Ep·I·Cu·Ri·Os·I·Ty

ep·i·cu·ri·os·i·ty ep·i·cu·ri·os·i·ty noun \e-pi-kyu̇r-ē-ˈä-s(ə-)tē\ : the desire to learn or know more about something or someone related to food and drink : something related to food and drink that is interesting because it is unusual Edible Innovations What is food science? Hear how much fun it is from the scientists themselves! “They pay me to play with food!” Watch now at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72eHuIakdLc The old saying goes "you are what you eat." So what does that say about you (and America?) More than you might imagine. Have you ever wondered about your food? Where it's from, how it's processed, how it’s made, what it does and doesn't contain? You have questions, let’s find answers, and fabulous favorites made from scratch! 1 Index A Pizza My Heart, p. 3-33 Chill: Ice Cream & Frozen Desserts, p. 34-66 Bubbling Over!: Sodas, p. 67-81 All You Knead is Bread, p. 82-110 Starting from Scratch: Cookies, Candies, & Pies p. 111-126 2 grill it, bake it, love it! A Pizza My Heart! 3 piz•za noun \ˈpēt-sə\ : a dish made typically of flattened bread dough spread with a savory mixture usually including tomatoes and cheese and often other toppings and baked —called also pizza pie. A Slice of History: Pizza through the Ages Think Italian cuisine and three dishes immediately come to mind: spaghetti, tomato, and pizza, yet none of them originated in Italy! Pizza lovers can suck down several sauce-laden slices in mere minutes (every second, Americans eat 350 slices of pizza. That's 23 pounds per person, per year. As a nation we buy over 3 billion pizzas annually), pizza didn’t develop out of nothing. Some form of pizza, or another, has been around for a long time! Archeologists have found evidence of pizza (flat flour cakes believed to be topped with oils and herbs) in Pompei in 79AD! Later Pompei and Neopolis would become centers of pizza, and Neopolis would eventually become Naples, the home of pizza. Technically an independent kingdom, Naples was notorious for its throngs of working poor, or lazzaroni. Unlike the wealthy minority, these Neapolitans required inexpensive food that could be consumed quickly, they had to get back to work! Pizza—flatbreads with various toppings, eaten for any meal and sold by street vendors or informal restaurants—met this need. Judgmental Italian authors often called their speedy eating habits ‘disgusting.’” These early pizzas eaten by Naples’ poor featured the tasty garnishes beloved today, such as tomatoes, cheese, oil, anchovies and garlic; and ones people today might not like so much like pork fat and lard. Now, one of our favorite toppings wasn’t possible till about 1522, when explorers brought tomatoes from Peru back to Italy. It’s hard to imagine Italian food without the tomatoes these days. Interestingly it took a while before Italians would even touch or eat tomatoes. Why? Because everyone thought they were poisonous. 4 Italy unified in 1861, and King Umberto I and Queen Margherita Teresa Giovanni visited Naples in 1889. Legend has it that the traveling pair became bored with their steady diet of fancy French haute cuisine and asked for an assortment of pizzas (common man’s food). Don Raffaele Esposito, who owned Pietro Il Pizzaiolo, was asked to prepare a special dish in honor of the Queen's visit. Esposito consulted his wife, who was the real pizza expert, and together they developed a pizza featuring tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and basil, food that would represent the colors of Italy and the colors of the Italian flag. They named it the Margherita Pizza, after the city's royal guest of honor and it was the variety the queen enjoyed most. From then on, the story goes, that particular topping combination was permanently dubbed pizza Margherita in her honor. Queen Margherita’s blessing could have been the start of an Italy-wide pizza craze. After all, flatbreads with toppings weren’t unique to the lazzaroni or Hungry History their time—they were consumed, for instance, by the ancient Egyptians, In this exclusive Hungry Romans and Greeks. (The latter ate a version with herbs and oil, similar to History video, host Ian today’s focaccia.) And yet, even with the Queen’s royal approval, until the Knauer serves up pizza 1940s, pizza would remain little known in Italy beyond Naples’ borders. history, from the flatbreads An ocean away, immigrants to the United States from Naples were replicating of ancient Pompeii to their trusty, crusty pizzas in New York and other American cities, including today’s pies. He also takes Trenton, New Haven, Boston, Chicago and St. Louis. The Neapolitans were us through the steps of coming for factory jobs, as did millions of Europeans in the late 19th and early making a classic Margherita 20th centuries; they weren’t seeking to make a culinary statement. pizza at home. Did you know oil is a key ingredient in Back in Italy they would use buffalo mozzarella and oregano. In the States, pizza crust-helping to fry the when they couldn’t get those ingredients, they would substitute with what dough from the inside out, was available, cow’s milk mozzarella and sweet marjoram. giving you an extra crispy crust? Follow his recipe The first documented United States pizzeria was G. (for (taken from his cookbook Gennaro) Lombardi’s grocery store on Spring Street in Manhattan, licensed to “The Farm: Rustic Recipes sell pizza in 1905! (Prior to that, the dish was homemade or purveyed by for a Year of Incredible unlicensed vendors.) Gennaro Lombardi, began selling his pizza for the Food”) or another to turn princely sum of a nickel per pizza (only $1.02 in today’s money). Lombardi’s, your classroom into an still in operation today though no longer at its 1905 location has the same authentic pizza parlor. oven as it did originally in 1905! Watch now at: The most elemental form of NY pizza, often called Neapolitan-American, http://www.history.com/ne shares much in common with the original Neapolitan type: a thin crust, a very ws/hungry-history/pizzas- light covering of tomato sauce, and a smattering of fresh mozzarella cheese. past-and-present-video But they differ in cooking technique, size, and texture. In Naples, the pies are cooked with wood and the center of the pizza tends to be soft and floppy. Neapolitan pies are intended for one person and a knife and fork is required. The original NY pies were larger, averaging a 14"-16" diameter, and were cooked in coal fired ovens until crisp from edge to edge. 5 Lombardi's thrived in Little Italy, feeding legions of factory workers and immigrants longing for a taste of home. It was so popular that Lombardi soon entirely stopped selling groceries and started selling pizza exclusively. Numerous employees struck out on their own, fanning out across the city and spreading the distinctive style of pizza. Relatively quickly, the flavors and aromas of pizza began to intrigue non-Neapolitans and non-Italians. And as the soldiers came home from Italy and Europe after WW2, they came home talking about and seeking to satisfy the taste they had acquired for Italian pizza while liberating Europe. Soon, pizzerias where opening in neighborhoods all over the city, not just Italian-American ones. As Italian-Americans, and their food, migrated from city to suburb, east to west, especially after World War II, pizza’s popularity in the United States boomed. No longer seen as an “ethnic” treat, it was increasingly identified as a fast, fun food. Postwar pizza finally reached Italy and beyond. “Like blue jeans and rock and roll, the rest of the world, including the Italians, picked up on pizza just because it was American.” Regional, decidedly non-Neapolitan Sicilian Style? variations emerged, eventually including Chicago’s deep dish, New York’s thin crust, California’s extra thin crust, Characterized by a rectangular Sicilian style, and more. Reflecting local tastes, toppings shape due to being pan cooked, can run the gamut from Gouda cheese in Curaçao to with a crust that is generally over hardboiled eggs in Brazil. Yet international outposts of an inch thick, this style of pizza American chains like Domino’s and Pizza Hut also thrive in originated in the bakeries, not the about 60 different countries. pizzerias, of Sicily, where it is sold as Sfinciuni. In Sicily, Sfinciuni is Today you can still get different kinds of pizza all around topped with a tomato sauce spiked the country like dessert pizzas (chocolate-cherry-berry with anchovies and onions under a pizza, anyone?), and decidedly different pizzas like today’s canopy of breadcrumbs rather gourmet pizzas topped with anything you can imagine, like than the tomato sauce and cheese barbecued chicken, asparagus, truffles, quail eggs, crusts we see in NYC. made with duck fat, pizzas covered in smoked salmon, or global ingredients like boquerones and merguez sausage. There’s an increasing number of interesting vegetarian and vegan combinations such as seitan sausage, Daiya non-dairy cheese and cornmeal- crusted mushrooms and the option for whole wheat or gluten-free crust. Perhaps one of the quirkiest American pizza variations is the Rocky Mountain pie (also called The Legendary Colorado Style Pizza) a thick pie (rather like a deep dish) topped with mountains of ingredients, baked with a supersized, braided doughy crust to save for last. Then you dip it in honey and have it for dessert.

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