is why our pizzas are better than theirs."