Everything ends in pizza
July 10 in Brazil celebrates Pizza Day, one of the most consumed dishes in the world. In Brazil, according to the Associação Pizzarias Unidas of the State of São Paulo (APUESP), consumption reaches 1 million pizzas daily, 572 thousand only in the city of São Paulo, which is considered the second city that consumes the most pizza in the world, standing only behind New York.
The date was set by the then tourism secretary Caio Luís de Carvalho, in 1985, when a state contest was held in São Paulo that elected the 10 best mozzarella and margherita recipes. Excited by the success of the event, the secretary chose its closing date, July 10, as the official date of celebration. Pizza is a culinary preparation that consists of a disk of fermented dough of wheat flour, covered with tomato sauce and the varied ingredients that usually include some type of cheese, prepared or smoked meats and herbs, usually oregano or basil, all baked in the oven.
Nowadays, there are pizzas of the most varied sizes and shapes, including square pizzas with stuffed edges, but the stories of the original pizza suggest that it all started with the Egyptians, it is believed that they were the first to mix flour with water; Others claim that the first were the Greeks, who made pasta from wheat flour, rice or chickpeas and baked them on hot bricks. The novelty was to stop in Italy.
At the beginning of its existence, only regional herbs and olive oil, common in the daily life of the region, were the typical ingredients of pizza. The Italians were the ones who added the tomato, discovered in America and taken to Europe by the Spanish conquerors. However, at that time, the pizza still did not have its characteristic, round shape, as we know it today, but rather folded in half, like a sandwich or a calzone.
Pizza was a food for humble people in southern Italy, when near the beginning of the first millennium, the term picea appeared in the city of Naples, considered the birthplace of pizza. “Picea” indicated a disk of baked pasta served with ingredients over cheap and was intended to “kill hunger”. Normally, the dough received, as a topping, bacon, fried fish and cheese.
The fame of the recipe spread around the world and gave rise to the first known pizzeria, Port’Alba, a meeting point for famous artists of the time such as Alexandre Dumas, who even mentioned variations of pizzas in his works.
It arrived in Brazil in the same way, through Italian immigrants and today it can be found easily in most Brazilian cities; it was in Brás, the São Paulo neighborhood of Italian immigrants, that the first pizzas started to be sold. (Source: Wikipedia)
And little by little, the Brazilian way has made this dish more and more popular and with an immense diversity of recipes, so that everyone could enjoy it, even those who are on a diet or are intolerant to the gluten present in traditional pasta.
To celebrate this power to bring people together at the table, with such different tastes and unparalleled colors, the recipe for this edition will be the very Brazilian Pizza with cauliflower dough.
Ingredients:
1 cauliflower
1 egg
½ cup of mozzarella
salt
Black pepper
1 teaspoon butter
3 tablespoons of tomato sauce
200g of mozzarella cheese
2 sliced tomatoes
½ red onion in strips
50g of olives
Basil to taste
Oregano to taste
Preparation mode:
Cook the cauliflower, once cold and well drained, grind in a processor or grate on a fine grater. Put in a bowl, add the egg, half a cup of mozzarella, salt and pepper, mix well. Grease the baking sheet with butter and shape the dough into a pizza disk. Place in a preheated oven at 220 ° C for approximately 10 min or until the edges start to brown.
Remove from the oven, cover with tomato sauce and 200g of mozzarella cheese. Place tomatoes, onion, olives and oregano on top. Bake again for approximately 10 min or until cheese is melted. Finish with the basil and serve warm.
Enjoy your food!
Written article for the newspaper A Cidade Ubatuba – ed. 7/14/2018
