I've eaten some of the best slices in the Bronx, the pizza joints had bullet proof glass between the employees and customers you put the money in a turnstile and then they slide a slice.
The New York pizza slice is a perfect hot, quick lunch that you can grab as you head to the subway. From the streets of Manhattan to Sydney to Tokyo, this saucy flat-breaded snack is universal — but why?
How did a single version of a simple food become an international standard bearer?
You can get a taste of the answer in “Food Routes” — a new book by Robyn Metcalfe that explains how certain food producers, like New York City pizza makers, came to dominate their food supply chains.
“As I traveled around the world looking at the way very, very simple dishes came together on people’s plates,” said Metcalfe who directs the the Food + City lab at the University of Texas at Austin, “no matter what city I went to, whether it was Istanbul or Tokyo or New York City, there were the same four themes that emerged every time.”
These four ingredients are reliability, adaptability, trust and technology — and Metcalfe said if one goes missing, it can break down the supply chains for our favorite foods.
New York pizza makers rely on the consistency of their food suppliers to deliver core ingredients — pecorino cheese from Italy and mozzarella from Wisconsin. If those deliveries stop arriving, such as during a natural disaster like 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, it can cripple service for months.
Metcalfe also visited pizzerias that adapted to such calamities, some by having a handy, backup food source. This flexibility helps build trust between the restaurants and their customers, who can always count on their pizza, notwithstanding mother nature.
But three of the ingredients — trust, reliability and adaptability — often depend technology, Metcalfe writes. Food technology is often what ensures food safety, broadens the ingredients in our diet or increases access to food.
In the case of the New York pizza slice, the key piece of technology arrived in the 1930s: the invention of the gas-fueled deck oven. Most New York slices around the world — whether served from a food truck, an Italian restaurant or a pizza chain — are cooked in these deck ovens.
PBS NewsHour spoke with Metcalfe, a pizza historian and pizza makers about about how this unassuming oven turned the New York slice into an international icon.
Where did the New York pizza oven come from?
Let’s rewind to the early 1900s, when Italian migrants streamed into the Northeastern United States. By 1920, nearly a quarter of the 1.6 million Italian immigrants in America lived in New York City — and they brought along a bunch of bedroom-sized coal- and wood-fired ovens.
“They were built by masons to bake bread, but they were being utilized to make pizza,” said Scott Wiener, a pizza historian and pizza tour guide. “So that’s the foundation of pizza in New York.”
These Neapolitan bakers would begin at dawn because it took time for the coal-fired ovens to warm to the 900 degrees Fahrenheit needed to cook bread. That temperature is way too hot for pizza dough, unless you enjoy charred crusts, so the first pizza purveyors primarily baked slices early in the morning. Today, coal-fired pizza remains a precision art — even with more modern hearth ovens.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/scienc...hsezVg_fppB41-213-Lgzj1qfPphjHA5Rxqce9ajbLde0
The New York pizza slice is a perfect hot, quick lunch that you can grab as you head to the subway. From the streets of Manhattan to Sydney to Tokyo, this saucy flat-breaded snack is universal — but why?
How did a single version of a simple food become an international standard bearer?
You can get a taste of the answer in “Food Routes” — a new book by Robyn Metcalfe that explains how certain food producers, like New York City pizza makers, came to dominate their food supply chains.
“As I traveled around the world looking at the way very, very simple dishes came together on people’s plates,” said Metcalfe who directs the the Food + City lab at the University of Texas at Austin, “no matter what city I went to, whether it was Istanbul or Tokyo or New York City, there were the same four themes that emerged every time.”
These four ingredients are reliability, adaptability, trust and technology — and Metcalfe said if one goes missing, it can break down the supply chains for our favorite foods.
New York pizza makers rely on the consistency of their food suppliers to deliver core ingredients — pecorino cheese from Italy and mozzarella from Wisconsin. If those deliveries stop arriving, such as during a natural disaster like 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, it can cripple service for months.
Metcalfe also visited pizzerias that adapted to such calamities, some by having a handy, backup food source. This flexibility helps build trust between the restaurants and their customers, who can always count on their pizza, notwithstanding mother nature.
But three of the ingredients — trust, reliability and adaptability — often depend technology, Metcalfe writes. Food technology is often what ensures food safety, broadens the ingredients in our diet or increases access to food.
In the case of the New York pizza slice, the key piece of technology arrived in the 1930s: the invention of the gas-fueled deck oven. Most New York slices around the world — whether served from a food truck, an Italian restaurant or a pizza chain — are cooked in these deck ovens.
PBS NewsHour spoke with Metcalfe, a pizza historian and pizza makers about about how this unassuming oven turned the New York slice into an international icon.
Where did the New York pizza oven come from?
Let’s rewind to the early 1900s, when Italian migrants streamed into the Northeastern United States. By 1920, nearly a quarter of the 1.6 million Italian immigrants in America lived in New York City — and they brought along a bunch of bedroom-sized coal- and wood-fired ovens.
“They were built by masons to bake bread, but they were being utilized to make pizza,” said Scott Wiener, a pizza historian and pizza tour guide. “So that’s the foundation of pizza in New York.”
These Neapolitan bakers would begin at dawn because it took time for the coal-fired ovens to warm to the 900 degrees Fahrenheit needed to cook bread. That temperature is way too hot for pizza dough, unless you enjoy charred crusts, so the first pizza purveyors primarily baked slices early in the morning. Today, coal-fired pizza remains a precision art — even with more modern hearth ovens.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/scienc...hsezVg_fppB41-213-Lgzj1qfPphjHA5Rxqce9ajbLde0
