Suburban Ohio’s Proudly Uncooked Pizza
The whole reason pizza is so popular is that it’s both a perfect combination and super-easy to customize. The reason people get mad at deep dish or pineapple or whatever is because for them, it’s actively decreasing the quality of the pizza by adding more stuff. It’s like when a friend gets a crappy tattoo. If they had just left it alone, it would have been fine.
But “leaving it alone” has its limits: If you left pizza alone completely, you’d just have some tomatoes, cheese, flour, yeast, and maybe a pig or a few plants in the ground. In the suburbs of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, they haven’t gone quite that far yet, but they’re on their way with the local specialty of Ohio Valley pizza, where the cheese and toppings are added on cold, after the sauce and crust come out of the oven.
As adaptable as pizza is, when you get rid of the melted cheese, you’re leaving the star player on the bench — or, to continue the metaphor, not letting that player warm up, so they have even odds of pulling a cheesy hamstring or puking cheese all over the field. (Man, this analogy went places.)
Either way, there are practical reasons for this ass-backwards pizza style: The tradition began with a pizzeria in Steubenville, Ohio, that started out as a bakery. To fast forward through years of culinary school and burnt fingers, different things need to be baked in different ovens, so the cheese would get burned to a crisp if they baked the pizza in a regular bread oven.
According to them, leaving the cheese and toppings cold helps them ship better, so it’s only just begun to get melted and gooey when it arrives at your door. Either way, though, you just end up with everything lukewarm, like a McDLT that could feed a whole family.
Hawaii’s Guilty Pleasure Spam Sushi
“Decolonize your bookshelf” is one thing, but decolonizing your plate is impossible: So many foods that feel too normal to even think about happened because of colonialism. Without empires and armies, Italy wouldn’t have tomatoes, Ireland wouldn’t have potatoes, and the Pacific islands wouldn’t have Spam, which is just as important as the other two.
Spam the canned meat that tastes like how a Photoshopped model looks (too unnaturally satisfying to be good for the mind, body or soul) and made it to the tropics during World War II, when thousands and thousands of cans were shipped to U.S. Army bases in the Pacific Theater. Local cooks started using it because it was so much cheaper and easier to store than regular meat, and also because it’s one of those foods that tells your animal brain “you’re getting all the salt and protein you could ever want and you barely even had to chew, now make with the endorphins already.”
![Disclaimer](<a href="https://rebrand.ly/LazadaSalePh"><img src="http://getfreefollowers.net/images/lazhorizontal.jpeg" /></a>){kind=link}
0 Comments