Ken Forkish - The Elements of Pizza: Unlocking the Secrets to World-Class Pies at Home

1 teaspoon = 4.93 milliliters

1 tablespoon = 14.79 milliliters/3 teaspoons

1 cup = 236.59 milliliters/16 tablespoons

1 liter = 202.88 teaspoons/67.63 tablespoons/4.23 cups

1 ounce = 28.35 grams

1 pound = 453.59 grams/16 ounces

1 kilogram = 2.2 pounds

1 inch = 2.54 cm

1 foot = 0.3 m/12 inches

1 cm = 0.39 inch

1 m = 3.28 feet/39.37 inches

9/ C + 32 = F

(F 32) 5/ = C

In 2014, a trip to Italy changed my thinking about pizza forever. I was moved by the way the people I met in Naples relate to pizza: for them, it was a soulful connection, related to the bigger picture of who they are as a culture. And then I became interested in the stories of the immigrants from Naples and the south of Italy who began making pizza in the United States in the early 1900s. I wanted to learn how pizza evolved from its early days to the present, how it stayed true to its roots in Italy, and how it grew to be its own thing in America. The stories always came back to the pizza maker, and how his or her passion was as important as the quality of the tomatoes.

Enzo Coccia, a globally celebrated Neapolitan pizzaiolo , altered my pizza reality when he made me stare at a naked truth I had not confronted directly before. Pizza is not the same as bread, he said, and Im glad he said it with force. Meaning I needed to adjust my thinking.

I set out to understand pizzas place in the culture, which means understanding its history and the role it plays in peoples lives, and meeting the people making it today. During my visit, I focused on Naples and Rome. Naples, because it is where pizza began. Neapolitans bleed pizzait is a defining element of who Neapolitans are and how they live. Rome, because it has two distinct styles of pizza that I admire: one a super-thin crusted wood-fired-oven style; the other called al taglio , served by the slice, which is found in bakeries. You will find pizza in both of these cities styles, with plenty of hybrids of the two, throughout Italy and beyond. In Bologna you will find very thin crust pizza like in Rome, but as a much larger pie, and in Florence its possible to find crust even thinner than in Bologna. In this book I focus on the styles of pizza that both interest me most and that I believe can be successfully adapted for the home kitchen. It inspires me that pizza making is not a static craft in Naples and Rome. The best pizzaiolos are pushing their skill to new heights, making extremely high-quality pizzas that are in harmony with tradition but not constrained by it. In my mind, this is the best evolution possible. Its like jazz to me.

Naples is the birthplace of pizza, where by most accounts it took its modern form in the 1700s, without tomatoeswhich, though they were first imported to southern Italy in the 1500s, probably didnt make it onto pizzas until the 1800s. Establishing firm timelines for specific evolutionary steps in pizza history (or for any other food that began as a street food) is difficult. One of the earliest Neapolitan pizzerias in the written record is Zi Ciccio, first written about in 1727, located in the Piazza Cavour. Others from that era include Portalba and, in Porta San Gennaro, the pizzeria Capasso. According to one account, the most successful was called Ntuono, run by Antonio Testa near the church of Santa Teresa, where King Ferdinand I (1751 to 1825), the ruler of Naples, secretly went to eat. Did he wear a wig? (It wasnt the public he was hiding his pizza habit from; it was his wife, Queen Maria Carolina of Austria, Marie Antoinettes sister, who apparently dominated her unsophisticated husband and ruled the Kingdom of Naples in his name.)