Any Way You Slice It

By Jane and Michael Stern

photo by Todd Coleman

California is where pizza became boutique food, starting in the 1980s, as part of a larger exaltation of Mediterranean cuisine. Alice Waters put a wood-burning oven into Berkeley's the Café at Chéz Panisse, and Wolfgang Puck got famous by feeding Hollywood stars $100 caviar pies. Puck's pizza man, Ed LaDou, went on to found the California Pizza Kitchen chain, now famous around the country for its barbecued-chicken pizza.

America's pizza map is a crazy quilt of invention, from inspired to insane. If you doubt that, have a taste of pulled-pork pizza in Memphis, or saltine-thin, unleavened-crust pizza in St. Louis, where mozzarella is shunned in favor of Provel cheese, a mix of cheddar, Swiss, and provolone. Detroit's signature is a thick-crust variation, called square pizza because it is cut into squares, gilded with caramelized cheese, and dotted with sauce. In the pork-loving Quad Cities region of Illinois and Iowa, pizzas come blanketed with ground Italian sausage, and they are cut into long pieces called "strips." Square, lightly sauced Grandma pizza is a Long Island specialty. Similar pizzas are known in other parts of the country as bakery pizza; a whole isn't a pie, it's a tray.

Page 5 of 5

« Previous 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #143

Subscribe now

Comments (1)

by CASA-GIARDINO on 2012-01-11

I'll stick to my own made pizzas -
1. topped with chopped fresh tomatoes (not sauce), grated pecorino, chopped hot peppers, basil and parsley.
2. stuffed with fresh roasted peppers, garlic and parsley
3. topped with minced garlic, parsley and anchovies (no tomatoes)
4. topped with thin layers of shaved potatoes, minced garlic and olive oil
5. stuffed with sauted onions and golden raisins.
http://casa-giardino.blogspot.com