America’s favorite food has long been the pizza cooked in a traditional oven but is that about to change? While most Americans have probably never indulged in a grilled pizza, the origins of pizza are making a big comeback. There is no denying that we love our traditional backyard barbeque but rarely, if ever has the barbeque included grilling a pizza. Despite the seemingly odd combination of grill and pizza, the grill is the ideal tool for cooking pizza and in fact is deep in the origin of pizza making. The high, dry heat is ideal for a nice crisp crust and the flavor provided from your grill will on a whole new world of backyard grilling.Before the word pizza was ever used, Greeks and Romans used wood-fired brick ovens to prepare the original version of pizza - flatbread. In ancient times each diner was given a piece of flat bread along with a piece of meat on the bread. This food was eaten with the fingers with an occasional knife to cut the meat. Little did they know that this would eventually spark the creation one of the America’s favorite foods.
What You’ll Need To Make Mushroom Turkey And Swiss Cheese Pizza Recipe Suggestion – Make your dough the night before you plan to bake your pizza, this will allow plenty of time for the dough to rise and also adds to the flavor of your crust)
Having problems making pizza dough? Take the pizza dough mini course… It’s FREE. You can find it here:
7 Secret Tips For Making Great Pizza Crust At Home
Pizza Crust Ingredients:
* 1 teaspoon white sugar
* 1 1/2 cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C- No need to boil the water)
* 2 packages of Active Dry Yeast (AYD) – Easily obtained form any grocery store
* 1 small bottle of Extra Virgin Olive Oil
* 1-teaspoon salt
* 1 ¾ cups of Enriched Unbleached Bread Flour
Accessories
1- Roller Pin (Or a rollable surface to flatten the dough)
1- 14” Perforated Pizza Pan (The kind with the holes punched into the bottom of the pan)
2- Large Bowls for Mixing
2- Kitchen towels or equivalent
Few American foods are loved more that the infamous “pizza pie”. It doesn’t matter if you’re young, old or somewhere in between, almost everyone has a favorite when it comes to pizza. It would be rare to find someone that has never tried a slice of pizza.
It doesn’t matter where you’re from, what you look like or how much money you make. If you’ve got a few extra bucks and a hearty appetite, sooner or later the perfect combination of cheese, sauce, crust and toppings are going to find their way into your mouth.
Americans eat approximately 100 acres of pizza a day. (Yes…that’s ACRES) That’s a whopping 350 slices per second! This gives real meaning to the term “pizza lover”. Did you know that there are approximately 69,000 pizzerias in the United States? Approximately 3 BILLION pizzas are sold in the U.S. each year. (Source: Blumenfeld and Associates)
You probably would have guessed it - the biggest day of the year for pizza in the United States is none other than Super Bowl Sunday! There’s nothing like watching the big game with a few friends while you wait anxiously for the pizza guy to show up.
Pizza has become a very personal subject for most people. Everyone knows exactly how they want their pizza made. They can tell you exactly what type of crust they like, what size they prefer, how much sauce is “enough” sauce, and what toppings are the absolute best. Some can even tell you how long they prefer their pizza to cook in the pizza oven. There’s no doubt about it, when asked, they’ll talk about their favorite pizza with a big smile on their face.
California pizza, a totally different “style” of pizza has thoroughly integrated itself into the mainstream. So much so that many people do not recognize it as a separate pizza style.
In much the same way as pizza restaurants throughout the United States may carry a Chicago-style deep dish option, they may also have California-style items on the menu.
Once-innovative ingredients like barbecue, curry, eggs, or goat cheese, are now sold at more traditional pizza restaurants and chains, as simply another topping choice. California-style pizza is also quite common as frozen pre-prepared pizza.
In fact, a number of smaller and newer chains either specialize in, or carry, the California pizza style. In the fine dining end, many expensive restaurants continue to offer single-serving pizzas with expensive or exotic ingredients, baked in wood ovens, or even devote a portion of their menu to California-style pizza.
The Chicago-style “deep-dish” pizza that many people love was invented at Pizzeria Uno, in Chicago, in 1943, reportedly by Uno’s founder Ike Sewell, a former University of Texas football star. However, a 1956 article from the Chicago Daily News asserts that Uno’s original pizza chef Rudy Malnati developed the famous recipe.
The pizza’s foundation is simple. It uses a thick layer of dough (made with olive oil and cornmeal) that is formed to a deep round pan and pulled up the sides. The pizza crust is then parbaked before the toppings are added to give it greater spring.
Parbaking is a cooking technique in which a bread or dough product is partially baked and then rapidly frozen or cooled. The raw dough is baked as if normal, but halted at about 80% of the normal cooking time, when it is rapidly cooled and frozen. The partial cooking kills the yeast in the bread mixture, and sets the internal structure of the proteins and starches (the spongy texture of the bread), so that it is now essentially cooked inside, but not so far as to have generated “crust” or other externally desirable qualities that are difficult to preserve once fully cooked.
Tomatoes - The Worlds Most Popular Fruit
Surprisingly, the tomato is the world’s most popular fruit. And yes, just like the brinjal and the pumpkin, botanically speaking it is a fruit, not a vegetable. More than 60 million tons of tomatoes are produced per year, 16 million tons more than the second most popular fruit, the banana. Apples are the third most popular (36 million tons), then oranges (34 million tons) and watermelons (22 million tons).
Tomatoes were first cultivated in 700 AD by Aztecs and Incas. Explorers returning from Mexico introduced the tomato into Europe, where it was first mentioned in 1556. The French called it “the apple of love,” the Germans “the apple of paradise.”
Tomatoes are rich in vitamins A and C and fiber, and are cholesterol free. An average size tomato (148 gram, or 5 oz) boasts only 35 calories. Furthermore, new medical research suggests that the consumption of lycopene - the stuff that makes tomatoes red - may prevent cancer. Lycopene is part of the family of pigments called carotenoids, which are natural compounds that create the colours of fruits and vegetables. For example, beta carotene is the orange pigment in carrots. As with essential amino acids, they are not produced by the human body. Lycopene us the most powerful antioxidant in the carotenoid family and, with vitamins C and E, protect us from the free radicals that degrade many parts of the body.
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