Forget authentic Italian pizza, try the New York slice
Cheap, meant to be eaten by hand and ubiquitous, American-style pizza is far more authentically street food.
It is safe to say that over the past 20 years Australia has experienced a culinary renaissance not seen in any nation since Escoffier instituted the brigade.
It is not uncommon to hear someone just returned from Paris or Phuket say, well, it was great, but frankly the French or Thai or whatever food is actually just as good if not better back home.
So if that’s the case, why can’t we crack a simple pizza?
“What?” I hear you say, over the sound of an old LP record scratching to a halt. “Australia has great pizza now. Why, my local has been certified by the Neapolitans as just as good as anything served in the old country.”
And there, my friends, is the rub. While for years — decades even — Australian pizza was an often dire affair, all cottony crusts overloaded with toppings of dubious provenance and run through glorified conveyor-belt toaster ovens of the sort seen at a 4.5-star family resort’s breakfast buffet, today this once humble food is suffering from a crisis of authenticity.
That is to say, in attempting to be like the real thing — thin-crust and wood-fired and washed down with a glass of something with a DOC (and preferably DOCG) dog collar — we have turned what should be a simple feed into something over-engineered, over-thought, and generally overpriced.
Because, although they are often good, even the best examples of the form are out of place, with gossamer crusts that go soggy on the plate (not to mention the humidity of a cardboard pizza box) and a built-in trigger for the anxious Australian diner: Do I have to eat this with a knife and fork? Will the waitress just flown in on a 457 visa from Torino judge me if I use my hands?
It is a shame then that Australians never embraced another form of pizza: the New York slice.
Of course, as we have far more established Italian than American communities in Australia, this is no surprise.
This may change, of course, if Manhattanites finally make good on their quadrennial promises to leave the country if a Republican is elected president, but let’s not hold our breath.
Cheap (the “dollar slice” is a New York institution), meant to be eaten by hand (politicians are mocked far and wide if they go for the cutlery on camera), and ubiquitous, it is far more authentically street food than the conceit of closing your eyes and pretending you’re in the backstreets of Naples when you’re handing over $20 for a simple pizza margarita in a “ristorante” in the podium of an apartment block that went up 18 months ago.
No, the tomatoes aren’t San Marzano and the cheese isn’t from lovingly hand-milked buffalo. Instead, the proper cheese topping on a New York slice done right should be molten and just a little bit greasy and course down the valley of a folded slice into the eater’s mouth like lava sliding off a Hawaiian island into the Pacific.
Sadly, there have been few attempts to recreate this delicacy here, and even fewer successful ones.
Having tried a couple of places touting “New York-style pizza” in the Sydney area, it’s safe to say that some people are still confused as to whether the Big Apple is simply a synecdoche for “huge” (it’s not).
It may be that New York pizza, like New York bagels, requires someone who grew up on the stuff to do for the slice what Sydney’s Michael Shafran’s “Brooklyn Boy Bagels” brand has done for the schmear.