buckytom said:
don't despair sham, our onion breath will cast off those oddball "sweet pizza" people. (just curious urm, is it called pizza dulce?)
You came very close, Bucky, however "dulce" is spanish, Italian for sweet is "DOLCE", thus pizza dolce
buckytom said:
i think there needs to be a distinction. pizza may have many toppings (fillings are another category, an abomination imo, being a thin crust guy), but it should only be classified as a "pizza" if it contains cheese and tomatoes on a foccacia like crust of varied thicknesses.
white, and all other pizzas that stray from these denominators should be called topped foccacias, or open face foccacias, or what have you.
Well Bucky, I think the version with cheese and tomato based sauce is the only kind of "pizza" that became spread abroad, so I don't really blame you for your comment. But if you come to the pizza capital of the world here in Italy, you will soon realise that white pizzas, which are served without any tomato sauce (which are called "red" pizza), are just as popular as the one with tomatoes, and there are endless varieties of white pizzas being enjoyed here. Actually I came to prefer in general the white version, as with the very thin and crispy Roman style pizza, tomato sauce tends to get the dough a bit too soggy if you don't spread it carefully and very thinly.
As I mentioned, in Italy the basic meaning of the "pizza" is the bread part, and there is a certain difference between the baked pizza dough (pizza bianca) and focaccia, With focaccia being much thicker, fluffier and often baked with some other ingredients, like olives or sun dried tomatoes. But then again, it is true that the Italian immigrants who has settled elsewhere a few generations ago were often cut off from any contacts with the folks from their homeland, and developed their own tradition over the time, which sort of branched out from the original version. So your point of view is probably "correct" in, say, Brooklyn. Also there are huge difference between pizzas between Rome and Napoli, in the end, it is pretty much like the discussion whether you say "to-mah-to" or "to-may-to"...
buckytom said:
but nun-ja call that crap ah-beetz!
What? Do you know some of the Napolitan dialect which I ever fail to comprehend???