When pizza isn't pizza: thick V thin

By Michael Quin

With the award for Australia’s best pizza going last week to The Pantry in Brighton, the issue of Australia’s take on the Napolitano specialty is back on the table.

It’s been said of the award-winning pizzas that they’re a fusion of Italian and Australian styles. I would say they have strayed too far from the original for their own good.

Meanwhile a friend, recently returned from Italy, expressed his disappointment at Italian food. He claimed there was “nothing on it”, but worse still, “there wasn’t a Meat Lovers in sight!”

We still have a lot to learn from our brethren of the boot.

And pizza, where proud Italians and irreverent Australians meet, both sure of their superiority, is as good a place as any to start.

In reality, The Lot isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, Supreme never deserved to reign, and those slices in deli windows hardly deserve the name.

Italian pizza is better than Australian pizza because it is a celebration of flavour and texture – the way food ought to be.

One might argue that Australian pizzas have more flavour – to which one could counter – only if you’re eating with your eyes.

Too many ingredients mean nothing is really tasted. Australians suffer the sin of gluttony.

The central tenet of Italian cooking is simplicity. Fresh ingredients are combined in a simple structure of no more than three or four flavours.
An Italian margarita pizza is a case in point. The thin base, floating somewhere between soft and crunchy, has the light taste of the dough and virgin olive oil used to make it.

On top, the sweetness of tomatoes and light creaminess of quality mozzarella unite. An Italian pizza base should sing it’s own song: the topping just tweaks the tune.

The Italian way is also more satisfying because one pizza is one meal, one’s progress in the meal mapped like a pie chart of progress.

Meat Lovers and The Lot, to name but two local mutations, ignore the art of the pizza base. Instead the thickest, doughiest, least interesting relative of the bread family is used – they almost deserve to be hidden beneath an inch of topping. Restaurant reviewer, Dani Valent, aptly describes the Australian pizza base as “machine-shredded pink pellets on a hot round sponge”.

Once this base is then dressed in so many ingredients, and in such quantities, nothing has it’s own flavour: the bacon tastes like sausage, the sausage like bread, the cheese like salt and the mushrooms like the cardboard box.

Italian food is better because it avoids this temptation to over-mix flavours at all cost.

Italian mealtimes consist of a first course, second course, cheese platter, salad and fruit platter. This is born not from extravagance but from a simple separation of flavours.

Cheese isn’t seen with seafood, salad not allowed on the side of your plate, and bread has no place on any pasta dish.

Italian ‘food rules’ can initially seem oppressive to the Australian diner, but the sooner you realise these rules are for your own good, the better.

In the end it comes down to how much you really like food.

Australians sometimes have an abusive relationship with their food, ‘scoffing’ a small herd of animals on a Meat Lovers pizza, or ‘smashing’ a kebab after a few beers.

It’s time perhaps to give credit where credit is due and accept that a thin Italian pizza is a superior species to its overweight Australian relative.

Maybe it’s time to accept that less can be more in cooking, and that foods should only be mixed when their combined flavour is greater.

Time to think back to your last meal and ask yourself, did I actually taste any of the things that were in that?