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Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

I grew up under soviet occupation - only ever saw pizza on TV in old B/W movies (censorship would not let new movies thru). Supposedly there were pizza serving bars since seventies located in Baltic vacation resorts. Everything changed after 1989. Entrepreneurs flooded Poland with new small businesses, pizza parlors among them. Then following 1992 McD entry Pizza Hut showed up in 1993 beginning the era of phone pizza delivery.

Of course we had our own not so junk food before hamburgers and pizza - Zapiekanki. Open-face toasted mushroom sandwiches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapiekanka https://www.polishyourkitchen.com/polish-zapiekanki/

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As a mushroom enjoyer, I now know exactly what I’m going to be searching for when I am next in Poland (soon).

Go late summer/autumn, and just drive around the countryside. You can pickup all kinds fresh on the roadside.

I totally forgot the why part: Meat! There was very little food available in Poland, Meat was a luxury good. September 1980 strikes (catalyst for movement that broke Iron Block) were about food and living conditions. Bread queues, empty shops with no meat at all.

https://ciekawostkihistoryczne.pl/2022/01/14/mieso-a-sprawa-... https://dziennikpolski24.pl/lubelska-zaraza/ar/2799170

>>The Security Service sent alarming reports. "There are still shortages of cold cuts from group IV, shortages of high-quality meat, there is no lard on the market, there are total shortages of: canned fish and imported fish, and the quantities of salted herring are limited (lack of supplies). There is a shortage of full-fat milk, full-fat cheese , fatty cottage cheese, bryndza cheese. There are limited quantities of hard cheeses. Moreover, there are shortages of semi-durable bread (including gryam [sic!], breadcrumbs, there is no real honey, cubes and liquid spices, and there are full restrictions on delicatessen products. ..."

Rumours about "Train full of meat on its way to Soviet Union welded to the rails by Railway workers" at the time of moscow Olympics didnt help.

This lead to full Martial Law a year later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_Poland

>>The official reasons for imposing martial law were the deteriorating economic situation of the country, the manifestations of which included, among others, lack of supplies in stores (including food), rationing (from April to October 1981, many important goods were again covered by the so-called food card system, e.g. meat, butter, fats, flour, rice, baby milk, etc.)

Soviets tried to quench the unrest by sending meat from military reserves ... in coal wagons. Rumours quickly spread about coal wagons full of rotten dirty meat from moscow.

TLDR: No Pizza because no meat, thats why we ate toasted mushroom sandwiches.

You only need bread, tomato sauce, and cheese to make the most basic of pizza. If you had some semi-soft cheese you could put it on the mushroom sandwich and maybe call it Pizza. Don’t tell the Italians tho.

However I think NY Pizza from American movies is probably what everyone is thinking about. As a teenager I went to London in 2001 and was amazed that Pizza Hut was a sit down white table cloth restaurant.

For good pizza you need high quality but basic ingredients. Theoretically you could grow your own tomatoes and basil and bake something reasonable at home (although the store bought cheese was shit and making your own is hard). In practice I haven't enjoyed good pizza until fairly late after the iron curtain fell.

And arguably a high temperature oven. One of the reasons pizza is financially successful as fast food is that one of the hard parts is having the right oven. You can fake it at home to some degree even without much special equipment but making a good pizza (whatever that means to you) at home is more work than most people are going to put in.

I guess it depends on what level of finesse you are aiming for. My mom makes a pretty good pizza (better than many commercials joints) in regular home gas oven. But the work is there: you need to knead the dough properly and let it rest for a day. Of course, an Italian might scoff at the result.

I've had exceptional results with the frying pan stovetop/broiler method.

Assemble the pie in a frying pan. Cook ~5 minutes (until the edge of the crust just starts to brown) on the stovetop, then duck it inside a pre-heated oven (as hot as it will go), under the broiler, for about 3--4 minutes (it will bake fast, pull it out before it's burnt, though some crisping is fine).

I do this with homemade sourdough crust and mostly hand-prepped ingredients (I'll usually go with a store-bought sauce, video below shows how to hand-make fresh from tomatoes). It beats the pants off any store-bought and most restaurant pizzas.

Original inspiration: <https://yewtube.com/watch?v=HXAW2GseICs>

Headline comment: "There is more drama in this video than in the entire Transformers franchise."

Watching this again for the first time in a year or two ... I've made some changes (dough, prep, toppings), but the key is the cast-iron pan, stovetop, and broiler, and results are delish.

(The YT channel is also great for baking, and is where I learned much of my own sourdough game.)

Pizza Hut was a semi-fancy sit-down table service restaurant (with a salad bar!) in the US well into the 1990s.

Yes but it was booth seating family style. Not a white table cloth business casual spot. They had some interesting pizzas.

Yeah I grew up in this broader region as well and my blood boils when I read tankies on Reddit claiming how much life was better than nowadays or in the west.

There's only one life aspect I might concede. Ugly "commie blocks" of prefab concrete were built plentifully. Right now we have a ludicrous housing crisis where even those old apartments that were planned to be obsolete nowadays are so expensive that purchase is out of reach for average young person.

Well, I'm not sure "plentifully" is really the right word. Sure rent was dirt cheap if you could get an apartment, but many young married couples lived with their parents in the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries because there was a housing shortage right up to the end.

A tiny fraction of the pizza I eat has meat on it.

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