Pizza Pizza!

At last, an episode on pizza! But that raises a tricky question: what exactly is pizza? As it turns out, the original pizzas from eighteenth-century Naples looked nothing like a standard slice—they were more like a focaccia, topped with oil, herbs, anchovies, or whatever else was on hand. Even after these first pizzas met the tomato, the dish was a local peculiarity—most Italians thought pizza was gross and weird until just a few decades ago. So how did we get from Neapolitan subsistence snack to today's delivery staple? Listen in this episode as we travel with historian Carol Helstosky, author of Pizza: A Global History, and Francisco Migoya, head chef at Modernist Cuisine, from Italy to New York to Brazil and beyond, to tell the story of how pizza conquered the world. All that, plus the tough questions: is Chicago deep dish really pizza? How about bananas on top? What about (gasp) a donut pizza? (encore episode) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If I put an egg on a grandma pizza, still a pizza.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not one of my traditional toppings, but...

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Cheddar. Is that a pizza cheese?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  This is a pizza. Confirmed. 100%.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Why are you in such shock?

• 0:13Speaker 00

  I'm in shock because I feel like-

• 0:15Speaker 01

  It has sauce, it has cheese, it has dough. Not a pizza, but close enough.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  French bread pizza, not a pizza. We agree.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  It is really good.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  This is crazy good. Is this like any other pizza you've ever had?

• 0:28Speaker 01

  No, I've never had a pizza doughnut before.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  But to me, it doesn't taste like pizza crust. To me, it tastes like a doughnut.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  It's a pizza doughnut.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, but is it a doughnut or is it a pizza?

• 0:40Cynthia Graber?

  Doughnut pizza? I don't know.

• 0:42Nicola Twilley?

  Oh, I do. And it's a yes. I mean, I don't know know it. I don't know doughnut pizza in the biblical sense. Haven't actually had one, but conceptually, yes.

• 0:53Cynthia Graber?

  These are clips from the thrillist video series Really Dough, where two guys go around and debate whether something is or isn't a pizza. And so the question is, is a doughnut pizza pizza?

• 1:04Nicola Twilley?

  I'm so glad you asked, Cynthia, because this is Gastropod, the show that looks at food through the lens of science and history. And we are here today to get to the bottom of this pizza question. I'm Nicola Twilley.

• 1:15Cynthia Graber?

  And I'm Cynthia Graber. And while pizza seems like it's incredibly straightforward, crust, tomato sauce, cheese, it's actually surprisingly mysterious. Where does it come from?

• 1:24Nicola Twilley?

  You may have just involuntarily shouted, "Italy, you dummies." But A, that's me, and B, just you wait. We're gonna blow your minds. As it turns out, most of the people living on the Italian peninsula thought pizza was weird and gross until just a few decades ago, which, why?

• 1:43Cynthia Graber?

  I mean, I think pizza is one of the world's perfect foods. I can't imagine anyone thinking it's gross. But that said, there are some serious battles for the best pizza, the best type of pizza, that is. Is it from Detroit, New York, Naples, Brazil?

• 1:55Nicola Twilley?

  And is there such a thing as bad pizza? I'm thinking about one I ate in China with sliced apple on top and feeling like I might already know the answer to that question.

• 2:04Cynthia Graber?

  We've got the answers to all those questions in this encore episode of Gastropod. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

• 2:15Speaker 04

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• 2:55Speaker 05

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• 3:29Cynthia Graber?

  We eat a seriously astounding amount of pizza. Americans collectively eat 350 slices a second and 100 acres a day. More than 5 billion pizzas are sold around the world each year. It's a lot. So we all eat it, but are we all eating the same thing? To get back to where we started with the donut pizza that is going to be haunting my dreams, is there actually a standard definition of pizza?

• 3:56Speaker 06

  Oh, no. Okay. The reason I'm laughing about that is because anytime I'm asked, I've become somewhat of an expert or authority on the history of pizza. And anytime I'm asked, there's always someone who disagrees with my definition.

• 4:11Cynthia Graber?

  Carol Helstosky is a history professor at the University of Denver and author of Pizza: A Global History.

• 4:17Speaker 06

  So I want to be really careful about what I say here, that this is my opinion as a food historian. That I believe pizza is a yeasted flatbread that has ingredients baked onto the crust. That is sort of the most basic definition of pizza. I don't get that specific where I say, okay, it has to be round, or it has to be square, or it has to, you know, be thin or thick, or it has to have tomatoes and cheese on it.

• 4:46Nicola Twilley?

  But here's the thing, you ask two pizza experts for definition of pizza, you get two different definitions.

• 4:53Speaker 07

  I think that we need to kind of establish the fact that pizza is pizza until you put tomato sauce on it, right? Because before that, it's a flatbread. I mean, if not, then you could argue that the Egyptians had pizza because they had flatbreads, right? And that would be absurd to say.

• 5:06Cynthia Graber?

  Francisco Migoya is the head chef at Modernist Cuisine. They've already put out a five tome series called Bread, and now they're working on an equally exhaustive pizza book, or books.

• 5:15Nicola Twilley?

  For which they have been doing a lot of research, which sounds delicious, although Francisco says it's actually very exhausting, too.

• 5:23Speaker 07

  The tally as of December, it's been 200 pizzerias. And it's just a number that boggles the mind, because, I mean, if we've been to 200 pizzerias, you have to picture there's at least five pizzas per pizzeria. And I don't want you to think that we eat the entire pizza. You have to pace yourself. It is a marathon of eating pizza. And by the end of the day, you just want to like a carrot or something, a vegetable, something that feels a little bit better to your body to eat, because there is such a thing as too much pizza.

• 5:54Nicola Twilley?

  I'm unconvinced, but I agree with Francisco that the definition of pizza is kind of a slippery thing.

• 6:00Speaker 07

  I wouldn't call just any flatbread a pizza. I mean, it's, you know, is a tortilla a pizza? I'm from Mexico. I would say no. But I've thought about it because it has sauce and it has cheese and it's a flatbread. And, you know, it's cooked at, you know, in a coma, which is very high heat. So strictly defining it, you could, you can see how how some of these lines cross over each other.

• 6:22Nicola Twilley?

  I think we can all agree that a tortilla is not a pizza. For starters, a tortilla is flat, but it's not really a flatbread. It doesn't have yeast.

• 6:31Cynthia Graber?

  But there are a lot of delicious yeasted flatbreads around the world. There's lafa and pita and lavash and naan, and those are just off the top of my head.

• 6:38Nicola Twilley?

  Carol says, there's archaeological evidence going back 10,000 years for little ancient pizza things. They were cakes of mashed grains, baked on a hot stone, and then topped with whatever was handy: oil, honey, herbs, or even more complex sauces.

• 6:53Cynthia Graber?

  So if flatbreads go back to the Neolithic, the dawn of agriculture, and if there are yeasted flatbreads in so many different cultures, then pizza can't possibly be an Italian invention, right?

• 7:02Nicola Twilley?

  These are the kind of fighting words that will land you in court, Cynthia. Specifically, the Court of Historical Review in San Francisco, which is a fake court staffed by real judges. They've made some landmark rulings in their time on where the martini was invented and whether or not chicken soup is the Jewish penicillin.

• 7:22Cynthia Graber?

  And in 1991, the court gathered to debate a serious question: is pizza originally Italian or Chinese?

• 7:29Nicola Twilley?

  The Chinese case was surprisingly strong. Prosecutor claimed that pizza is descended from ping cu, which are rice flour cakes filled with sausage and spices that were brought to Italy by our old friend Marco Polo back in the 1200s and then transformed with the use of local ingredients.

• 7:46Cynthia Graber?

  But the judge wasn't buying it. Even before Marco Polo made his way to the east and back, the Etruscans in what is now Italy, around about 1,000 BCE, were making little cakes that looked much more like pizza.

• 7:57Nicola Twilley?

  The Italians won their day in court. So I guess we can say that pizza is not Chinese. But that's pretty much all we can say for sure.

• 8:05Cynthia Graber?

  While the exact origins of ancient pizza are somewhat murky, modern pizza definitely has a birthplace.

• 8:11Speaker 06

  Where you begin to see pizza develop and being called pizza is around the 17th and 18th century in Naples. And what people ate back then that they called pizza

• 8:26Speaker 06

  Was essentially kind of a bread with toppings baked on to it. It didn't look anything like what we might visualize now as pizza.

• 8:33Nicola Twilley?

  For starters, the first things that Neapolitans called pizza had no tomato.

• 8:37Speaker 06

  In fact, it was yeasted flatbread with anything that was on hand. You kind of threw whatever you had, usually because you didn't have a lot of ingredients. So it wasn't unusual for people to consume pizza, which was just, you know, crust or bread with maybe bits of fish baked on it, or maybe herbs that you gathered from the fields. And that would look really different from what we think about is pizza today.

• 9:04Nicola Twilley?

  By the late 1700s, Italian dictionaries defined pizza as "the word that people in Naples used for what pretty much everyone else called focaccia, a yeasted flatbread topped with oil and herbs and sometimes olives and other salty good things like cheese and cured meats."

• 9:21Cynthia Graber?

  But what about the tomato? At least according to Francisco, a yeasted flatbread isn't really a pizza until it meets one of the most delicious vegetables ever. Oh, god, it's actually a fruit, but never mind. The tomato first had to get to Naples from Central and South America. It arrived at the very end of the 1500s, but it took another century before people regularly ate it.

• 9:41Nicola Twilley?

  Europeans were initially a little wary of tomatoes, but tomatoes planted in the rich volcanic soil in sunny southern Italy were particularly sweet and delicious.

• 9:52Cynthia Graber?

  And someone in Naples had the brilliant idea to take these delicious tomatoes and toss them on their flatbread.

• 9:58Speaker 06

  I have no idea, you know, who was the first person to do it, but I think it was very much the case, like I just mentioned, that people kind of threw whatever ingredients were on hand and someone got this great idea of like, yeah, let's slap a few tomatoes on top of this pizza.

• 10:12Nicola Twilley?

  And it caught on, at least in Naples. And that's actually the thing you have to understand to understand where the modern pizza came from, is that Naples in the 1700s was the third largest city in Europe and also by far and away the most densely packed city.

• 10:28Cynthia Graber?

  Lots of those people in Naples at the time were really poor. They lived tightly packed in tiny rooms in multi-story buildings and they didn't have running Water or kitchens, and so they had to buy and eat their food on the street. They were eating a lot of things you could buy hot and hold in your hand. This is how Naples developed a very particular food culture.

• 10:44Nicola Twilley?

  Naples was famous for its street vendors who walked the city and cried out their wares. Octopus balls, cones of fried anchovies melt from the bay, boiled chestnuts, chunks of zucchini marinated in vinegar, this fun new food called macaroni.

• 11:00Cynthia Graber?

  Which, of course, you can hear about both in our macaroni and cheese episode and also in our pasta episode.

• 11:05Nicola Twilley?

  Although, actually, macaroni was comparatively speaking expensive, and the very poorest Neapolitans could only have that on Sundays. Pizza was half the price, and so people ate slices of it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

• 11:18Cynthia Graber?

  Remember, Naples is a port town, and there were a lot of fishermen there. Many of them ate plain tomato pizza for breakfast before going out to sea. Carol says that's why it's called marinara.

• 11:27Speaker 06

  And a mobile vendor would sell them a chunk of pizza, or they would go into a pizzeria and eat standing up.

• 11:36Nicola Twilley?

  The history of these very first pizzas is actually not super well documented. Like Carol says, pizza was food for really poor people, and that's not the kind of thing that tends to make the official histories.

• 11:47Speaker 06

  So we don't have a lot of evidence left behind by the very poorest citizens of Naples about what they eat and when they ate their first tomato pizza. We do have evidence from foreigners who visit Naples and see that, wow, all these people are eating pizza. And let me be really clear on this, that when foreigners come to Naples and witness pizza, they do not think this is a very enticing or interesting food.

• 12:17Cynthia Graber?

  International visitors had some choice words. Samuel Morse, he's the guy who invented the telegraph. He visited Naples in the 1800s and said pizza was a, quote, "species of most nauseating cake, covered over with slices of pomodoro or tomatoes sprinkled with little fish and black pepper, and I know not what other ingredients. It altogether looks like a piece of bread that had been taken reeking out of the sewer."

• 12:41Nicola Twilley?

  Even other Italians, if they weren't from Naples, they were usually not pizza fans. In the late 1800s, a pioneering woman journalist called Matteo D'Zarao described these vendors walking around with slices of pizza made from, quote, "dense dough that burns but doesn't cook" and covered with almost raw tomatoes. She wrote that the slices would freeze in the cold and turn yellow in the sun, eaten by the flies.

• 13:07Cynthia Graber?

  But also, honestly, most Italians hadn't even heard of pizza.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  It's such a rich, varied cuisine. And people in the north are eating something very different from people in the south and people in the center. And I think that certainly was the case, where you had most Italians who were living in Italy, if they weren't living in the immediate environs of Naples, they were not that aware of this dish called pizza.

• 13:34Cynthia Graber?

  Even a visit from the queen of a newly unified Italy, who traveled south to Naples in 1889, that didn't help pizza's popularity. But it did give one pizza a famous new name.

• 13:44Speaker 06

  The legend of the pizza Margherita is that the wife of the Italian king, on their visit to Naples, really wants to try some local street food. And she's not going to go out in the streets and the alleys and, you know, walk into a pizzeria or buy pizza from a mobile vendor, which is how most Neapolitans consumed their pizza then.

• 14:07Nicola Twilley?

  Instead, her staff found one of the city's best-known pizza makers. And the story goes that he came up from his cramped little pizzeria to the palace she was staying at and made her three pizzas. One just with oil, one topped with tiny silvery fish fry, and one with tomato, mozzarella, and some torn basil leaves.

• 14:25Cynthia Graber?

  Queen Margherita was enjoying a bit of culinary tourism. She was in Naples, and she wanted a taste of what the locals ate, the local poor people, which meant pizza. And she quite enjoyed it. Her staff wrote the pizza maker a lovely thank you note, saying that the three pizzas were found to be delicious.

• 14:40Nicola Twilley?

  And in return, the pizza maker named one of those three pizzas Pizza Margherita, the one with tomato, mozzarella, and basil.

• 14:47Speaker 06

  So everyone assumed, oh, they were the inventors of the pizza Margherita. Now, it's highly unlikely, and I think it would be the case, that Many other pizzerias also made this type of pizza or some variation thereof. So I don't think they were the only pizzeria that made it. I don't use the story, I don't think about the story as illustrative of an authentic first pizza margherita, but rather I think it's an important story that tells us something about food and Italian nationalism.

• 15:16Nicola Twilley?

  I mean, tomato sauce, mozzarella and basil is red, white and green, the colors of the relatively new Italian flag.

• 15:23Cynthia Graber?

  But even though a local guy got excited about the new national colors, pizza margherita wasn't a national dish because pizza was still super regional. It took decades more for other Italians to fall in love with pizza.

• 15:33Nicola Twilley?

  As late as 1900, all the pizzerias in Italy were in Naples. There had been one attempt by a Neapolitan to open a pizzeria in Rome and it had apparently failed miserably.

• 15:45Cynthia Graber?

  Strangely, the next place pizza takes hold isn't somewhere close to Naples, it's across the ocean.

• 15:49Speaker 06

  Pizza definitely catches on next in the United States.

• 15:52Nicola Twilley?

  Remember, Naples was really poor, even for Italy, which was a really poor country. So in the early 1900s, a lot of Neapolitans emigrated to find work and a lot of them ended up in New York City.

• 16:04Cynthia Graber?

  And they wanted food from home, so some started making pizza for their fellow Neapolitans.

• 16:08Nicola Twilley?

  No one knows who opened the true first pizzeria in the US, but you can still get a slice at the place that calls itself the first in the US, Lombardi's, which opened in 1905.

• 16:19Speaker 06

  Because they, they wind up being the first ones to get a commercial license to sell pizza. And again, it doesn't mean that no one else is producing pizza, it just means that there's some physical record.

• 16:29Cynthia Graber?

  Lombardi and all the other guys making pizza wanted to make it taste like home, so they had super hot ovens.

• 16:34Nicola Twilley?

  But they could only get hold of coal instead of the wood they'd use back in Naples. So the pizzas became coal-fired rather than wood-fired.

• 16:42Cynthia Graber?

  Back home, they would have used fresh tomatoes and seasoned.

• 16:44Speaker 06

  So they wind up initially asking for tomatoes back in Italy. And what we see is the growth of a canned tomato or tinned tomato industry back in southern Italy, which is really interesting because the market for what becomes a hallmark of Italian cuisine really develops outside of it.

• 17:06Nicola Twilley?

  So the tomato sauce on a New York slice was already different. Cam tomatoes taste cooked and more jammy and umami-ish than raw tomatoes.

• 17:14Cynthia Graber?

  And the cheese changed, too. Back home, these pizza makers would have used fresh buffalo mozzarella, which is just like those creamy softballs of fresh cow's milk mozzarella you can find in lots of stores today, but it has even more delicious fat.

• 17:27Speaker 06

  And that doesn't get exported as readily and easily as the tinned tomatoes, which keep for a long period of time. So they experiment with other forms of cheese and other forms of mozzarella cheese specifically. And so you wind up seeing these sort of mozzarella cheese factories or companies that produce the cheese for them.

• 17:45Cynthia Graber?

  American-style mozzarella, that low-fat, more dried and aged kind that you buy shredded in bags or in blocks in the supermarket today. Carol says an entire industry developed around this cheese to support these early pizza makers.

• 17:57Nicola Twilley?

  It's completely different from fresh mozzarella, and it forms a stretchy, stringy, yellow layer on top of your New York slice.

• 18:05Cynthia Graber?

  And this is why a New York slice is so different from pizza in Naples. The cheese, the sauce, they look and taste significantly different. And these make New York pizza a new creature. It's not Neapolitan pizza anymore.

• 18:16Nicola Twilley?

  And it wasn't just Neapolitans eating it anymore either.

• 18:19Speaker 06

  You do have some people who are not Italian at all, who are just in New York, who are like, you know, bohemians and they're more adventuresome in terms of their palates. And so they're going to try this, you know, wild Italian thing called pizza. And they're going to drink a little bit of Italian red wine with that. And that, to them, was very exotic.

• 18:38Cynthia Graber?

  New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, all three states had a lot of Southern Italians and some people willing to try this exotic Southern Italian food. This is the birthplace of pizza in the US and the first region it really caught on outside Naples.

• 18:50Nicola Twilley?

  But pizza didn't start to catch on anywhere else, even in Italy outside of Naples, until quite a bit later. Half a century later, actually, after the Second World War. So what happened?

• 19:02Speaker 06

  That's shrouded in myth.

• 19:06Cynthia Graber?

  We have the story of how pizza actually got big in the US coming up after the break.

• 19:12Cynthia Graber?

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• 19:32Nicola Twilley?

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• 20:36Speaker 04

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• 21:16Cynthia Graber?

  The myth that supposedly explains how pizza spread around the US in the 50s, it's that as American servicemen passed through Naples during World War II, they tried this strange flatbread with tomatoes and cheese, and they really liked it.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  On reaching the center of the city, thousands of shouting, hysterical people started to swarm around the lorries, tanks, and cows. It was the start of an amazing scene. Here's a press car, snowed up under an avalanche of wildly excited Neapolitans. This was Italy's second most important city in

• 21:42Speaker 06

  In the year of good gracious me, 1943. And when they came back stateside, they, you know, looked around and said, hey, you know, I had this great thing called pizza. I'd really like to have some. And so servicemen were running into, I guess, pizzerias and asking for pizza. And that fed the growth of pizza in the United States.

• 22:00Cynthia Graber?

  But although you can read this story in a lot of pizza books and articles, Carol doesn't think it's true, and she has a very good reason.

• 22:07Speaker 06

  By the time that the Americans get to places like Sicily and Naples, and then have to sort of march up the peninsula, fighting the Germans the whole way, Italians are really struggling in terms of food and how much food they're eating. Now, if we think about that scenario, I don't think that's a scenario that's conducive to a lot of American soldiers eating this great thing called pizza. There probably wasn't a lot of pizza available, and if it was, it probably tasted pretty horrible.

• 22:38Cynthia Graber?

  Pizza did start to catch on in the 1950s, but it seems like it was more the whole post-war period we've talked about frequently on the show. People had more money, they started to eat out more, they wanted to try exotic new foods or drinks, like in our tiki episode.

• 22:51Nicola Twilley?

  And Carol says, as part of that, there was a whole pizza craze in the 1950s.

• 22:56Speaker 06

  We began to see the promotion of pizza through newspapers, through women's magazines, like, here's a great Italian thing for you to try. You could basically make it out of any ingredient you could find at home. So they're suggesting the English muffin pizza, they're suggesting making pizza out of, you know, whatever toast or whatever kind of bread stuff you could find. You just need to slap some ingredients on it and bake it somehow. So I found all these really unique recipes for various kind of homemade pizzas, where you would put liverwurst and chopped onions on the pizza, which doesn't resemble anything, I don't think, that people in Italy were consuming.

• 23:32Cynthia Graber?

  This kind of thing was happening to a lot of, quote, "foreign foods" at the time. Magazines were printing recipes for egg noodles and ketchup and calling it Italian. It was the 50s, and there was a lot of bad food being made in the US. So pizza was starting to spread around America, but it still hadn't really caught on outside of the tri-state area.

• 23:52Speaker 06

  What I do think made pizza break out of this, what you call the ethnic enclave of taste, were the fast food restaurants, specifically Domino's and Pizza Hut.

• 24:03Speaker 07

  What makes a Pizza Hut pan pizza so good?

• 24:08Speaker 07

  It's a pan full of homemade taste.

• 24:12Speaker 07

  Made fresh with dough we raised twice.

• 24:14Speaker 06

  And it's really interesting to me how they get their start. They're started in the Midwest where there aren't a lot of Italian American communities. So they're not appealing directly to Italian Americans, right? They don't care as much about them as consumers. What they do care about is they set up these pizzerias and they specialize in food delivery. Later you can eat inside a Pizza Hut, but they're really just interested. So they add this new twist to it where they will deliver this pizza to you.

• 24:41Speaker 07

  Domino's Pizza delivers. Right where you want it to be. Domino's Pizza delivers.

• 24:50Nicola Twilley?

  One call does it all. And that's because these are the other big stories of the 1950s. Convenience and car culture. Pizza Hut was founded in Wichita, Kansas in 1958 by two brothers who were not Italian or even Italian American. And Domino's was founded two years later in Michigan, also by two brothers, the Monagans. Again, not so Italian.

• 25:15Nicola Twilley?

  It was about 50 years ago that they started the first store just about five miles from here. Two brothers had a great idea and they also said they wanted to get it delivered within 30 minutes. And that's something that no one said could be done. In fact, the first pizza delivery vehicle for our company is that vehicle right there. Around the eighties, we were exploding. We were the fastest growing company in the history of franchise business. Nothing had ever grown like that. This is from a Domino's ad, but it's true. They had a smart business model. And it wasn't just the method of getting the pizza to people. It was also who they were targeting as their ideal market. They set up shop near universities and military bases.

• 25:48Speaker 06

  Thinking, these are people, students in college and soldiers don't have a lot of money. So they want to eat cheap, fast food. And that really takes off because low and behold, guess what? College students and soldiers really do want to eat cheap, fast food. So they become enormously popular. And as they begin to spread, you know, they have this sort of idea. They mass produce these pizzas in these conveyor belt steel ovens. They're not replicating the Ovens that you find back in Naples. And they're just trying to develop a standardized product with a set number of toppings. You have a set number of choices and most of it's delivered. And they can really crank out the pizzas.

• 26:31Cynthia Graber?

  This is a new style of pizza, delivery pizza. The people making it weren't as focused on taste as pizza makers were in New York. It's basically meant to be fast and filling.

• 26:40Nicola Twilley?

  In a weird way, though, these new delivery style pizzas were actually pretty authentic to their roots. It was fast and cheap food for people without a lot of money or time, just like in the 1700s and 1800s in Naples.

• 26:52Cynthia Graber?

  But what made these companies particularly prosperous was that they could also take advantage of the newish franchise model that we talked about in our episode about McDonald's. Like Nikki said, they were using cheap ingredients, but also standardized recipes. And the result was fast food that was easy to replicate across the country.

• 27:08Nicola Twilley?

  At the same time, pizza was also morphing into a new format, the frozen pizza. The first ones hit the market in the late 1950s and early 60s.

• 27:18Speaker 06

  And these were pizzas that you could purchase fully assembled out of all kinds of standardized ingredients and heat up at home. But it was really thin. People described it as almost like cardboardy.

• 27:30Cynthia Graber?

  Frozen pizza was huge when I was a kid, but yeah, it was pretty cardboardy and gross. And then there was a breakthrough in frozen pizza technology.

• 27:37Speaker 07

  Hey, you ordered pizza? Hey, I didn't. It's not delivery. It's DiGiorno. Great toppings. Where's it from? It's not delivery. It's DiGiorno. Someone said delivery. Duh. Someone said DiGiorno.

• 27:51Nicola Twilley?

  DiGiorno Rising Crust Pizza is the frozen pizza with a crust that bakes up fresh like pizzeria pizza. Yes, it's true. In 1995, DiGiorno introduced a frozen pizza with a yeast leaven crust that actually puffed up in the oven.

• 28:06Cynthia Graber?

  There's some complicated chemistry going on here. They had to pre-bake. The crust so that it would puff up some, but then stabilize it with thickeners and package it in a particular gas mix, not regular air, to keep the yeast from doing any more work. And then, at a certain temperature in your oven, the crust would start puffing up again. It was indeed self-rising and no longer flat as cardboard.

• 28:25Nicola Twilley?

  A miracle of modern science, and yet, still kind of disgusting. As part of his extensive research, Francisco also explored the world of frozen pizzas.

• 28:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, and it's kind of baffling to us why it even exists, because there is no such thing as a good frozen pizza. And we've done a bunch of tests. Like, we bought every or most of the frozen pizzas that you can imagine exists. And they always have this weird smell, weird texture, weird taste.

• 28:55Cynthia Graber?

  Bad it might have been, but delivery, unfranchising, and frozen pizza explains how pizza got big in America. But how did it get big in Italy?

• 29:03Nicola Twilley?

  That happened at about the same time pizza was taking off in the US, in the 1950s and 60s.

• 29:08Speaker 06

  This is the time of the so-called economic miracle, where Italian industry really takes off. And northern Italy is a really great example, not only in textiles, but also office products. The economic miracle is not so prevalent in the South. Industry doesn't develop as quickly down there. So, southern Italian immigrants go looking for economic opportunities in northern Italy. They bring their pizza with them.

• 29:33Nicola Twilley?

  These were Neapolitan pizzas being cooked by migrant Neapolitans, initially for migrant Neapolitans, but then gradually adopted by other Italians.

• 29:42Cynthia Graber?

  But by the 1970s, there was another group hungry for a taste of Italy, and that was tourists. Air travel was becoming more common, and people wanted to visit romantic Italian cities.

• 29:52Speaker 06

  So you begin to see more tourists, not just coming from the United States, but other parts of Europe, trying to appreciate Italian tourism and the sights of Italy. And part of that has to do with they don't have a lot of time. They may have five days. They may have seven days. They don't have months to go travel to Naples and to Milan and all these places, but they want to try all the characteristic Italian foods.

• 30:14Nicola Twilley?

  As Carol said, Italian cuisine is super-regional. You shouldn't really Expect to find Milanese risotto and ragu bolognese in a Genoese pesto and a Neapolitan pizza all in the same place, but needs must.

• 30:28Speaker 06

  And so we begin to see, along with the development of the tourist industry in Italy, more and more restaurants throughout Italy offering pizza as a standard. And it's not unusual then to see pizzerias in cities all over Italy.

• 30:41Nicola Twilley?

  And thus, the pizza conquered its home country, Italy.

• 30:45Cynthia Graber?

  So if you're keeping count at home, at this point, we have four styles of pizza. There's Neapolitan pizza, there's New York pizza, there's delivery pizza, and there's frozen pizza. But I can practically hear you all yelling at us, what about Chicago? What about Detroit?

• 31:00Speaker 07

  The United States has a lot of styles that it could call its own. And that is incredible because there've been a lot of immigrants, Italian immigrants, that have gone to other countries and established roots there and made pizza, but not necessarily created a style for that place. For example, if you go to Australia, there's a ton of Italians that live in Australia. And they've opened a lot of Italian restaurants. And there's a fondness for Italian food in Australia. It's huge. But the pizza that you see there is Neapolitan. It wasn't like translated into Australia and its people and its ingredients. It's Neapolitan. But if you go to New York and you see a slice of pizza, a New York slice of pizza, and you know it's a New York slice of pizza.

• 31:39Nicola Twilley?

  But while New York may be the first truly American style of pizza, it is no longer the only one. The story of all the pizzas, Chicago, Detroit, even St. Louis, we've got those styles and those stories after the break.

• 31:57Speaker 05

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• 32:44Speaker 06

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• 33:29Cynthia Graber?

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• 34:06Speaker 07

  Detroit is definitely a very clear and specific style.

• 34:10Nicola Twilley?

  Detroit's style, for those of you who haven't yet tried it, is served in squares. It's a thick focaccia-like crust with super crispy edges, and the sauce is actually dolloped on top, over the cheese and other stuff. It's not my absolute most favorite, but I certainly wouldn't kick it out of bed.

• 34:28Speaker 07

  It's a pizza that's baked in these pans that were used in auto mechanic shops. They're black steel pans. I don't know who connected that, like, they saw the pan and thought, "I should bake a pizza in that." There's a story, it's somewhere, and I'm sure somebody knows it, but you don't usually think of things that you would see in an auto shop as things that you would use to cook as well, but I'm grateful they did because it produces a great pizza. And that pan is important because it's black. Which is good because it absorbs and it radiates heat very well into the pizza. It's thin too, so the conduction is very quick into the dough. But also doesn't warp and bend in the oven.

• 35:03Cynthia Graber?

  The pan gives Detroit pizza its characteristic shape and crispiness, but it's not just the pan. It's also both the type of cheese and how Detroiters spread that cheese around.

• 35:11Speaker 07

  It's a combination of cheeses, Wisconsin brick cheese and what we call pizza cheese, which is the part skim shredded pizza cheese that you see in all pizzas, mozzarella. It's a combination of that and what is really great about it is that cheese goes all the way to the border of the pan, it's in contact with the pan, so it bakes, kind of bakes into the dough and it forms its own cheese crust.

• 35:32Nicola Twilley?

  That's what makes the edges of a Detroit-style pizza so delicious, which is its true selling point for me.

• 35:39Cynthia Graber?

  And then, of course, there's Chicago-style, though, to be fair, Francisco says most people in Chicago aren't eating what most of the rest of us think of as Chicago-style.

• 35:47Speaker 07

  In Chicago, if you tell a group of people, let's go get pizza, people from Chicago won't be thinking immediately deep dish. And I need to clarify that because everybody who's not from Chicago, the first thing they think about when they think of Chicago pizza is deep dish, right? Chicagoans will go for what you and I would consider regular pizza, which is New York-ish in look.

• 36:08Nicola Twilley?

  But actual Chicago-style, as I may have mentioned before, Chicago is the first American city I ever lived in, and when I first encountered its eponymous pizza, I really didn't know exactly what to think.

• 36:21Cynthia Graber?

  I'm still perplexed by the whole thing. It has a really high crust and it's super, super thick with lots of gloopy cheese and a thick layer of tomato sauce on top, and the sauce is only prevented from spilling off the sides by that ridiculously high crust.

• 36:35Speaker 07

  So is it pizza or is it not pizza? I mean, it's a casserole, isn't it? I've seen quiches that look very much like Chicago deep dish. And just the amount of cheese and sauce in it is important. There's a lot about it that is very mystifying.

• 36:54Nicola Twilley?

  Francisco is not the only one that finds Chicago-style pizza confusing.

• 36:59Cynthia Graber?

  Jon Stewart has very, very strong words about Chicago pizza, such strong words that if you're a parent listening with kids, it is bleeped, but you still might want to skip ahead a minute. Deep dish pizza is not only not better than New York pizza.

• 37:13Cynthia Graber?

  It's

• 37:13Speaker 01

  It's not pizza. It's a [BLEEP] casserole. It's a cornbread biscuit which you've melted cheese on. And then, in defiance of God and man and all things holy, you poured uncooked marinara sauce atop the cheese. Atop! This is not pizza. This is tomato soup in a bread bowl. This is an above-ground marinara swimming pool for rats. When I look at your deep-dish [BLEEP] pizza, I don't know whether to eat it or throw a coin in it and make a wish. And if I made a wish, it would be that I wish for some real [BLEEP] pizza.

• 37:51Nicola Twilley?

  Jon Stewart is a very funny man, and I agree with him about lots of things. But I do have to take a stand here and say that, actually, Chicago-style pizza is amazing. It may not be pizza, but it is incredibly great in its own way, which is just as well, because ordering one is a real commitment.

• 38:09Speaker 07

  One of the things that baffles me as a chef is that if you go, because we did, we went to a bunch of different pizza areas when we were there. And every time you go, you say you're hungry, because that's where you go to a restaurant, because you're hungry. These pizzas take like 45 minutes to bake. How long of a lunch do you have to take?

• 38:25Cynthia Graber?

  So many mysteries. What's more, to the best of our knowledge, nobody even knows why Chicago pizza developed this way.

• 38:31Nicola Twilley?

  But it makes sense, kind of. Chicago is the agricultural commodity center for the US. All that grain passing through from the Midwest, all the slaughterhouses. With all that abundance, the local pizza would naturally also be generously proportioned.

• 38:47Cynthia Graber?

  So Chicago-style is famous for its overabundance, but then St. Louis-style is famous for its super-thin cracker crust and its particular cheese, which was invented in St. Louis.

• 38:56Nicola Twilley?

  This cheese is called Provol, and it's more like American cheese than mozzarella. It's not as stretchy as New York pizza cheese.

• 39:03Speaker 07

  I don't want to make a judgment that it's good or bad, but I will say it's an acquired taste. It doesn't stretch, just melts, and it turns into a very different, soft, oozy matter.

• 39:12Cynthia Graber?

  To be honest, soft, oozy matter on pizza doesn't sound all that appealing.

• 39:17Nicola Twilley?

  I have also tried St. Louis-style, and honestly, I've never felt like it was something I needed to have again.

• 39:22Cynthia Graber?

  But America isn't the only country that welcomed immigrants from Naples when they left in search of opportunities. Many traveled to South America, and there, they invented yet other styles of pizza. In Argentina, the pizza overflows with tomatoes and cheese, particularly cheese.

• 39:36Speaker 07

  The Italians that moved from Italy... Which used to be a very poor country and they moved to South America. There's all this abundance all of a sudden. So we're now taking this, you know, all of that we have here and we're gonna go to town on it. And our pizzas are gonna be thick. It's a thick crust pizza. It's covered in cheese. I think it's about the same amount of cheese as there is a dough. To the point where you cut a slice and the cheese is still hot. It covers the slice completely. It's like a blanket of cheese that melts on top of it. So it's a sort of pizza you have one or two slices and you're done.

• 40:09Nicola Twilley?

  Meanwhile, just next door, Brazil also had its share of Neapolitan immigrants, but their pizzas turned out distinctively different.

• 40:16Speaker 07

  And in Brazil, you have very thin crust pizzas. You know, you just get on a plane, go to a neighboring country and the pizzas all of a sudden are like super thin. Super thin and also adapted to stuff in the region, right? So there's hearts of palm on pizza. There's seafood, a lot of shrimp, tuna fish, canned tuna. There's cheese that is very similar to cream cheese called catupiry. They sell it in like piping bags, so you can just squeeze it on top of a pizza.

• 40:43Nicola Twilley?

  In fact, Francisco has a lab where he's perfecting recipes for each of these styles for the upcoming Modernist Cuisine Pizza Book, and he showed us a Brazilian pizza.

• 40:50Speaker 07

  As you can see, it's very thin. It's a very thin crust. And in fact, it's so thin that you can hear how this is like cracker-like, right? You can hear how it's very, it's very crackly.

• 41:02Nicola Twilley?

  Francisco's lab is like a chef slash scientist Disney world. He has everything, a professional wood-fired oven, all the kitchen tools you could imagine and then some, and also a whole bunch of scientific instruments.

• 41:14Speaker 07

  And one of them is called an extensograph. So an extensograph is basically a machine that what it does is it, it's picture like a robotic hook. And what it does is we attach like a string of dough to it, or a very thin strip of dough. And we attach it to the hook and it lifts it up and it's connected to a computer. So what it'll do is it'll measure the force it took to tear that piece of dough.

• 41:39Nicola Twilley?

  The extensograph helps Francisco measure the strength of flour. Some flours have more proteins than other. These proteins form gluten and they affect how stretchy and elastic the pizza is.

• 41:48Cynthia Graber?

  Pizza dough is.

• 41:48Nicola Twilley?

  Which is important because not all pizza dough needs to be stretchy.

• 41:52Speaker 07

  For example, if you're making a very thin crust dough, like the Brazilian thin crust pizza, you don't need to have a very elastic dough. But like with Neapolitan, it's very important to have that combination of strength and elasticity.

• 42:04Cynthia Graber?

  We watched the machine tug at dough until it ripped, and then the machine showed us how much strength it took to tear the dough. Francisco uses it to compare doughs made from different flours so he can figure out which flour is best for which type of pizza.

• 42:15Nicola Twilley?

  Clearly, stretching raw pizza dough is scientifically thrilling. But after talking about pizzas all day, Cynthia and I wanted to see, well, let's be honest, we really wanted to eat an actual pizza. So Francisco made us an authentic Neapolitan style.

• 42:34Speaker 07

  I'm trying to gently stretch it. And this sauce is a, compared to other tomato sauces, it's a very thin sauce. It's very fluid. And you need to have that with this particular style of pizza because if you use a thicker sauce, there's a chance it's going to burn in the oven. So we need to have that excess moisture to evaporate while the pizza is being spun in a 900-degree oven.

• 42:55Cynthia Graber?

  Francisco ripped up some basil and sprinkled it around, and then he took out a ball of fresh mozzarella and tore it into pieces.

• 43:01Speaker 07

  Not too much cheese. It's not like American pizzas. It's just a little bit of cheese.

• 43:06Nicola Twilley?

  Then he slid his creation onto what pizza people call the peel and into the oven.

• 43:13Cynthia Graber?

  And then as soon as he started to see some blistering and color on the crust, he stuck the very long-handled peel back into the very, very hot oven and carefully spun the pizza around.

• 43:22Speaker 07

  I like to spin it all the time so that the bottom doesn't burn. I like to have a golden bottom crust, but I don't want to have a burnt crust. So right now, I'm going to gently lift it and I'm going to start spinning it, okay? And I'm spinning it constantly so that I can get an evenly baked pizza. I want to make sure that the color is consistent throughout, that all of the leoparding is consistent throughout it.

• 43:51Nicola Twilley?

  Leoparding is actually a technical pizza term as well as a scientific mystery.

• 43:56Speaker 07

  If you get those little like black charm It's called leperting and it's a desirable thing. It's something that you want. There's that little, there's a difference between charred and burnt, I suppose is the best way to put it. And leperting is that little bit of char. We're trying to find out what it is. We think it's CO2 that has come to solution on the surface because you see it in a lot of sourdough breads.

• 44:16Cynthia Graber?

  And then after only 75 seconds, Francisco slid the pizza out, but not into our waiting mouths.

• 44:22Speaker 07

  So we're going to take this from here, straight to Evan over there, who's going to put it through the 3D scanner.

• 44:27Nicola Twilley?

  Francisco told us that true Neapolitan-style pizza has a five-minute window of perfection. That's why it doesn't work for delivery. And yet, here he was butzing around with the scanner. It was painful to watch.

• 44:41Speaker 07

  Essentially, the 3D scanner, it allows us to get like a very accurate volume measure of the pizza. So we basically have it on this, it's basically, it's spinning. And what it's spinning on is a cake stand that is motorized. So if we're comparing hydration percentages, if we're comparing fermentation times, if we're comparing baking temperatures, this is going to give us some very important and valuable results.

• 45:04Cynthia Graber?

  Do not panic, this pizza wasn't going to waste. Some of the staff there were happy to snack on the not-quite-perfect Neapolitan pizza.

• 45:11Nicola Twilley?

  But for us, only perfection would do. So Francisco made another.

• 45:16Speaker 07

  It's starting to bake, it's starting to get some color, so I'm starting to just spin it.

• 45:25Cynthia Graber?

  Wow.

• 45:28Cynthia Graber?

  Oh my god, smell that.

• 45:29Nicola Twilley?

  Smell it.

• 45:31Speaker 07

  So, so I'm going to cut this, eat whatever you'd like. You don't need to finish the whole slice if you don't want to. But if you want to, then you're more than welcome to.

• 45:43Cynthia Graber?

  Holy Hannah. That's about all we can say right now. That's all I have. We ate the whole slice. In fact, we ate more than one slice.

• 45:50Nicola Twilley?

  In fact, we ate the whole pizza. And I've had good pizzas, even pizza in Naples itself, and I feel comfortable saying this was a perfect Neapolitan pizza.

• 46:00Cynthia Graber?

  Oh, wait, I need a moment, I'm still dreaming about that pizza. Okay. But creating perfect examples of classic styles isn't enough for Francisco. He's still innovating.

• 46:09Nicola Twilley?

  Particularly with toppings.

• 46:11Speaker 07

  And by this, I mean like certain sauces, like you could put hollandaise on a pizza. And let me tell you, it's the most amazing thing you could do to pizza. Essentially, we made a Detroit pizza recently, and then we put hollandaise on top of it, our modernist hollandaise recipe, and flashed it back in the oven. It's one of the best things I've ever eaten.

• 46:30Cynthia Graber?

  But not all pizza is good.

• 46:32Nicola Twilley?

  There are some things that are just technically bad ideas. Francisco says microwaving pizza is something he cannot endorse because it turns the dough chewy. And he says stuffing a pizza crust, however much you need those extra fillings, that's not the place to put them. It makes everything too soggy.

• 46:50Cynthia Graber?

  And there are some flavor combinations that just don't work.

• 46:53Speaker 07

  Well, I think the one that still gives me nightmares is the Swedish kebab pizza, which is banana, curry sauce, peanuts, chicken, cheese, that's all baked on a piece of dough. But it's a thing. I mean, that really shook me to my core. And it's still, like I said, I still think about it.

• 47:14Nicola Twilley?

  So I've had apple on a pizza in China, which was not a culinary highlight. But banana? No. Maybe on a dessert pizza? But also, I'm not sure those are a good idea, full stop.

• 47:27Cynthia Graber?

  I don't even think that dessert pizzas are pizza. They might be tasty, but they're a different thing.

• 47:31Speaker 07

  It's an interesting aspect of the world of pizza. I don't know that I want to be the person who says, no, that's not pizza. I mean, does it look like a duck? No. Does it quack like a duck? No. So then, is it a duck? No. Just because you call it a duck, does it mean it's a duck, right?

• 47:50Nicola Twilley?

  Or a pizza.

• 47:53Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks this episode to Carol Hilstoski, author of Pizza: A Global History, and Francisco Magoya, co-author of Modernist Pizza.

• 48:00Nicola Twilley?

  We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode for your listening delight.

• 48:07Nicola Twilley?

  Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs. Best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo.com/voxx. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash voxx.

• 48:44Nicola Twilley?

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess Collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at HomeDepot.com.