If you were in Naples last night you could have been forgiven for wondering if Christmas had somehow passed you by and if it was New Year’s Eve already, for the city was celebrating the recognition and protection, at last, of its most famous product, the Neapolitan pizza. Yesterday the pizza napoletana was awarded the prestigious Stg [specialità tradizionale garantita] or TSG [Traditional Speciality Guaranteed] accolade by the EU.
The farming union Coldiretti estimates that even in Italy, the main ingredients in 50% of the pizze consumed are imported: they contain flour from Canada or the Ukraine, Chinese tomatoes, mozzarella from Eastern Europe, oil from Tunisia or even seed oil instead of olive oil and other such horrors. And of course, Neapolitan pizza is imitated all over the world.
Now, however, any establishment claiming to be producing Neapolitan pizza in an EU country will be subject to stringent inspections. The Tsg label guarantees that a product contains traditional ingredients and that it is made to a certain method but not that the product is made in a particular area.
Neapolitan pizza must contain durum wheat flour, fresh yeast, water, seasalt, extra virgin olive oil, mozzarella di bufala and San Marzano tomatoes cut no thicker than 8 millimetres [0.3 inches]. The base must be no more than 20 millimeters thick [one eighth of an inch] and the pizza must have a raised crust. The dough has to be stretched by hand and the pizza must be cooked on a stone slab in a wood-fired oven.
The Tsg label allows for only three variants of Neopolitan pizza:
pizza marinara, which contains garlic;
pizza Margherita which contains tomatoes, mozzarella and basil;
pizza Margherita extra which contains mozzarella in fillets.
Pizza Margherita was first made by the pizzaiuolo Raffaele Esposito for Queen Margherita of Savoy in 1899. Its colours – the red of the tomatoes, the white of the mozzarella and the green of the basil – represent the Italian flag.
Rosario Lopa, the President of a committee which has campaigned for recognition and protection of the Neapolitan pizza, said yesterday:
“By protecting pizza we have safeguarded the history, culture and tradition of the Neopolitan people.”
What is your favourite kind of pizza?
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