Boo, no mention of New Haven's early contribution. Not that I'm biased (I am, they have the best pizza in the world, objectively speaking, of course)
Well duh. It's conference center food. Might as well complain how the worst hamburger you had was at a McDonalds in Portland.
Believe me - I was allowing for that!
Second worst was when I first had Imo's without knowing what provel was. I think I got through almost half a slice on that one. You must have to grow up eating it to find it edible.
The next few rankings after that, moving up the list, would be very cheap frozen pizzas. Like, the dollar or two a pie (on sale) kind.
https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x531c1ec8469aabe...
Truly an abomination.
The pizza is rectangular, incredibly thick (almost a cake-like consistency and crumb), with tomato sauce on top and usually nothing else.
I like it, but probably more due to it being comfort food from when I was a kid at parties than the pizza actually being particularly good.
https://s3-media1.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/JkEI-lNlRm-ELKgV2keU...
Chicago pizza and its dip dish really on the other hand, was one of the biggest deception of my life ^^
But i’ll definitely agree - i find your typical usa pizza (HUGE crust, terrible ingredients) impossible to enjoy ;p
> It's good. Nothing great, but once I stopped thinking of it as a pizza, I found it was good food.
Having said that, there is a lot of good Pizza in the US, especially in areas with heavy Italian immigrations like the north east. Obviously its a different style than most Italian Pizza, but its still really good.
I have only been to Italy once for three weeks to visit my cousins, but I read a lot about pizza. From what I have read/watched from Italian sources, even Pizza in Italy was in somewhat of a rut ~20+ years ago.
Northeast region pizzerias are a given. Varasano's down south in Atlanta is pretty fantastic however.
I would probably put a well done Regina's pizza (Boston) or a Prince Street (NYC) spicy pepperoni square slice ahead of any neapolitan pizza, and I say that as someone who owns a pizza oven and makes a lot of neapolitan style pizza.
Yep! But not in the American south.
It's truly delicious... and nowhere near my favorite pizza in the US.
In the rest of Italy is the same: you call it "pizza", but you distinguish between places that make good Naples pizza, bad Naples pizza, good not-Naples pizza, bad not-Naples pizza.
If there were no good local substitutes you have to pump up the grease and toast the ingredients a bit more to make it flavorful enough.
As for the ingredients, I’m not sure why Italy would have inherently better local ingredients. I can understand why northern Europe has shitty tomatoes (too cold to grow compared to, for example, southern Italy), but with its size, population and diversity of climates I imagine you can grow pretty much anything in the US at a decent quality, without the need to grease stuff to give it flavor.
I believe this is true, subject to the original source material (seeds?) being imported.
> but with its size, population and diversity of climates
This makes it tricky, as producing enough of the high quality ingredients in appropriate locations, that can survive the transportation distances, creates a whole new range of problems.
Solving this at Italy scale is a different matter to solving this at USA scale.
Italian cuisine is all about letting the ingredients speak for themselves and success really depends on having high quality ingredients. So, yes, selecting for tomatoes that have long shelf life and trucking them long distances would violate Italian food sensibilities.
The Italian point of view would be to make the most of the ingredients that are available where you are. In other words, if you don't have fresh tasty tomatoes in the middle of winter, don't substitute subpar global-supply-chain tomatoes from the supermarket. Instead, use something else, like high-quality sundried tomatoes or don't use tomatoes at all. This is what happens in Italy, and it's why what visiting Americans might consider "iconic" Italian dishes aren't always present or recognizable.
You could grow anything in the US and there are indeed great producers for everything. The problem is recognition.
PDO/DOP Parmigiano, prosciutto and olive oil and san marazano tomatoes are in the you cannot do wrong cathegory. They are always excellent.
A pizza maker in the US will have a lot harder time discovering great ingredients made in US. Not because they don't exist, but because anyone can label almost anything.
It's also possible to live among wheat fields and not be able to buy good bread for anything less than insane luxury food prices here. All I can figure is our ovens cost more to run? I mean I know it's not that but I can't figure out WTF else could be the problem.
Decent cheese is also a lot more expensive—but again, we have lots and lots of fairly bad but very cheap options. And the cheaper end of our wine market is (much) less consistently good than in, say, France.
Given that these places served a lot of immigrants when they opened, I also wouldn't be surprised if it helped having a sturdier pizza that you could take to work with you.
With a coal fired pizza, the goal is to get a bit of black on the outside, a crispy crust with a fluffy inside.