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The rise of Neapolitan-style pizza, soft, pliable and blast-cooked to perfection in under 90 seconds, is the best thing to happen to British food in the past decade.
Those slow-proved bases blistered with delicious char, topped with sweet San Marzano tomato pulp and a modest layer of imperious ingredients, are frequently incredible – the most fun you can have with food at circa £10. From the Dusty Knuckle in Cardiff to Little Furnace in Liverpool, Cal’s Own in Newcastle to Bertha’s in Bristol, How to Eat – the series isolating the best way to eat our most beloved foods – salutes this flour-powered vanguard.
Is Neapolitan pizza unusually floppy? Undeniably. The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana [pdf] directs that a pizza should be no thicker than 4mm at its centre and, in its airy, chewy elasticity, the Neapolitan base is famed for its easy digestibility. It is a revelation, despite some objecting to Nea-pizza on the basis that a slice cannot support its own weight. Such naysayers are more than welcome to continue to eat the many pizzas available, from Brooklyn to Bolton, that feature bases as sturdy and appetising as cardboard. It leaves more gloriously limp, drooping Neapolitan pizza for the rest of us.
There is, however, one growing problem in this buffalo mozzarella-covered sphere, and that is a sudden voguish tendency – How To Eat is looking at you, the otherwise impeccable Honest Crust in Manchester – to send Neapolitan pizzas out from the kitchen unsliced. Not just in restaurants, but in more chaotic street food environments, too. This leaves you in the unfortunate position of having to eat your pizza with a knife and fork or tear it by hand, which seems a barbaric way to treat such a precious item.
It is authentic, apparently. But does that make it right? Let How to Eat (HTE) cut to the chase on the Neapolitan slice.
On knives, forks and pre-slicing …
“First things first,” announces Pizza Pilgrims’ website, “eating pizza with a knife and fork is a very Italian way to do things – so don’t feel like this is any kind of cop-out.” Indeed, there are those who see the New York “slice” and the habit that arose from that of pre-slicing whole pizzas in restaurants as an Italian-American invention, yet another strand of US cultural imperialism alien in Italy itself. Most Italian sources agree that in restaurants, cutlery should be used to eat your (whole, unsliced) pizza, not your hands.
That may seem weird for something we think of as street food, but it is not nearly as bizarre as the genuinely WTF method used in Naples by those eating pizza on the street. Pizza a portafoglio, literally wallet pizza, involves folding your pizza in half and then quarters, so you can walk along eating your newly portable pizza like a crepe or kebab – held out away from your shirtfront, warn its advocates. This (what … DIY calzone?) was the original way to enjoy this working-class street food, traditionalists insist.
But you can have too much tradition, HTE finds.
First, you should not be walking when eating a pizza of this quality. Pause and enjoy it properly in a leisurely manner, whether sat in a bus stop or at a restaurant table. Second, the portafoglio method (music to the ears of those who dismiss pizza as cheese on toast, no more than an open sandwich with good PR) surely gives you far too much of everything in every four-layer bite. Particularly at the pizza’s doughy edges. Flavourful as a good Neapolitan base is, who wants to eat four layers of undressed rim in one mouthful? That would be hideous. True, you can avoid that by inverting the portafoglio triangle and eating it from the tip down – as some do – but does that not risk the contents falling out of the pizza’s bottom as you move? It must.
Broken as Britain is in so many other ways, we should take pride in the fact that we have evolved a superior third way beyond cutlery or this portafoglio fallacy, by simply pre-cutting Neapolitan pizzas and then eating them slice by slice, by hand. A big part of the joy of this product is precisely how tactile it is. You want to get hands-on with your pizza. You want to feel that hot, springy crust yielding between your fingers. You want to get up close and personal with each slice – its aroma, its vivid colours – rather than eating it at one prim remove with cutlery or wolfing it down as a fat, folded wodge of indistinguishable ballast.
The fold
You must fold a Neapolitan pizza slice. Otherwise it is clearly going to flop and loll like a parched dog’s tongue, and all your toppings will drop off. Puffed-up and leopard-spotted, a slice of Neapolitan pizza may be beautiful, but it has all the structural integrity of a slinky.
The crimp, that half-hearted inversion of your slice, is not sufficient. That gully you create down the middle of your slice will not reinforce it. Conversely, Pizza Pilgrims’ advice to cut the pizza into four unmanageably large slices then fold each slice’s wings in by one-third to create a “pizza boat” is an over-engineered solution to a self-inflicted problem.
Instead, cut your pizza into six smaller sections so that you only need to fold each slice once, pinching the outer edges of the crust together to create, in essence, a folded sandwich from each slice. One that, if your pizza is a good one (its high-quality ingredients thinly sliced and evenly distributed, not left in a mountainous jumble), should mean you get a little bit of every ingredient in each bite.
If the centre of your pizza is extra-sloppy – and frequently it will be (that moist or umido centre is prized) – then you should also fold the tip of each slice in on itself by about 1cm. That stops sauce spraying hither and tither, and flipping the tip also means each slice starts with an extra thick, juicy gobbet of pure pizza pleasure.
It also helps you retain your dignity as a human being. By flipping the tip you are not left a.) chasing that dangling, trembling tip around like some fairground game, or b.) getting your head under each high-held slice and eating it from the tip up, feeding it down your throat like a pelican. A process that, after a few drinks, often leads to you smearing it all over your face.
The crust
Repeatedly, you see the argument advanced that Neapolitan pizza is unsuitable for slicing because it is so wet. If it is pre-cut, its molten topping will simply slide away. True, there may be spillages, ooze, a certain magma flow. But surely that is what the cornicione, that swollen outer crust, is for? Swiping through any rogue tomato, oil or mozzarella as you eat?
The crust is certainly not to be discarded. In its rule book, the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana stipulates that it “should deliver the flavour of well-prepared, baked bread”. Glossy and fragrant, the best crust can be eaten on its own or used to mop up the oil from pizza’s ideal starter: a bowl of plump, buttery nocellara olives. (Yes, that is the most middle-class sentence you have ever read and is precisely why, come the revolution, HTE will be first up against the wall.)
Additions
A good pizza does not need any. The tendency among heavy-handed pizzaiolo to drown already well-lubricated Neapolitan pizzas in a finishing flourish of olive oil is a good illustration of why you should not add more.
Similarly, from chilli flakes to freshly cracked black pepper, the common additions offered to pizza customers are likely, in one over-enthusiastic twist of the wrist, to ruin your meal. If you are regularly eating Neapolitan-style pizzas whose flavours need punching up, then you need to find a better pizza operation – someone is slacking in the kitchen.
Equipment
The dead chill of porcelain kills pizza, causing it to cool too quickly. A wooden pizza board or the classic corrugated-cardboard takeaway box are far superior platforms. Both allow a pizza to breathe, but maintain its core warmth for a suitable duration. Other than that, all you need is a ready supply of paper napkins.
Drink
Something dry, lightly acidic and gently carbonated to briskly flush the mouth clean during what is a naturally oily meal: good Czech or German pils (Jever, Rothaus Tannenzäpfle); US-style pale ales; lightly sour, citrusy saisons; sparkling wine, such as a proper secco red lambrusco: dry and complex, very different from the sweet muck of yore, favoured by several pizza experts and enjoying a renaissance.
Tread carefully with soft drinks. All that mozzarella and tomato pulp can make pizza a sweet savoury dish, which can become cloying when partnered with cola, lemonade or such. Sparkling water or grapefruit juice heavily watered down with tonic water is preferable.
So: Neapolitan-style pizza, how do you eat yours?
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