The Secret Origins Of Pizza!!!

We all love pizza. I think we could say that pizza is the most popular delicacy in the world. And why not? I mean there is a pizza for anyone, no matter what your preferences are you can find or make a pizza to suit your tastes! Pineapple Pizza, Pizza Neapolitan, Salad Pizza, Kebab Pizza, Chocolate Pizza, Ice Cream Pizza , the possibilities are endless. But the most famous pizza ever is the Italian pizza and to be more precise the Pizza Margarita, supposedly the first pizza ever made by the baker Rafael Esposito in honor of the Queen of Italy, Margarita of Savoy, in 1889 AC. But what if I told you that pizza is an ancient food and Its origins go back to ancient Greece.

We can find info about pizza being a Greek food in Plato's writings that date back to 300 BC, centuries before Rafael Esposito was even born. So according to Plato, ancient Greeks used to bake thin pies (Pites) which they decorated with vegetables, olives, garlic, onions, cheese, spices, herbs, and olive oil. It was made as a main dish and not an appetizer.

The weird thing is that they named this delicious dish plakous or plakountas which means placenta. Who knows why? So how did plakous become pizza? Well, we think that pizza comes from the Italian word pikta which means dough, but pikta comes from the Greek word pikti which also means dough.

As the Greeks traveled to Italy during the second Greek colonization, piza, or to be more precise, plakous traveled with them there, the place where it will take its final form centuries later. ( The second Greek colonization was an organized colonial expansion that took place by the Archaic Greeks in the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea in the period of the 8th,7th, and 6th century BC. In particular, the Greeks colonized south Italy and Sicily. The areas of settlement in southern Italy became so thoroughly Hellenized that Roman writers such as Polybius and Ovid referred to this region as Great Greece or Mama Grecia. Still to this day, a lot of people in southern Italy speak Greek influenced dialects!)

Now back at the pizza! It is also worth mentioning that during the period that ancient Rome ruled the world, they lived by the famous saying "Panem et Circenses" which means "Bread and Circuses".During those times the dish Focaccia, a kind of a dough garnished with many ingredients, a food that could be described as the evolution of the Greek "Plakous" and the grandfather of the Italian pizza we all know and love today, was as popular as the Gladiator games!( It looks like they actually lived by the famous saying!). Foccacia is a flat oven-baked type of bread, similar in texture and style to the modern Italian pizza but, unlike plakous and pizza, Foccacia is served as a side dish and not as a main course. In some places, it is also called Pizza Bianca.

Ok, but what about all those different types of pizza we have today? All those delicious pizzas that have me looking at the menu for at least 15 minutes every time I go to a restaurant, trying to decide what to order, what about those? How, where and when did they appear?

Let us look at some of the most popular types of pizza today!

Although Canada has lots of pizzerias that bake every type of pizza, the most popular one is the Canadian Pizza. Many variations of the same dish exist, but the main element that diffiriantes the Canadian Pizza, from the other types of pizza, is the addition of bacon and mashrooms!

It is also intresting that in some regions of Canada, you can find a special dish called Pizza Ghetti that is a combination of a half pizza accompanied by some spaghetti with tomato sauce! Another take on this combination is using spaghetti as a pizza topping, under the cheese! Even though this dish is a compination of 2 of Italy's most famous dishes, the pizza ghetti is something unheard of in Italy!

Another weird fact is that the Hawaiian pizza, the famous Pineapple Pizza was invented in Canada by the Greek-born Canadian baker and businessman Sam Panopoulis at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham Ontario! So, it looks like Hawaiian pizza is Greek after all!

Pizza in the USA grew in popularity after World War 2 when soldiers who served in Italy came back from the war! Innovating bakers in the USA, changed pizza forever, creating a lot of different varieties and types of pizza that were never seen before! We cannot include every pizza variation here but some of the most notable changes are the following .

Most pizzas in the USA are made with thicker crusts as well as a thicker base that is extremely different from the traditional thin Italian base.

Additionally, it is common for American pizza bakers to add vegetable oil or shortening into the daugh!

Also worth mentioning is, the huge deep-dish pizzas that seem more like massive pies than actual pizza!

Other notable pizza facts are the following:

-The world's largest pizza was measured to be 1261. 65 square meters. It was made in Rome, the year 2012.

-The pizza Napolitano was granted Protected Designation of Origin by the EU in 2009 and 2017 it was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Records!

-In the USA, 350 slices of pizza are consumed each second!

-The first documented pizzeria in the world opened in Naples, Italy during the 1800's while the first pizzeria in America opened in New York City in 1905 its name was Lombardi’s.

- The first documentation we know of the word pizza is from 997C.B.

- The most expensive pizza costs 9000$.

However, to sum it all up, one thing is clear, wherever pizza came from and wherever in the world you eat it, no matter the type of pizza you decide to get, it is going to be delicious!