Pizza

Pizza is a flat, round bread topped with sauce, cheese, and other foods, then baked in a hot oven. It comes from Italy, where people have made flatbreads with toppings for thousands of years. Today pizza is one of the most popular foods in the world. It is eaten in nearly every country.

The basic recipe is simple. A cook stretches dough into a thin circle. Then they spread tomato sauce on top, sprinkle on cheese, and add other toppings like pepperoni, mushrooms, peppers, or olives. The pizza bakes until the crust turns golden and the cheese melts and bubbles.

Flatbreads with toppings are very old. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all ate them. But modern pizza, with tomato sauce, was born in the city of Naples, Italy. Tomatoes are not even from Europe. Spanish explorers brought them back from the Americas in the 1500s. At first, many Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous. Poor people in Naples ignored that warning. By the 1700s, they were putting tomatoes on flatbread and selling it on the streets.

One famous story says that in 1889, a baker named Raffaele Esposito made a special pizza for Queen Margherita of Italy. He topped it with red tomato, white cheese, and green basil, the colors of the Italian flag. That style is still called Margherita pizza today. Some food historians doubt the story is fully true, but the pizza named after the queen is real and beloved.

Pizza came to the United States with Italian immigrants in the late 1800s. The first pizzeria in America opened in New York City in 1905. For a long time, only Italian American neighborhoods ate it. After World War II, American soldiers came home from Italy with a taste for pizza. Pizza shops spread fast. By the 1960s, frozen pizzas filled grocery stores, and chains like Pizza Hut and Domino's opened all over the country.

Different cities now have their own styles. New York pizza has wide, thin slices you fold in half. Chicago is famous for deep-dish pizza, which is baked in a tall pan and stuffed with cheese and sauce. In Naples, true Neapolitan pizza is cooked in a wood-fired oven for only 90 seconds. Every country with pizza has added its own toppings too. In Japan you can order pizza with corn and squid. In Brazil, green peas are a common topping. The basic idea travels well, and almost every culture makes it their own.