I’m satisfied and happy, not bloated with the cheap carbs and self-loathing that lesser pizzas trail in their wake
A while back, on a trip sponsored by the Neapolitan tourist board, I was compelled to eat 10 pizzas, one after the other, an experience since immortalised by my partner in crime as “The Best Day In My Life”. (The only place I refused was the famous Da Michele, thanks to its starring role in Eat, Pray, Love, a film that deserves to die by a thousand cuts.) By the time we hit La Notizia, a place run by a pizza fascist so scary he made Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi seem reasonable, some members of our party had started turning green around the gills. Not us, though. Not us. What a day.
It all added up to something of a whistlestop education. Neapolitans take pizza veeeery seriously; they’re not much inclined to regard the rest of the world ( let alone upstarts like Rome and Milan) as capable of coming up with the goods. There’s a body in the city, the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, that publishes a set of rules as to what constitutes the real thing: flour has to be high-protein 0 or 00; cooking must be for no longer than 90 seconds in a wood-fired oven at a temperature of 485F or above. The rules demand a certain shape and construction for the oven, and dictate what woods can be used; they even lay down the desired temperature for the tomato. There are pages and pages of this stuff. It’s fair to say the vast majority of pizza makers would give it a glance and think, sod this for a game of soldiers.
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