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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public.
I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from curious kids like you and we find interesting people to answer them.
Going through all your amazing questions really makes me hungry and so today we're going to give into temptation and grab a bite to eat.
The food we're going to be talking about is something a lot of kids love and adults love it too.
So much so that this food might be aiming for world domination.
We're talking about pizza.
Do you think pizza could be the world's most popular food?
We can't find any stats to prove it, but judging by how many people rank pizza among their favorite things to eat, it seems at least possible.
You can get pizza in almost every country in the world in one form or another and different cultures and communities take advantage of local ingredients to really make pizza their own.
What's your favorite kind of pizza?
While pizza may have originated in Italy, New York was one of the first places in the United States that pizza became popular.
So we thought we'd put your pizza questions to a well-known New York pizza chef and get some answers.
My name is Frank Penello and I'm the owner and operator of Best Pizza in Williamsburg, which basically means I'm in charge of all the jobs at the pizzeria.
Do you make pizza ever? I make a lot of pizza and pretty often, but not as often as I used to make pizza.
So in the first four, six years of us being open, I made every pizza here every day.
So we would open at 11 o'clock in the morning, close at 12 o'clock at night and there was only three of us.
So I was the guy making all the pizza for everyone to eat.
And as we started to grow and the pizzeria started to become more notable and we got some good reviews.
We got bizzier and I was able to hire some really great staff.
So now I have some really great pizza makers and young cooks in the kitchen.
In addition to making pizza, Frank is also a video star.
He hosted an online show called The Pizza Show for Vice.
So he's used to talking about this kind of stuff.
Hi, I'm Belle. I'm five years old.
I live in Wisconsin and my question is, how do you make pizza dough?
Hello, Belle. That's a great question.
So pizza dough is primarily made from flour.
So if you've ever seen your family or friends make a pie or make cookies at home that usually starts with a dough.
For cookies, it's obviously a sweet dough and for pizza, it's not sweet.
It's savory. So we basically take flour and we mix flour with water.
We mix flour with yeast and we mix all of that up and then there's a fermentation process.
So this is where the science comes in.
Basically, the flour goes from becoming almost like a dust into a dough, like a play dough, which I'm sure you're all familiar with.
And if you leave it alone in the right temperature, the flour will start to grow and the yeast will eat the proteins in the flour and it chemically changes the flour into a dough.
Yeast is a single-celled organism that exists naturally in the environment and yeast is actually alive.
So when Frank says the yeast will eat the proteins in the flour, that's not a figure of speech.
It is a sugar-eating fungus, but you don't have to go to the pet store to buy yeast, you can get it right in your grocery store.
For baking, manufacturers take pure yeast and feed it molasses and that grows more yeast.
Then they package up the yeast and sell it to people who want to make pizza dough or bread or whatever else you want to bake.
Before we could buy yeast in the stores, people use the natural yeast in the environment.
If you combine flour and water and let it sit in a warm spot, the yeast from the air or already present on the flour starts to feed off the sugar once the flour gets wet and that grows more yeast.
If you've ever heard someone talking about their sour dough starter, that's what they mean, letting the yeast grow and multiply so they can then add that starter, that yeast, to their bread dough.
But why would you want yeast in your dough?
yeast is a rising agent or an ingredient that you use to help rise the dough.
The yeast are almost like your small little friends that you have that eat up the dough and help break down the proteins and the gluten.
So in other words, if the yeast does its job and breaks down the dough, then when you have the pizza at home, it's a lot easier for you to chew the pizza.
And then it's a lot easier for you to stomach to digest.
And that's something that helps a lot of us out because it could be tough to digest a big ball of gluten otherwise.
When yeast is breaking down that gluten, it eats the sugar and breathes out carbon dioxide and that makes bubbles in the dough and the dough starts to rise with all those bubbles.
When you bake the dough, those bubbles get trapped and the finished pizza crust or slice of bread is fluffy and airy, not hard and chewy.
Hi, my name is Ariel. I'm seven years old and I live in Long Island, New York.
And my question is, how do gluten-free foods rise because my best friend is gluten-free?
Ariel from Rhode Island, that's a great question.
So the gluten-free doesn't have gluten in it.
Obviously, it's in the name gluten-free.
So rather than using flour from wheat, you have to use flowers from different items like rice or tapioca.
And those are different flowers that come from different ingredients and they don't have the same makeup as wheat flour does.
So in order to get a nice gluten-free dough, we have to add some other interesting products.
And what we do here at Best Pizza is we make our own gluten-free dough.
It's from 10 different flowers.
Some of the ingredients are brown rice flour, regular rice flour, tapioca flour, and we add in something called Xantum gum.
And Xantum gum is an ingredient that you see all over the world and all different types of foods.
And it helps bind the flour.
So when we make our gluten-free dough, we're able to get a little bit of a rise out of it.
So people that have ciliac or are gluten-free so they could enjoy pizza as well.
We've definitely established that pizza starts with dough.
But so do a lot of other things.
What makes pizza pizza?
Let's establish a baseline.
Most people agree that pizza is basically a flat bread dough covered with some kind of toppings that is then baked.
But how thick the dough is, how much crust is free and clear of the toppings, and what those toppings actually are depends on where you live and what you like.
And some people have pretty strong opinions about what kind of pizza is best.
There's a lot of debate over which style of pizza is best, there's thin crust, there's thick crust, there's deep dish, what kind of pizza do you make?
So we make here a best pizza and what we're known for is New York style pizza.
And although pizza was invented in Italy, I would like to say that here in New York we perfected it.
So what's special about New York style pizza?
Over the years as the Italian immigrants came to New York around the turn of the century, you know, early 1900s, up until today.
You know, pizza has been made and has been embraced by America very much so.
So the New York style was born at a necessity.
It was a very inexpensive way to feed people.
A lot of the bakeries in and around New York are now pizzerias, including mine.
So where we are right now is at best pizza in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
And we have a big, old, 100 year old oven that used to be a baker oven.
And it was used to feed a lot of the factory workers on the water.
And you know, once those factories started getting converted into apartments and so on, they changed from being just a bakery into a pizzeria which became really the more popular food at the time.
Frank grew up enjoying pizza, but how did he go from a pizza eater to a pizza chef?
You know, I come from a family of immigrants, you know, my father came here from Sicily.
And my mother's, you know, two sisters were born in Sicily.
My mother was born here.
So I grew up in a family that all spoke Sicilian and Italian, but they also were very amazing cooks.
They didn't do it for a living.
None of my relatives owned restaurants, but they cooked like they should have owned restaurants.
So as a young boy, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother in the kitchen and with my grandfather, clean and vegetables and making sausage and teaching me a lot about food.
And as I got older and started working in restaurants, I realized there was a connection, you know, between my family and between this restaurant work.
And I ended up working for a chef as I got a little bit older who went to the Culinary Institute of America, which is a French culinary school in the Hudson Valley, so a little bit upstate New York.
And it's a beautiful campus and it's a very strict school, almost like a military school, but for cooking.
And that's really where I learned, you know, the nuts and bolts of being a chef, understanding different cuisines like French cuisine, Japanese cuisine, Mexican cuisine, other than Italian food, which I grew up eating.
So Frank got that rigorous training and how to be a chef.
And he says he uses all of those tools still today, even though it might seem like pizza is a really easy thing to make.
It is very simple. Pizza is, if you think about it, it's only three ingredients, you know, it's the dough, it's the sauce and the cheese.
But the preparation of all of those three ingredients are very complicated behind the scenes.
So it's simple in theory and simple by, you know, just looking at it.
But when you dig into it a little bit more, it gets a lot more complicated.
And I would say the biggest thing is that pizza is basically a mix between baking and cooking, right?
So in baking, there's a lot of science and math.
You have to be very exact.
You can't really play around with the recipes.
You have to make the recipes as they are.
And in cooking, you're able to kind of be a little more creative.
You can, you know, throw different spices in, you know, cook different temperatures.
And there's a little bit more room for creativity.
In pizza, it's a mix of baking and cooking.
So my education at the Culinary Institute or the CIA, as it's called, was perfect because they taught us baking and the science behind baking, which is very important in pizza.
And then they taught us cooking and how important ingredients are.
And that all related to what I do.
Plus, Frank has had to learn how to be a business owner, hiring and mentoring staff, making sure customers know about his restaurant, doing all of the accounting and keeping track of money, and keeping his equipment in order.
It's a lot of work. But if you really love pizza as much as Frank does, maybe you'll become a pizza chef someday.
Thanks to Frank Penello for sharing his pizza journey with us.
Coming up is pizza Italian, American, or global?
This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids.
I'm Jane Lindholm. We're learning about a food that is a favorite of a lot of kids and adults.
GUI, it's cheesy, it's pizza.
I mentioned that pizza is a food you can eat almost anywhere.
But how did it take over the globe?
Hi, my name is Valerie. I'm six years old and I'm recording from Sunnyside Queens.
And my question is who invented pizza?
To answer this question, we track down a food historian.
Scott Weiner is another lifelong pizza lover in New York.
He loves pizza so much that he even runs pizza tours of the city.
Scott started out with the same question Valerie has.
The word pizza meant something very different in the 10th century than it means today.
And it meant something very different again in the late 16th century than it does today.
So that journey of the word is an interesting one.
The 10th century was this broad term that just referred to cookies and cakes and mostly sweet items.
Nothing with tomato on it because the tomato did not exist in Europe at the time.
The tomato was brought over from Central America in the late 1400s, early 1500s.
And when it landed in Europe, it was brought over by the Spanish and the Spanish in the late 1400s and early 1500s had a colony in what is now southern Italy.
And what now includes the city of Naples, which is the birthplace of pizza.
So the tomato landed in Naples only in the early 1500s.
And we couldn't really have something that we all agree as pizza without the tomato being in the picture.
So the word pizza or the idea of pizza is much, much, much older than what we think of as pizza today.
Exactly correct, it was a broad term that would gain some specificity in different parts of Italy.
So in Naples, when people started making these flattened doughs with items baked on top, that became known as pizza na pola-tana, the pizza of Naples.
So just like if you like to make cookies at home and maybe what you call cookies are just chocolate chip cookies.
That's cookies to you. And then maybe you have a cousin who lives a thousand miles away and their standard cookie is a butter cookie with no chocolate chips, no brown sugar, maybe it's something totally different.
They're both cookies, but that's the broad term.
We need some specificity.
A butter cookie is different from a chocolate chip cookie and that's why pizza na pola-tana is very different from, for instance, pizza, Sicilian pizza.
So the term pizza is this broad word.
And you need another word to help figure out, well what exactly am I talking about?
What version is this? So how did we get from pizza in Naples, Italy to pizza in the United States?
It's really interesting to follow the history of pizza because it's not like it started in Naples and then just spread outward.
Naples is in the south of Italy and if you go about two hours north of Naples, you find Rome.
Very big city did not have very much pizza until the early 1900s.
And even then it barely had any until the 1950s.
So pizza did not spread around the rest of Italy and that's because Neapolitan were the ones who made pizza and it wasn't until Neapolitan's left Naples that the people who were at the pizza left with them.
And that happened in the late 1800s.
There was a big push to move to places like New York City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New Haven, Connecticut, Trenton, New Jersey, and even parts of South America because they had factory jobs that needed workers.
And those workers did not have to speak English.
And Southern Italian men who were farmers mostly realized that they could work in these jobs make so much more money than they would make as farmers in Southern Italy.
And here's the kicker. They would be able to afford to eat meat every single week.
And that brought in lots of Southern Italian immigrants into those cities that I just mentioned and that's how pizza spread.
So all those cities got pizza in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Whereas if you go to Australia or Russia or China, you wouldn't find pizza until much later.
So how did it spread then beyond the United States and beyond where people from Italy and specifically from Naples were immigrating?
The big push after the spread of pizza around the United States didn't happen until after the Second World War.
And that was this combination of an economic boom in the United States combined with the rise of media.
Most you had radio and newspapers and everybody singing and recording songs that mentioned, oh, if the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, well suddenly that food spreads way past the places that make it.
And in the 1950s and 1960s there are articles all over the world that are explaining what pizza is.
And one of the big events that helped spread it was the 1964 World's Fair.
It's an event that happened in New York City in Queens.
And at that event there was a pavilion for understanding the culture of India, understanding the culture of Uzbekistan, under the culture of Egypt.
And then there was a pizza pavilion called the Mastro Pizza Pavilion.
And you could get pizza by the slice.
You could watch people tossing dough up in the air.
And this didn't just introduce pizza to people.
It introduced the concept of pizza reas to people who might have wanted to open their own business.
And so the company that ran it also happened to sell pizza ovens, dough mixing machines, tables with refrigeration underneath.
So if you enjoyed it at the World's Fair, you might think, well, this is a business that I could get into.
And so the world's fair in 1964 really exposed the whole world, not just to pizza, or really to this New York style of pizza.
And the rise of global media, TV and now the internet has spread all kinds of cultural phenomena from one place to another.
Pizza is just one of them.
My name is Hugo A. William Brueyton.
I'm five years old and my question is do all countries have pizza?
That's a great question Hugo.
There are hundreds of countries around the world here at But Why we haven't checked with every single one of them to make sure they have pizza or a local dish that's pizza like.
But truly there are a lot of different types of pizza around the world.
Some cultures like to put their own spin on toppings, like in Sweden, where they make a kebab pizza or in France where you'll often find an egg on top.
Some countries, especially in the Middle East, enjoy flat breads that are similar to pizza.
They're thin-crusted with toppings that reflect the local tastes.
In Argentina and other countries, light and airy focaccia, a type of bread with toppings is a favorite.
In Scotland, some people deep fry pizza.
In Mexico, there's a type of pizza made with a tortilla topped with beans and queso.
And in Poland, pizza is made on a baguette and is a popular street food.
I have personally eaten pizza in Nairobi, Kenya, CMRUPE, Cambodia, and Pisco, El Quichile.
Even here in the United States, we have lots of local variations.
New York style pizza is a round pizza that's quite large, 16 to 20 inches in diameter.
It's cut into 8 slices usually.
The center of the pizza is pretty thin, but the edge, the outside, the ring around the outside, usually has a little bit of puff.
And it's topped with a type of cheese called low moisture mozzarella.
It's the kind that you usually see shredded.
And when you eat it, you eat it by picking it up, you fold it in half, and you can eat it while standing up or while walking.
And that's why it's New York style pizza, because New Yorkers are always walking.
And if it's food that we need to sit down to eat, it's not right for us.
Which brings me to Chicago deep dish, a very different style of pizza.
It's usually two inches thick.
It has a dense, brittle biscuit-like crust that has a lot of oil in it.
And it's baked in these round cake pans.
And the dough rises up the sides of the cake pans so that the toppings are more like fillings in a pie.
It starts with cheese, then you get your toppings, usually sausage in Chicago.
And then the last thing on the pizza is sauce.
So the sauce is at the very top, kind of unusual.
And there's neopolitan pizza.
Neopolitan is very small.
It's usually about 12 inches in diameter.
And it's very puffy on the outside, thin in the center.
And it usually bakes in under two minutes.
And it can bake that fast because the ovens are over 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Sometimes they're more like 900, 950 degrees, which is around over 500 Celsius.
And so they bake so fast, which means the crusts are a little softer.
You won't get crunch under the Eipali pizza.
Then there's Detroit style pizza, New Haven style pizza, California pizza, and whatever you like where you live.
So with all of this variation, is pizza Italian?
Is it something we can claim as American now?
Or is it something else entirely?
I don't think anybody owns pizza.
And I don't think anybody has owned it since the early 1900s.
I strongly believe that pizza is this food that even at its origin in Naples.
It's made up of ingredients from all over the world.
The tomato is from Central America, basil, and mozzarella, really from South Asia, from India.
Olive oil is a Mediterranean product that's not specific to Southern Italy.
Pizza is from the fertile crescent in what we now call the Middle East.
So every component of pizza is not originally from Italy, but it came together in Southern Italy.
And it was this Southern Italian ingenuity that pulled it together and made that original product.
But today, pizza has become everybody's.
So whoever is making the pizza, that style is theirs.
And it's not even just a city or a state or a country or a continent.
Sometimes it's really the people who make it.
So as much as we know that the origins of pizza were in Southern Italy, it don't think it's an Italian food anymore.
Really is global. What's your favorite kind of pizza?
Either style or toppings or both?
I love a cheese pizza. I'll eat anything on a pizza, but a cheese pizza, New York style, that's the one that I could eat every day.
And there are even some weeks when I do eat it every day.
Actually, Scott has a limit on the amount of pizza he can eat.
15 slices a week. That's a lot.
What would your limit be if you were allowed to eat as many slices as you'd like?
That's it for this episode.
Thanks to Scott Weiner of Scott's Pizza Tours and to Frank Penello of Best Pizza in Williams Bergbrookland.
If you have a question about anything, you can send it to us.
Have an adult record you asking.
It's easy to do on a smartphone using an app like Voice Memo's or Voice Recorder.
Be sure to include your first name, where you live, and how old you are.
And try not to record in the car or a noisy environment unless your question is about that noisy environment.
Then have your adult email the file to questions at butwhykids.org.
We can't answer every question we get, but we do listen to them all.
The But Why team includes Melody Bodette, Keanu Haskin, and me, Jane Lindholm.
Joey Palombo produces our YouTube Bites series.
Go check it out. We're produced at Vermont Public and distributed by PRX, and our theme music is by Luke Reynolds.
We'll be back in two weeks with an all new episode.
Till then, stay curious.
