The word pizza evolved from a mispronunciation of the word pita or picta. Pita was a kind of flat bread that has been popular in the Middle East and the Mediterranean area for thousands of years. The word pizza first appeared in 997AD in a document that was found in the town of Gaeta in Southern Italy.
Many examples of early flavoured flat breads have been found in many parts of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India and some parts of Northern Europe. The earliest flat breads found date back over 3,000 years. The first record of cheese being used when making a flat bread is when the Persian King, Darius The Great’s soldiers cooked a bread on their shields. They covered the resulting flat bread with dates and cheese.
Bakers used a piece of flat dough to check the temperature of their ovens to see if they were hot enough to cook the bread. The poor were sold the resulting product. Most bakers covered the piece of dough in a thin white sauce. Slowly this changed with them adding oil, cheese or tomatoes.
The first modern pizza was made in 1889 by Raffaele Esposito to honour the Queen consort of Italy, Margarita of Savoy. The pizza was designed to replicate the colours of the Italian flag, so was topped with mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and basil.
Nowadays, you can buy a pizza in any country on earth, and in virtually every city. As a result whilst the doughs are very similar the toppings used are continually evolving to reflect local tastes. Many different cooking methods are used, but the best tasting pizzas are made in wood burning ovens.
Pizza is the perfect takeaway food, it also tastes good cold the next day. Some take away pizza companies are now offering customers a take-and-bake service. They make up the pizza to your specifications, but you bake it at home.
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