International Italian Pizza Day

I really like pizza. How about you?

Did you know that today the most iconic dish of Italian gastronomic tradition celebrates its world day?
January 17 is a date not chosen at random.

 

In fact, it is the feast day of Sant’Antonio Abate, patron saint of bakers and pizza makers.

In Naples in the early 1900s, January 17 was also “pizza makers’ day“.

 

These, in fact, stopped working at noon to spend the afternoon and evening hours with their relatives.

 

But how many of you know that Rome has its traditional “pizza”?
It has very ancient origins.

 

It is the “PINSA” not “pizza” and even if the names seem similar they are very different.

 

The origins of pinsa seems to date back to Ancient Rome, when farmers and shepherds offered to the gods simple offerings.

Often they offered what little they had and among the gifts there was also this simple dough with which they created a sort of oval focaccia, made with flours of poor cereals (such as millet, barley, oats, spelt) mixed to water, aromatic herbs and salt and baked on flat stones placed on the coals.

 

Virgil, in the Aeneid, tells about it as a base to eat various types of foods such as meat and vegetables creating a food similar to today’s pizzas.

For this reason, still today, many believe pinsa is the official ancestor of the famous pizza.

 

The differences between pizza and pinsa are that as opposed to the classic pizza dough, the one of pinsa provides a different quantity of water, and a lower percentage of yeast.

 

This difference in dough is also reflected in the consistency, with pina being soft and light in the center, with crispy edges.

 

Just in the consistency of the pina reveals all its uniqueness, very different in fact from the soft frame of a typical Neapolitan pizza.

 

Today you can find pinsa all over Rome in the “pinserie” which were born thanks to the Roman pizza maker Corrado Di Marco who studied the ancient recipe of pinsa and the mix of flours of its dough in 2000 and reproposed it, after they had been forgotten for years, to be tasted by us after the ancient Romans.

 

The name Pinsa in fact comes from the Latin word “Pinsere” which in Italian means to stretch and nowadays there are more than 5000 Pinserie all over the world.