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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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).
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 52.2 ms ] threadThe Italians really did their marketing well to get the attribution
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.
(But I can attest to the deep fried mars bar)
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).
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.
Sort of reminds me of how Japan has mastered high end denim despite it being a very American product.
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".
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).
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>
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14289307
[1]: https://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm