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Pizza is one of those things I can't believe someone "invented". Flat bread must have been the first kind of bread: you just mix flour and water and heat it. Pu
by idontwantthis 3y ago
Pizza is one of those things I can't believe someone "invented". Flat bread must have been the first kind of bread: you just mix flour and water and heat it. Put something on that flat bread and eat it together and you have a "pizza" as much as this fresco is a "pizza".
- _giorgio_ 3y agoExactly, and nowdays pizza is just a trendy "tray" used to serve some exotic and new ingredients.
- adql 3y agoalways has been
- delecti 3y agoOnce upon a time (only about 500 years ago), tomato was a new exotic ingredient in Italy too.
- toyg 3y agoSo exotic they called it "the gold fruit", "pomo d'oro" - gold being the seeds inside.
- graypegg 3y agoI’m not sure if we can call “pizza with toppings other than the strictly Italian defaults” as “trendy” anymore. Most Swedish pizzerias will happily make you a banana curry pizza, and it’ll be the one of the standard topping options on the menu. Is it a trend if it’s normal? I think we (humans) have been putting different things on bread for as long as we’ve had bread, like GP said.
- lostlogin 3y agoYour idea makes sense but that recipe of yours doesn’t sound like any pizza I want.
- netrus 3y agoI am not aware of any traditional German dish that resembles a pizza - and we definitely have a tradition of bread making. So apparently it was not obvious to everyone.
- gfaure 3y agoWhat about Flammekueche?
- jeffreygoesto 3y agoLes Alsaciens m aimerait avoir son mot à dire.
- pjmlp 3y agoPeut-êtrè il fallait écrire en alsacien. :)
- b3orn 3y agoFlammkuchen, from south western parts of Germany.
- twic 3y agoThere's a very old German word which mean some sort of baked flat thing: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Etymological_Dictionary_of_the_German_Language/Annotated/Fladen https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Etymological_Dictionary_of... But i haven't been able to find out if we know whether it was sweet or savoury, or anything else about it.
- omnibrain 3y agoFlammkuchen got already mentioned, but there is also "Dinnele/Dinnete/Dünnele". Both sweet and savory.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago> you just mix flour and water and heat it Presumably though the domestication of wheat had a symbiotic relationship with bread making. The (ancestral) wheat that exists today is like bread-powder when it is milled, but it was probably bred for that purpose (no pun intended). So I’m not sure we can be confident what the first breads were like, made with whatever pre-wheat grasses they had at the time. Perhaps it required other ingredients at first before those aspects were “automated” into the grass itself, etc
- eru 3y agoYou can make something like bread with lots of different grains, not just wheat. However, if you eg want to make a 100% rye bread, you really have to make it a sourdough, because otherwise the chemistry doesn't work out.
- lisper 3y agoAha! So that’s why a true rye bread tastes so good!
- eru 3y agoRye also has different trace minerals than eg wheat or barley. That's part of why rye ale tastes different from wheat beer tastes different from barley beer.
- OJFord 3y agoThat doesn't make sense to me, unless you mean the 'normal' instant yeasts supermarkets sell only work with wheat? If yeast from natural exposure would work then surely one of the plethora commercial yeasts (or marketed for homebrew) would do the trick?
- moritz 3y agoYou can use commercial yeast, but it will never be as light as with sourdough fermentation, but very dense and “soggy”. There are more factors at play here but the tldr is that, other than wheat, rye flour contains a very high level of amylase, an enzyme that breaks starches into sugars. Amylase prevents bread from rising, and rye contains so much of it that it stays active even with the high temperatures of baking. Add that to the fact that rye has very little gluten to hold up the structure of the bread… That‘s where sourdough comes into play. The acids produced during a slow fermentation slow down the reaction of amylase, giving you a lighter bread. For a good rye bread, I ferment for over 24h in three steps.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago> Flat bread must have been the first kind of bread: you just mix flour and water and heat it. And keep some "old dough" for starting the next batch. The general concept of a "sourdough starter" arises from that. This was pretty much the only form of bread yeast until 1850 or so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker%27s_yeast#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker%27s_yeast#History And have a look at the wood-fired bead ovens in Pompeii. They're quite similar to the Pizza ovens down the road in Napoli. It's likely that the Romans made similar dishes: flatbread with cheese, meat, sauce and herbs baked on top. But not tomatoes yet, until 1600s or later, after the Columbian exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
- idontwantthis 3y ago> And keep some "old dough" for starting the next batch. It wouldn’t even need to rise. Just heat dough and you’ll have something you can put other food on top of and eat the whole thing.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y agoBut also the technique of leavening using natural yeast has been known for thousands of years; it pre-dates the Romans, who definitely used it in their regular bread. I'd say that running a bakery under those conditions: i.e. would always be yeast around and there is no refrigeration, so for any given dough it's a question of when, not if, a given piece of dough will start to rise.
- datavirtue 3y agoYou will also have a brick in your colon. Not good advice.
- prox 3y agoPompeii had snackbars as well. People bought their food on the street. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/26/exceptionally-well-preserved-snack-bar-unearthed-in-pompeii https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/26/exceptionally-... In some districts in Rome, they had large apartment blocks (insualae) several levels high, and fire was forbidden, so people had to buy food on the streets. From wiki: The insulae could be built up to nine storeys, before Augustus introduced a height limit of about 68 feet. Later, this was reduced further, to about 58 feet
- sacnoradhq 3y agoSpiced flatbreads of the middle east are pretty damn good. I think enough people, early enough, tried every combination of tasty things on bread. Oil and vinegar with bread were probably found thousands of years ago. Tomato and corn don't arrive in the Old World until the early 16th c. Cheese goes back to 7th mill. BCE but was too expensive for most people.
- mrtksn 3y agoIMHO it's more like a case of getting invented in many places because it still needs to be invented and people are inventing it in very different forms. You have the French/German Flammkuchen, which is an amazingly good version that I don't know why it's not widely known. There's Lahmacun, which is the "Turkish Pizza" - a lot more spicy and thin version with minced meat with spice as topping. There's also Pide, which is thicker and closer to Italian pizza but the shape and the toppings are quite different(cubed meat, egg). Then there are the American pizza types like Chicago-style that look significantly different than the Italian ones. The one on the fresco looks like the Italian version.
- ziftface 3y agoI think lahmacun's origins are at least more complicated than just Turkish. Even the name means "meat with dough" in Arabic. As you said it was invented in many places though.
- mrtksn 3y agoSure, due to the history of the region(which is old as the history of humanity and religions) it's really not easy to attribute anything to any particular civilisation. It's almost a sport to argue over the origin of the dish between Greeks, Turks and Arabs.
- sirfz 3y agoIndeed, lahmacun (lahmajoon) clearly comes from Arabic "lahm b ajin" (meat with bread) which is just another variation of the Mankoushe (منقوشة) - a flat bread with different toppings such as thyme, cheese and the famous meat variation.
- pjmlp 3y agoOnce in Basel I had a laugh, because a restaurant decided to translate Flammkuchen as "French Pizza" on their menus.
- Symbiote 3y agoI'd like to promote British cuisine by including cheese on toast in your list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese_on_toast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese_on_toast
- CTDOCodebases 3y agoIt tastes so good so why isn't it available in multiple places then? Did some of the peoples involved in the parallel construction have their bloodlines wiped off the whiteboard of humanity? Or did they just get sick of eating it?
- activiation 3y agoGood idea, i will patent it first though.
- jojobas 3y agoWell, someone had to do it first, therefore "invented". For the Greeks, bread was almost as separate from other foods as drinks were, so maybe the concept of baking that other food with dough is not that obvious.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- paxys 3y agoIf you consider all flatbreads with toppings to be "pizza" then sure, that goes back basically forever. People however usually think of the origin of pizza to be when tomatoes were added to the equation, and that has a much more well-defined history (mainly due to the limited availability and spread of tomatoes in Europe and around the world).
- datavirtue 3y agoPizza evolved in America. High gluten flour, tomatoes, and mozzarella. Don't confuse pizza with Italy. American wheat flour has been the key innovation. No one else has the gluten to hang. People import Americanized flour from Italy with Italian names and such but you can get better in the US. The lower gluten flours from Italy are good for the style they make over there...margherita (the Italianized version of pizza--very thin, high temp).
- cyberneticist 3y agoThere also has to be an aspect of the price of mozzarella in the post WW2 boom in America or else we wouldn't use such an indulgent amount of cheese as standard. Even Canadians I know will take home an American pizza because of the ridiculous amount of cheese we put on pizza compared to Canada.