Italians have a pride in their cooking that other nations can’t match. Good for him to stand up for it. He can probably find someone more genuine Italian to work for.
I like people who are willing to stand up for their principles even when there is a price to pay for it.
Odd hill to die on.
That the best kind!
To be fair cantaloupe and prosciutto is way better than pineapple on pizza has ever been (this is not opinion this is fact)
Crusades have been launched over pettier disagreements.
Opinion that bot you banned
He was just a fucking kid!
Look… The Poles put strawberry in pasta. I found the idea of pineapple on pizza weird when I heard of it… But then I tried it and I liked it. The flavors surprisingly worked.
Not to say I order it frequently. I am very much a meat-lover cheesy pizza type of guy. My normal pizzas are boring.
Sweet and salty go great together, as do fruit and pork. I’m convinced half the people who say they don’t like pineapple on pizza have just never tried it.
I remember thinking it would be gross as a kid but then tried a slice when a friend’s family ordered one and really enjoying it. Told my dad I wanted it next time we ordered pizza and he refused and made me buy my own because “nobody wants that garbage and it’ll get thrown away”. Ate some that night then went to bed, went to eat the next day and he’d eaten every leftover slice overnight. From that day on, he only ordered Hawaiian and I got completely burnt out for years.
Plum stuffed veal is a thing!
Pineapple on pizza works very well.
Now, banana on pizza, I will shiv a motherfucker committing such a crime. There are standards, dude.
Pfft https://thenordicdish.com/swedish-banana-curry-pizza/ just add some curry and chill
I hate that I am tempted, and I will die denying my urges on principle.
Hahaha I’d try it once, but I have a pretty strong dislike of banana in general so I doubt I’d enjoy it
In WWII the Italians were horrified when the Germans would put jelly on italian cured meats. But like jam is literally a side on many charcuterie boards. Pork goes well with fruit.
Wow. He liked it that much? Variety is the spice of life, my guy, you should have told him that. I got favorite foods, too. But even then I need to take a break from them.
My favorite book to read to my kids is called “every night is pizza night” where the main character discovers that even though pizza will always be her favorite, there’s tons of other delicious things to try and there’s more than one best food.
My father was a man of extremes, 0 or 100 with little in between.
And you? What about you? Are you of extremes?
No, while I enjoy some extreme things I am a firm believer in moderation.
I respect that you found your own path. I didn’t turn out as my father either. I’m very much like my mother though. Minus the hard working nature and sound morals.
This underlines my biggest issue with italian cuisine. There are so many chefs that leave no room for innovation or updates to a traditional recipies. I’ll put cream in my carbonara and pineapple on my pizza because I like the taste of it. And those preferences should be more important than the old traditions when it comes to making foods I want to enjoy.
There is no such thing as a ‘traditional’ recipe. It was what those individuals made and with what resources they had.
It’s all good, just as long as you don’t break your spaghetti before putting it in the pot…
Obligatory
And Italy also invented fascism, so I’m not sure I’ll follow their judgement on pineapples…
Personally, I wouldn’t care what a customer ordered on their pizza, they could order the worst possible combination of flavours, and I’d happily make it for them, what’s the big deal? It wouldn’t hurt me, or anyone else.
Funny as this is, the guy is def both stupid and an asshole
I hope he also refuses to put tomatoes on pizza, because they’re a new world plant and non-native to Europe and Italy. What a fart sniffing jackhole.
Tomatoes are fruit! D-:
So are eggplants, but they’re used as vegetables in a culinary context.
I just shove them up my girlfriends muff, we have a wide assortment of fruits and vegetables for this purpose, and none of us have the faintest idea about botanical taxonomy.
Wait until Italians and Pseudo-Italian Americans find out about Durian pizza. They’ll be begging for pineapple.
Critics and first-time smellers often describe the odor as resembling sewage, rotten eggs, raw onions, garlic, old gym socks, or hot garbage. Fans, however, may perceive subtle sweet or floral undertones.
It’s also banned from hotels and public transport where it grows natively.
It’s called the King of Fruits for a reason.
Very high in micronutrients and calories. Taste really good.
My own perception of the durian’s aroma is of a toddler’s full diaper mixed with a splash of kerosene. I’m the type who tries almost anything once, and so I tasted durian when it was offered to me, and it has a wonderful, complex flavor.
For those who are more squeamish, there’s always jackfruit.
I just don’t understand this and am beginning to wonder if it’s one of those “can smell asparagus in pee” sort of phenomena, because while clearly an unpleasant smell, I have never got the extreme comparisons to sewage and shit. It’s not a nice smell but it’s just nowhere near as disgusting to me as people make it out to be.
I find jackfruit to be always disappointing. I don’t know what I’m expecting, but I want more from it.
I’ve had it when its plain and meh, and I’ve had a chef marinade it and batter/bread it like is crisoy chicken and it was amazing
Damn, I bet that smells feisty.
Durian is a war crime in a food fight. It’s effective as both a melee and chemical weapon.
I seriously don’t get it. I traveled all over SE Asia and sure, Durian doesn’t exactly smell like roses, but it’s not THAT bad. Also it tastes like weird fruit bubblegum.
what is this unholy abomination. please tell me this isn’t real.
It’s a fruit. The peel smells “not super”, but the fruit itself is a very complex interesting flavor that you can get hooked on.
It’s malaysian. Those guys love their durian.
Even the branding, most malaysian (filo?) thing ever.
I would love to try this! Durian might actually fit nicely
I’d go for durian, gorgonzola and fresh basil.
This miscarriage of justice should go all the way to the ECHR.
The European Culinary Heresy Revisionists?
NOBODY expects the European Culinary Heresy Revisionists!
Pizza is not really Italian. A lot of cultures have invented flatbread that you top with stuff before baking. It just happens that the Italian version of that got spread around widely. And then other cultures added their own flairs, one of which is pineapple, usually connected with a salty pork product like ham or Canadian bacon.
Here in California, that’s called Hawaiian style pizza, and I didn’t get it, myself, until I tried it and found it’s a pairing that works, usually with extra mozzarella cheese.
I don’t know that it’s actually Hawaiian even in style, though my wife’s family used to like going to Hawaiian-style fast food, which involves a lot of Spam (the Hormell kind), so there… may be a connection?
My parents’ generation, in the 1970s way dug anchovies on pizza which I found way too salty. I didn’t get it then, but I don’t see much in the way of anchovies on pizza now. So collective tastes may change with time.
Anchovies are spectacular sources of umami. I use them in tomato sauces, among other things. You don’t taste the fish at all, you just get a nice round salty flavor out of them, and they just dissolve in the sauce.
My parents’ generation, in the 1970s way dug anchovies on pizza which I found way too salty. I didn’t get it then, but I don’t see much in the way of anchovies on pizza now. So collective tastes may change with time.
That makes me kinda sad. I’m definitely nowhere near that generation but I love anchovies on pizza, and people not ordering anchovies on pizza just makes it harder to find places that still offer anchovies. I think it’s the best pizza topping. Although I also don’t mind Hawaiian style pizza separately either.
Pizza is not really Italian.
It is Italian, but it’s not exclusively Italian. Turkish lahmacun (thin base, with a meaty sauce, is a good approximation of the Ur-Pizza, as are various Levantine flatbreads. One of my favorites is manaqish ma’a za’atar, which is a thin pizza-like base topped with olive oil and thyme.
Ur-pizzas would be from Ur, not the Levant.
Toasted flatbread topped with olive oil and thyme sounds delightful!
I don’t know that it’s actually Hawaiian even in style
It’s not–Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada IIRC.
It’s weird. I’m at an age where I wouldn’t mind to try out anchovies on pizza, but it’s become so out-of-style that either pizza places don’t carry it any more, or people are so repulsed by it that it’s hard to order with others sharing.
Meanwhile, I’ve always loved pineapple on pizza, and that one seemed to have stuck around as a topping longer.
Anchovies work. Try with just tomato sauce and cheese, onions and olives. It’s a complex, mature type of taste. Maybe sun dried tomatoes. But it depends a lot on who’s cooking it if you know what I mean.
You know how kids all go crazy about candy? That’s because of how their taste buds work when they’re kids. When you get older, these funky tastes get more like candy to us. Very rich flavors.
Anchovies on pizza are fantastic, especially in some Italian thin crust, say with black olives, onions, capers, artichoke…
The problem is that people use them as an ingredient, where they should be used as a seasoning, sparingly.
The ruling also detailed an incident at work in April this year where Tamburella fractured bones in his right hand when he struck a metal hand rail.
Forget the pineapple - dude has anger issues and shouldn’t be running a kitchen.
Yes, that was in the title of the post
Italian chef
ItalianchefFTFY
Its just a job. You dont have to fuck the pineapples, just work with them.
I take two giant pineapple rings and sandwich a piece of pizza in between and eat it like a juicy sandwich.
Fucking pineapples is both challenging and painful. I’d rather have it on a pizza. Only just, though.
That’s only with fresh pineapple though. If they’re from a can they have conveniently placed holes
Kitchen serves Caesar salad that was created 100 years ago in Tijuana by Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini when his hotel restaurant was short on ingredients.
It also serves “Kilpatrick”, which is oysters served with “Grilled finely chopped bacon with Worcestershire, BBQ, Dijon, ketchup, Tabasco, lemon juice and smoked paprika”.
Precursors to pizza used things like dates and other fruits as toppings.
The menu has meat all over it, which to me reads more like an Italian-American thing where meat over here was super cheap and thus became increasingly incorporated into Italian dishes.
And of course modern pizza uses a key ingredient not even available until it was brought back from the New World.
But sure, this is a step too far and an affront to his culture.
Wait until this guy hears how many pizzarias are run by Greek folks, rather than Italians. His heart will explode, I’m sure.
We have a pretty large amount of pizzarias owned by people with turkish roots here too! They often also offer Kebap, and some even provide Kebap Pizza.
Kebap Pizza.
OK I need this in my life
Wait until you try curry pizza.
! Yes please
Eh, i personally like either a pizza with all its cheesy & tomato & oregano goodness or kebap with it’s own satisfying taste. Pizza dough goes better with ingredients that don’t tend to dry out as much in an pizza oven, sadly. Although, thinking about it again, a kebap Calzone sounds awesome.
When you say kebap, what food are you referring to? Where I am it’s usually spelled kabob and refers to chunks of meat on a skewer, which I think would be too big for pizza.
Shawarma or gyro on a pizza is good though! It doesn’t dry out in my experience, and at most gets a little more crisp on smaller edges like a ham or bacon might.
Ah, sorry, here in german speaking areas we call what you are calling Shawarma Kebap, no skewers, at least not when served:
The well roasted surface gets sheared off.
I only ordered a Kebap Pizza once and it sadly was a pretty dry affair, might be that i just had bad luck with the restaurant. Many of those restaurants are “Jack of all trades, master of none”, offering a wild mix of Pizza, Indian Food, Turkish cuisine, and some local foods, leading them to mix and match as they go.
It differs based on country and which immigrants they got when.
In Denmark as an example; there’s a fairly clear cut between Turks making döner, Kurds making pizza and Iranians making shawarma
We had an explosion in turkish owned restaurants starting in the 90s here - and the larger ones tend to offer everything, and i mean everything. The flyers are filled with a humongous amount of different dishes, but they have all the tendency to taste somewhat similar (they do not taste bad, mind you, but if my Döner tastes similar to my indian food because they use mostly the same spices for both, it all blends together into a “Taste palette of the restaurant”).
Turks are one of the main group of people who immigrated in the 60s-90s (they were called Gastarbeiter, guest workers), and it took them decades of work to actually fulfill their dream of building a business. Then Covid came, and it caused a lot of those restaurants to shut their doors, while ghost kitchens started to appear (which hadn’t been a thing here before).
Nowadays the same people will never have a real chance of accumulating enough wealth to actually start a business.
We have butter chicken pizza and it’s crazy good
It’s not even Kebap pizza, it’s a traditional Turkish dish, called Lamakhun (spelling? ) that probably predates pizza. It’s often called Turkish pizza, so that people unaware of the dish can understand the style.
No, it’s not lahmacun, everyone here knows and enjoys lahmacun. Kebab-Pizza is an italian pizza with döner-kebab meat shavings on it, often accompanied by sheeps cheese and a yoghurt sauce.
In Glasgow, they do pizzas with slices of doner kebap as a topping. It’s a common ingredient in a munchy box.
Yes, in Germany too, that’s what you get if you order a kebap pizza in Germany.
A lahmacun is something entirely different, you can get it with kebab-meat too, and sometimes it is called a “turkish pizza” but it’s not the “kebap pizza”
From Wikipedia:
Lahmacun Lahmacun with salad Alternative names Lahmadjoune, Lahmajun, lahmajoun, lahm b’ajin, lahmajo, lahmajin, lahamagine, lahmatzoun Course Main Region or state Levant[1] Serving temperature Warm Main ingredients Wheat flour, minced meat, vegetables and herbs
Wikimedia Commons logo Media: LahmacunLahmacun,[a] lahmajun, or lahmajo[b] is a Middle Eastern flatbread topped with minced meat (most commonly beef or lamb), minced vegetables, and herbs such as onions, garlic, tomatoes, red peppers, and parsley, flavored with spices such as chili pepper and paprika, then baked.[3] Lahmacun is often wrapped around vegetables, including pickled vegetables, tomatoes, peppers, onions, lettuce, parsley, and roasted eggplant.
The word lahmacun is attested in explorer Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme a travelogue from the 17th century, according to Sevan Nişanyan, it is the oldest Turkish-language use of the word.[21]
Hmmm. Maybe not?
This is how I know it in Germany
Kebab
Döner Kebap
Kebab Pizza
Lahmacun
Nah, i had actual pizza dough with the ingredients that would normally go into a Döner Kebap. I know about that turkish dish, but that dough is very different to the one used in italian pizza.
Lahmacun, with the c pronounced as a j, consistent with Turkish orthography (the c with a squiggle under it is a different sound, pronounced ch).
Where do I find one of those?
Searching for “Turkish pizza near me” find pizzerias that also sell gyros. The ones I tried didn’t have any different pizza toppings listed and it’s not like I can check every menu
Greeks mogging Romans once again.
The Romans came in and saved the Greeks’ asses twice with no strings attached just because they were the Greeks’ fanboys. Romans mogged the everloving fuck out of the Greeks.
Computer, define “mogged”
Verb; To assert ones dominance.
Where I live: the Italian restaurants are run by Greeks, the Greek restaurants are run by Serbians, the Turkish restaurants are run by Indians, and the Indian restaurants are run by Turks. It’s like nobody wanted to sell their own food lol
Where I live, the Turkish restaurants are mainly run by Kurds. Despite the sign outside on the building, they really don’t like being mistaken for Turks.
Lebanese restaurants are often run by Palestinians or Syrians. Syrians are better cooks than the Lebanese (no small feat, that). Palestinians are as good as the Lebanese, but there are small differences in how the cuisine is prepared.
Thai restaurants are sometimes run by Laotians, and at those places, if you ask for Lao food, they might make you something tasty off-menu.
In almost the entire UK, the majority of Indian restaurants are run by Bangladeshis. South Indian restaurants are an exception.
Also where I live, there are a number of Mexican restaurants run by Filipinos. That doesn’t work all that well.
“Greeks are Turks that think they are Italians.”
And of course modern pizza uses a key ingredient not even available until it was brought back from the New World.
Not sure what point you’re trying to make since Pizza came from Napoli immigrants to the USA where it spread across the east coast and the rest of the country. American tourists then spread it across Italy because they kept asking head scratching, Italian chefs about it who couldn’t help them. There’s basically two kinds of Pizza: A local dish of Naples and a popular American fast food but it was never something traditionally Italian that represents the country’s cuisine or anything. Some Italians just somehow made being a food snob their culture or something.
Another funny thing is that Carbonara sauce has endless documented recipes going back many years that include all sorts of ham, cheese and even garlic so don’t let any Italian tell you how to make a “authentic” carbonara. There is no such thing and they don’t know what they’re talking about.
If my grandmother had wheels she would be a bike. That’s all I need to know about ham in carbonara
Do they think wheat only comes from north america?
Tomatoes
Italians: “You can’t put fruit on pizza!!1!”
Tomatoes: -_-
Tomatoes aren’t Italian.
American at Apple pie
Apple pie’s British actually
And tea isn’t originally English. So what?
Tomatoes are fruit, yes. Botanically.
Here is a list of botanical fruits: tomato, cucumber, zucchini, yellow squash, acorn squash, butternut squash, pumpkin, eggplant, bell pepper, jalapeno pepper, habanero pepper, poblano pepper, cayenne pepper, serrano pepper, banana pepper, avocado, olive
Tomato is botanically a fruit, and culinarily a vegetable. Vegetables are not a botanical classification. Botanical classifications are often surprising - a strawberry is not a botanical berry, for example, but culinarily it is.
Yeah probably cause they don’t wanna yell “prep the accessory fruits” 10 times a shift.
They are not precursors but a family of flat, oven fired dough, with toppings. It’s a whole culinary style in the Mediterranean basin.
It’s essentially like saying that Texans get to decide what people put on a barbeque.
Most Texans I know would loudly agree with that.
There is literally a traditional Neapolitan pizza with figs and cheese on it.
Yeah, but that’s not pineapple. Pineapple is just wrong.
And of course modern pizza uses a key ingredient not even available until it was brought back from the New World.
Still has nothing to do with the United States. The tomato was introduced to Europe centuries before that country even existed. So I don’t really get what the point of this statement is. Every Italian dish needs to be from before 1500 to be authentic?
But sure, this is a step too far
Cuisine is an element of culture and so a socially-defined thing. Few would argue that espresso isn’t a part of Italian cuisine, but it was only really invented in the 1930s (coffee had been consumed in Italy for long before that, of course). Ciabatta was invented in 1982 and I’m sure most Italians would be fine with serving that.
But pineapple on pizza is not just not part of the socially-defined Italian cuisine; it’s an antithesis to it! It’s an emblem to everyone of how you can take something that is part of a cuisine (pizza) and do something to it that is completely at odds with it. Whether you like pineapple on pizza or not, that should be clear.
So, it shouldn’t be surprising that some people feel strongly enough about what is and isn’t part of their cuisine and draw the line there. In my experience, many Italians do feel very strongly about their cuisine, more so than any other nationality I’ve talked to about food. Try asking some what they think about spaghetti and meatballs for an example that seems innocuous to most non-Italians.
I respect such viewpoints but I do think there are plenty of people who hold them without really understanding them - who don’t realise how malleable cultural elements like cuisine are and who think they’re actually upholding an objective and immutable standard. That’s clearly wrong, but just because what is part of a cuisine changes doesn’t mean everything is part of a cuisine.
For restaurants there’s a decision to make - do you stick to what you hold to be the authentic cuisine, or do something more accommodating of globalised expectations? There’s room for both… and individual cooks who aren’t the restaurant owner or whatever probably don’t get to make the call.
How exactly is pineapple an “antithesis” of Italian cuisine?
Well, what other flavours in Italian food would you compare it to? Don’t read too much into it, I just mean the flavour is far from what’s already there.
Good points. But I would argue that pizza more than almost any dish (maybe rivaled by hamburgers?) has far transcended its roots and become a true global phenomenon.
“Hawaiian” pizza, generally considered the origin of pineapple as a topping, started in Canada in 1962*. That’s almost 65 years ago and 20 years older than your example of Ciabatta.
[*] Or possibly Portland, OR in 1957.
Canada in 1962
And bear in mind that pizza only became international basically right after WWII, so if pineapple pizza was invented today, pizza would have only started becoming known to most in, say, North America in like 2013 or so.
It blows my mind how quickly it spread and became just something normal.
I think that’s one reason I’m perfectly fine with the places that do things like put corn on it. lol
Food is meant to be enjoyed. And nourish, but hopefully pleasantly so.
Unarguably it’s a global phenomenon. And personally I don’t greatly value authenticity - or adherence to a particularly canonical cuisine - but changes to a cuisine’s canon don’t just happen due to time passed; that was really my point with the ciabatta example, that it is accepted in spite of being very recent. I haven’t asked anyone explicitly about ciabatta, but I would guess that even though it happened recently, it’d be accepted by most Italians, even those who are fairly strict about what counts as authentic, as Italian cuisine.
Why, even though it’s so recent? Well, in the end it’s about social agreement, not rules, but there are probably some reasons that go into that agreement: it was developed in Italy; it has similarities to existing cuisine; those similarities were consciously developed; it doesn’t violate any implicit expectations in the existing cuisine. Hawaiian pizza certainly doesn’t share those aspects. That doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be accepted, but it means it’s harder.
To take another example, sandwiches are an accepted part of British cuisine, and have also well and truly transcended those roots and become global. But that doesn’t mean that banh mi are part of British cuisine!
Ciabatta
wow… i had no idea something like that was only made so recently. That’s kinda wild.
Well, ciabatta believe it!
