Italy's pizza detectives | Hacker News Reader

Italy's pizza detectives

bbc.com

72 pointspseudolus97 comments

I've travelled quite a lot in the top half of Italy over the decades for both work and pleasure - Milan, Venice, Florence, Siena, Verona, Bologna, Pisa, Parma.

I would suggest that from the outside it could be easy to underestimate just how seriously (many) Italians take their food.

Last year - as a family, on the way somewhere else - we visited a "factory" that makes Parmesan cheese. It's astounding how much work and time goes into making a product that, although it's of course produced "on mass", feels anything other than mass produced.

>"on mass"

En masse?

same difference

Seem difrens

sé difez

Not really "in mass (quantities)" would mean large amounts produced, "on mass" means the factory sits on a very large rock.

"en masse" is French for "in mass" not "on mass" so completely different.

it's just one letter no big deal

yes, but to be fair, for an english speaker, en masse is pronounced more like "on mass" than like "en mass".

to be more french, say "awning" but lose the entire "-ning" part, and then "mass", like the "a" in father, not the "a" in cat.

> En masse?

My French is just fine - merci beaucoup - yet unfortunately yet another HN thread gets distracted from the intention of a post by someone determined to focus on semantics :/

PP was asking to clarify your English, not your French, so that readers could understand what you were trying to express with your neologism.

> PP was asking to clarify your English, not your French, so that readers could understand...

(This is the first time I've had this on HN) but I have no idea what you mean. Is someone really not understanding? It looks like they're trying to correct what I wrote :/

It's a product produced in quantity, but not “mass-produced”.

There is no English expression “on mass.” The expression used by English speakers are the French words _en masse_.

The point is, assuming that we all knew what the original commenter meant—and I think we did—it's rude to correct their usage. This has been basic netiquette since Usenet.

I don’t think it’s necessarily clear what they meant because “en masse” has been pretty thoroughly borrowed into English as a singular phrase, as have many other French words and phrases. To then literally translate that borrowed phrase back into English is just confusing because those English words are not correct in that context (while the borrowed French phrase is).

For what it’s worth I definitely did a double take and had to re-read the sentence because I was not expecting those words there.

I like being corrected. Actually, I would consider it rude if you didn't correct me. Thank you for helping me making less mistakes in the future.

Never in my life as a native speaker of American English have I ever seen “on mass” used like that. It’s fair to ask for clarification since “on mass” in that sentence is very, very unusual (dare I say “incorrect”).

Makes me think of those who pronounce "coup de grâce" as "coupe de gras". Ew.

Once I tried pointing this out. The speaker said "it doesn't matter". Sure, bud, enjoy your lard. Ew.

RIP south Italy, where the pizza actually came from.

Pizza's interesting to me because it's one of the few foods where I think the American variant is largely superior to the original. All of the "traditional style" pizza I've had simply doesn't have near enough cheese.

Sort of reminds me of how Japan has mastered high end denim despite it being a very American product.

Pizza in the US is so detached from its Italian origins that if you emphasized "authentic" pizza, a fair amount of people would think you're talking about New York style.

Pizza as any modern reader knows it originated in the US and was backported to Italy.

The best pizzas in the world are in the US, the best Italian style pizzas are in Japan.

>Sort of reminds me of how Japan has mastered high end denim despite it being a very American product.

Denim is a contraction of "serge de Nîmes". It is French in origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denim

https://www.insidefashiondesign.com/post/how-denim-was-inven...

Mastered by Levi Strauss, who was Bavarian.

Interesting! I didn't know that and I'm fairly into fashion! Thanks for teaching me something new!

I guess I was more thinking of how blue jeans (and maybe denim jackets?) specifically are a classic part of Americana.

American pizza is by far not authentic pizza, call it something else. Like "focaccia with enough calories to kill a bear".

I mean there are many distinct styles of American pizza. And Italy itself is home to several different distinct styles of pizza. Is Pizza al Taglio "authentic"? What about Sicilian Pizza? Is Pizza Fritta "authentic"?

> Is Pizza al Taglio "authentic"? What about Sicilian Pizza? Is Pizza Fritta "authentic"?

All these at least resemble the original

Original Roma or original Napoli style?

Napoli is still making the best pizzas, just because their tomatoes and mozzarella is so good. Followed by New York.

Some people think that American pizza has far too much cheese.

" Pizza's interesting to me because it's one of the few foods where I think the American variant is largely superior to the original. All of the "traditional style" pizza I've had simply doesn't have near enough cheese. "

It is such an American comment. Cheese is a very diverse food and putting on pizza itself not a quality.

But my main point is that: Ranking food is so American. I like to draw this comparision: Germany today has the highest share of people not born in the country (20%). So it is not a surprise the local cuisine is heavily influenced by foreign cuisines. The most famous dish of that process is Döner, originated from the Turkish Döner Kebab. So what are the Germans handle this fact? At least if you read comments in r/Döner, it is seen as just two different dishes with its own qualities. You can't get the OG Döner Kebab (and all its variants) in Germany very easily, but vice versa German - styled Döner in Turkey isn't so good. And I like that attitude. Food is art. You can't just rank art. But Americans still try.

Careful travelling to Italy, you will get arrested

(joking)

To me pizza in the US is more akin to fast/junk food

Flat bread topped with some sort of condements is expected to have independently discovered basically everywhere where they had bread in some incarnation.

The Italians really did their marketing well to get the attribution

Quesadilla? Pizza. Taco? Folded pizza. Calzone - taco, therefore folded pizza. Toast with jam? Sweet pizza. Shit on a shingle? Military pizza.

Any food without bread? Pizza without bread.

Pizza without bread? Pizza without bread.

Pizza? Pizza.

Pizza with pizza? Pizza++.

Pizza is toast, unless it's deep dish then it's quiche: https://cuberule.com/

A quesadilla is a sandwich, though.

A sandwich is two pizzas kissing.

The next step is to create pizzarule.com with an Apple marketing-inspired design explaining how all food is some derivative of pizza.

All food evolves into pizza given enough time, or something like that.

I think the cube rule should really be amended such that toast is actually "open-faced sandwich". Toast is just bread. Toast with toppings, such as pizza, is actually an open-faced sandwich.

It might be casual heresy but it is right.

That's a perfectly good synonym, but god no don't make one category be "X" and another category be "A B X". That will cause nothing but confusion.

I ordered a bruschetta in Nice (France), and got something that looked like a mini pizza.

Granted, Nice is next door'ish to Italy

>Pizza++

Pizza with classes?

Or Pizza in notepad.

Pizza with way too many toppings. Some of them toxic.

Pizza with spices? Pizza#

By coincidence I heard an interview on Radio 4 today.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002gqz2 41:00

Approx transcript:

> by the 1970s Italy had left its peasant origins behind it had become an industrial consumerist, democracy, and at that point, people start to get nostalgic, and they make the past simple for themselves by turning it into recipes, turning into simple forms. And that has become actually, and this is another novelty, very politicised in recent years. The current government, which of all the various right wing parties have been in power since 1994, is the one that most is most proud of its sort of fascist DNA, if I feel like, it's linked to historical links to Mussolini's fascist Party. They've really wedded themselves to this idea, this food nostalgia, this idea of defending Italian culture against contamination from abroad or wherever it might be.

pizza got bigger (than in Italy) first in America, and that started to happen well before the actual Fascists. So, no, pizza standards are not a nostalgic defense against contamination.

French winemakers started defending their region names as trademarks in the middle of the last century (picked up steam in 1960s to 1970s) and cheese followed, and the rest of the Europe too. That's where the joke "real Existentialism must come from France, otherwise you just have sparkling anxiety" comes from.

As one rather benign example, Hungary and Slovakia asserted rights to the name of the wine Tokaji/Tokai and in 2007 Friuli Italy had to stop using that name for their wine, a name they had been using for hundreds of years (though the grape is still called Tokai in Italy). In Hungary, the measure of quality/sweetness of the wine (it's a dessert wine) is called Puttonyos. The Italians now call their wine Friulano (not a dessert wine in particular); I want the Italians to start measuring their quality in Putanas just to give the finger to Hungary.

I know nothing of this field. Just commenting as the interview came up today.

But surely ideas about nationalism and purity can arise at any time?

IIRC the interview was about pasta recipes, and about cultural rather than DOP purity.

europeans are not purists about cheese, europe has the same "supermarket brands" of cheese that the US does. It's a marketing move for the quality producers of regional cheese varieties to protect their market by proclaiming that their cheese is the authentic one, and others (with no regard to quality) are not. it's wanting to own the name. The Sardinians are proud of their cheese that they eat with the maggots in it, it's not about purity.

> europe has the same "supermarket brands" of cheese that the US does.

I'm not certain about your exact meaning, but I disagree here. Cheese availability in supermarkets is strongly regional even within Europe, and most non-local varieties are either impossible to get, or have to be ordered at 4 times the price outside their regions.

E.g. You can buy perfectly adequate taleggio cheese in an Italian "Lidl" supermarket, but stores (from the same chain!) just 2 car hours away wont have it, and there is no "unbranded" local replacement either.

You do get some very generic kinds of cheese pretty much everywhere ("vegan cheddar", sandwich slices mostly consisting of emulgators and color, Emmental, Gouda, Parmesan, ...) but the availability/selection even for very well-known cheeses (like pecorino) decreases quickly as you leave their regions.

I do agree that a big motivation is to reduce competition and protect regional monopolies basically, but in many cases this also protects and preserves the identity/taste of that product itself, by preventing large international producers from turning distinct regional products into lowest-common-denominator mass-market trash.

the only difference between what you wrote and what I wrote is that I distilled it down to one sentence so I could move on to make a point about something else; we can't write a treatise about the cheese industry and grocery distribution and regional tastes every time we want to talk about fascism and trademarks.

you understood what I meant, there is industrial scale dairy and artisanal dairy, and that has implications for health (industrial scale dairy can poison a whole country if it's impure) and a for quality (artisinal scale dairy can have more complex and unique flavors)

the italians have plenty of flat breads with condiments (try foccacia), and they are not pizza. those italians don't say "hey, we invented that too", nor should anybody else.

we all agree what pizza means at least till the point we need to duke it out over pineapple (which is not pizza)

i'm reminded of an old Lake Wobegon piece about Minnesota tacos (pronounced to rhyme with tack-o). they're made with folded over white bread and with your flannel sleeves rolled up because the juice will run down your arms

That's true but most of them are unleavened, the yeast plus the fast cook time is I think what makes pizza unique, more than the cheese which is present in other variations.

Poems are just stack of words, aren't they.

more of sack, stacks are sooo ordered.

shuffle emily poem dickinson invariant are.

The difference is in fact in the tiny details between pizza and flatbread

Like there is a tiiiiny difference between a flatbread and a flat bread.

> And the final product must be consumed within 10 minutes after emerging from the oven.

I like this requirement because it means I could go into a place, order a pizza, sit there starting at it for 15 minutes, and then report them for a violation. :-)

Joking aside, I'm always intrigued by these associations and legal categories that nail down specific characteristics for certain foods (or other items). A lot of them require stuff to be made in a specific geographical area, so it's cool to see this Naples pizza one focusing on the actual process rather than the location. But this is still largely about the process rather than the product. It'd be an interesting challenge to see if you could define such categories in terms of the product itself, so you could verify just based on the pizza whether it was a "real" pizza, without knowing how it was made.

I do have to wonder whether it's really worth it to go through all this rigmarole to get the official Neapolitan pizza seal of approval. In practice I find that in a fair amount of cases, the most "authentic" version of something isn't necessarily the one I like the most. And if it costs the restaurant a bunch of money to get this certification, I'm not sure it's going to be worth it to me as a customer when that cost is passed on to me. I care more about how good the pizza is than how authentic it is.

Amusingly, I once met an Italian (from the Veneto area) who loved Little Ceasar's pizza and said Italian pizza was "boring".

>I do have to wonder whether it's really worth it to go through all this rigmarole to get the official Neapolitan pizza seal of approval.

In my neighborhood in Denver I have several Neapolitan pizza options. One is fully Vero certified. I go there often because it truly does give me the taste of Napoli from my childhood.

The best option, however, is recognizable as Neapolitan pizza but is much better than anything I have ever had in Italy (at least to my taste buds).

I feel like both really have their place and both restaurants have been around for quite awhile at this point so it seems to work for both.

That said I do appreciate the places that have are fully Vero certified because when I travel if I see that sticker in the window I know I am gonna have a pretty good pizza.

>I'm always intrigued by these associations and legal categories that nail down specific characteristics for certain foods

>A lot of them require stuff to be made in a specific

All these organizations are basically just lobbying/PR groups trying to ensure some amount of baseline "make work" for their members. They engage in certification and quality control (not that those aren't valid activities) as a means to that end. Their odd requirements like "made in X" and "consumed in Y" make sense in this context since they're basically political requirements to curry favor from various groups.

It mostly works. Neapolitan Pizza tastes the same everywhere and engineered structures mostly don't fall down but given the change these organizations try their hardest to capture markets and stamp out lower end competing offerings which is bad.

> I could go into a place, order a pizza, sit there starting at it for 15 minutes, and then report them for a violation

it's just the other way around: the pizzeria's duty is just to serve you a fresh pizza, but if you haven't finished eating it within 10 minutes, THEY can report YOU for violation and the pizza police comes for YOU. This ensures that customers don't hog the table (which is bad for business).

It's amusing to read some of the early articles, such as one that appeared in the New York Times ("Pizza a pie Popular in Southern Italy, Is Offered Here for Home Consumption"), explaining to the mainstream what pizza is and heralding its availability as take-out in the US: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1781097393301119360?lang=e...

My mom grew up in New Jersey and often mentions how there was a pizza place in her hometown called "Vic's Tomato Pies". I guess early on a lot of places called it that because people wouldn't know the word "pizza". Interesting how ubiquitous it's become in a relatively short amount of time.

But "tomato pie" is a different thing! https://www.seriouseats.com/homemade-philadelphia-tomato-pie...

Why do they need to be undercover? It’s not like anyone is expecting to be raided by the pizza police. And can they do anything about hot pockets? Or is that considered a calzone? Are calzones off jurisdiction? They’re basically a pizza folded onto itself.

A calzone should have ricotta cheese not mozzarella.

Stromboli is closer to folded up pizza as it typically has mozzarella cheese.

In the USA any of those can be anything.

Sromboli can be ground sausage and cheese on a french bread roll.

Stromboli is American, from Philadelphia. It was named after a movie about a Sicilian island that was popular in 1950, because they just wanted to give it an Italian sounding name.

Afaik they don't serve those in Italy or even that far away from Philadelphia. So "in the USA that can be anything" is ... I guess accurate, for a regional American dish

They are served in Puerto Rico. I find that amusing because there’s local types not found anywhere else.

The Italians, for revenge, do their own cheesesteak sandwich.

Just because some people abuse the language out of ignorance does not make them right ;-)

In Italy it's even worse, it can even be made of rock, dirt and lava.

> A calzone should have ricotta cheese not mozzarella.

It typically has both. And ricotta is legally not a cheese in Italy (because it's not made from milk).

I thought Ricotta is what's left over after you make another cheese from milk, most commonly cows milk.

Wikipedia says ricotta is made from milk in Italy from the production of mozzarella

Whey leftover from Parmesan production is also commonly used to make ricotta

Yeah, pretty much this. But the law in Italy defines cheese as something made directly from milk, whereas ricotta is made mostly from whey (you can add some milk, but it's secondary).

Similarly things like mascarpone and yogurt which are not fermented using rennet can't be called cheese.

Regarding the type of whey used to make ricotta it can come from any cheese. In central Italy sheep ricotta is more prized than cow, but you can easily find buffalo and goat ricotta as well.

> Why do they need to be undercover?

It's a marketing gimmick to promote their pizza brand.

because everyone knows dave portnoy.

Today I learned about pizza fritta! Lends unexpected legitimacy to what I saw on the menu in a chippy one night out long ago in Glasgow. I never dared to try it.

(But I can attest to the deep fried mars bar)

Deep fried Mars bar is like a dessert group unto itself!

Reminds me of this classic HN thread [0] and accompanying amazing resource [1]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14289307

[1]: https://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm

Neapolitan pizza isn't even the most popular pizza in Italy...

The AVPN is basically just an organization promoting Neapolitan pizza around the world since Naples is traditionally a poorer part of Italy and extra tourism helps.

It is interesting though, and I do enjoy Neapolitan pizza (even got an Ooni pizza oven just to make it at home lol).

Yes and no. I've seen many established businesses gradually switch to it over time due to it being "the original." Thank Instagram for that.

It tracks that if you're going to give an accreditation you want to make sure its being upheld. Pizza shops can cut a lot of corners that a normal patron might not notice or care about.

<us-centric-pizza-complaint-dept>

I could never find good pizza in California, and I definitely can't find it in Texas. Nor Illinois, sorry.

The only good pizza appears to be in NYC. It probably also exists in other parts of New England too. Massachusetts, I'm guessing.

But when someone isn't near the five boroughs, Amnon's Kosher frozen pizza is tolerable.

Why is it so damn hard to make edible pizza? Do 99.95% of customers have zero taste and will accept any trash put in front of them?

</us-centric-pizza-complaint-dept>

I really hate these movements that clothe themselves in words like "authenticity", but when you look underneath, it's just a clique.

I kinda wish there was more of this type of thing. I'm all for making new foods but call them something else please.

As a Hawaiian I find it culturally disrespectful what passes for poke in most areas outside the Hawaiian Islands, so I kind of wish they were required to use a different name so that they could hopefully learn what they're making is not poke, at least not traditional poke.

Here's is Google's first picture of poke

https://pasteboard.co/seVXA4y4e3Qb.webp

Maybe now-a-days that's common in Hawaii, probably to cater to tourists, but, at least all the places I go and the stuff I grew up with looks nothing like that.

It would look more like this. No rice, very few veggies.

https://pasteboard.co/RdAwZEuQQENd.jpg

There are various varieties (salt, shoyu, octopus, etc...) but they all have one thing in common. They are not served with veggies and rice.

So, nix the Thai curries and Japanese curries because they are different from their Indian counterpart?

If a particular country itself wants to police what something means, I guess... and that means we could ossify what poke means in the us but poke exists in other countries as well (like the philippine islands and japan.) and they are different.

But I disagree... we can have Texas BBQ and Carolinas BBQ and St Louis BBQ... or CT lobster rolls and maine Lobster rolls...

We might as well rail against calling non mincemeat hamburgers 'burgers because they are not genuine burgers...

I didn't suggest getting rid of anything. I suggested changing the name.

If you make brownies without chocolate you don't call them brownies. Maybe you call the blondies. Or if they're made with a unique incredient then you called them whatever. "vegan brownies", "no-bake brownies", etc. but not just "brownies" as that has a meaning.

If you make hummus from beets you call it "beet hummus". If you make it from avocados you call it "avocado hummus". Because calling it just "hummus" implies you made it from chickpeans, seseme, etc...

Same here. If you add lettuce, avocado, rice, etc to poke then call it "salad poke" or "poke salad" but don't just call it "poke" because with those things added it's not poke.

In other parts of the world where we can’t just pull big tasty fish out of the water, we have to make do with other ingredients, sorry.

That's not really the point. The point is representing something as something it's not. poke is a representation of my culture. The things others are calling poke is not. It's a misreprestation. It tastes different. It taste worse IMO. A better name could be as simple as "poke salad", "poke with rice and lettuce". But not just "poke"

I don't see that as controversial. If you made a margarita with whisky you wouldn't put it on the menu as "margarita". You'd put it on the menu as "whisky margarita" to make it clear it's NOT a margarita.

Same with a mojito. If you change the liquor from rum or use a fruit other than lime then you change the name. "mango mojito" etc...

The same with poke. If you're going to add avocado, lettuce, edamame, rice, then don't just call it "poke". That's misprepresation of what you're serving.

Your images didn't load for me, sadly. Might be some corporate filtering.

Anyway, I googled up this [1] article about supposedly original poke, and it also mentions rice and shows images of bowls with rice. Interesting!

PS. As a Swedish person, the "cinnamon rolls" with frosting that are typical in the US are somewhat triggering to me (because [2]). Sorry about the poke!

Edit: switched the cinnamon roll link to the actual Swedish-style image, for clarity.

[1]: https://guide.michelin.com/hk/en/article/features/6-things-t...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_roll#/media/File:Cinn...

These detectives should come from new york given that ny pizza is far superior than italian pizza

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