The Taste of Pizza

When one thinks of the taste of pizza, the most common perception is a delicious blend of bread, cheese, and tomato sauce. The bread is usually crispy in texture, after being baked to a golden-brown. The sauce adds a complementing tangy red tomato flavor on top of the crust. The pizza is not complete, of course, without the cheese. This also adds a complementing flavor to the blend, but the cheese’s flavor is generally more mild. The cheese adds a soft, gooey, strechy texture to the surface of the pizza. This is the pizza flavor that I think of whenever someone reccomends that we should order a pizza on a Friday night.

The first thought that enters my mind when I smell a fresh baked piece of pizza is authentic Italian cooking. In fact, Italy has a generous amount of history and influence with pizza. According to What’s Cooking America, “The word pizza is believed to be from an Old Italian word meaning ‘a point,’ which in turn became the Italian word ‘pizzicare,’ which means ‘to pinch’ or ‘pluck’”(Stradly). The word pizza may have came from Italy, but its history goes further back then that.

The pizza is said to have originated as early as the sixth century B.C., “At the height of the Persian Empire, it is said that the soldiers of Darius the Great (521-486 B.C.), accustomed to lengthy marches, baked a kind of bread flat upon their shields and then covered it with cheese and dates” (Stradly).

Pizza that began in the sixth century B.C. most likely did not have the same taste as the pizza we have today. The bread was baked on their shields, as noted, probably with basic ingredients that were very bland. For many years for other cultures such as the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans influenced the pizza and it’s flavor. Adding olive oil, honey, and eventually tomatos gave pizza an extra flavor to cover up the plain taste of the round bread or crust. Different toppings were also added, usually whatever varieties of herbs or fruits that culture had available to them.

It took many hundreds of years for the main influential cultures to discover the combination of cheese, tomato sauce, and baked crust. This current day version of the pizza is the perfect blend of pizza ingredients and is accepted as the standard American pizza. This has also influenced other variations influenced by modern day cultures. Variations have mostly been named after their influence in a certain town.

New York-style pizza was influenced by the abundance of pizza shops in downtown New York. New York-style pizza is often hand-tossed, thin, and oversized. This is very similar to the standard American style of pizza.

Chicago-style pizza very different from any other type of pizza. Chicago-style pizza is often called “Deep dish pizza”. This pizza is made by forming crust up the sides of a deep-dish pan. Then, cheese is used as filling in the deep-dish pizza and the sauce is poured on top making the pizza look similar to a pie.

There are many different types of pizza and flavors to go with it. This is because pizza has been influenced my many different cultures causing several changes and variations. All of this effort to alter the pizza for a culture or one’s personal preferance is purely for the desire to create the pizza with the taste of the ultimate blend of bread, cheese and sauce.