Daily Dose of English 43
Pizza
Daily Dose of English 43
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about pizza. Pizza. Pizza, as it looks like it's spelled. However, we say pizza. Pizza is interesting, and one of the reasons is because that word is almost universally recognized. There's not very many words to say pizza and it's so popular that it's spread over basically the entire world. So no matter where you go, you can find pizza and you can be almost sure that it's pronounced or said very similarly. Not absolutely everywhere, like there are changes in things and especially in between alphabets or languages that are completely different, but it almost always comes from the same root of that pizza or pizza or whatever you want to say it. I don't speak any old Italian, but Um, pizza did come from that region of the world, right? That was sort of the original place that it was, was invented. Um, but it's a really simple dish in a lot of ways, right? It's bread, sauce, cheese, and then other toppings, right? The cheese isn't even required necessarily. It's sort of just bread sauce and whatever else you got. And it's so versatile, right? There's a lot of different ways you can use it. Versatility is when something has a lot of different uses, right? And so with pizza, it's incredibly versatile because you can do it in so many different ways for so many different people. Right. Pizza is like it's it's as big of a category as like saying the word sports. Right. There's so many sports in the world. There's so many different kinds of pizza in the world. In the United States. Right. We have a couple of pizza types that are popular here. Right. There's the New York style pizza, which is very well known. New York style pizzas are usually very large and they're pretty thin, crusted, right? So the bread, the crust is quite thin. It's usually pretty soft and it has a little bit of sauce on top, right? Then there's typically cheese and other toppings. And that's a New York pizza. You might also hear it called a pie, a New York pie. And that was obviously from New York, right? That's where the name comes from. And it's, that's the most common style of pizza that you're going to find pretty much all over the US. However, it's not like exactly the same as you're going to find in New York. It's actually, I would argue that it's a little bit better in New York, mostly because the experience that they have, they're making it. There's plenty of very good pizzerias all over the world. However, the average pizza in New York is very good. I will admit it is just good. Nothing else to add there. There's other types of pizzas as well, and they typically come from one part of the country, in the US at least. For example, Detroit-style pizza is another kind of pizza that's very, very good. And it is typically baked in a tin, a dish that is a little bit deeper. And so the crust, the bread is pretty thick, right? It's almost like a loaf of bread. And then because it has this square dish that it's cooked in and it's metal, that metal is usually very hot. And so the sides of the pizza get very crispy. And so that makes really good sort of crispy, crunchy crust with toppings on top. There's also not that much sauce on Detroit-style pizza, usually. Again, there's 100 different ways to make all different kinds of pizza. None of it's necessarily correct or incorrect. As long as it's delicious, that's all I care about. And Detroit pizza often has just some stripes of sauce. And so instead of covering the entire thing, they'll just have a couple of stripes of sauce across the top. And even it's also common to have the sauce above the cheese instead of below. And so if you ever come to the US and go to Detroit, you might find delicious Detroit style pizza. A very controversial pizza type is Chicago deep dish style pizza. Controversial is when something, a lot of people don't agree on something, right? So in this case, a lot of people think that Chicago-style pizza isn't pizza. They say that's not pizza, that's something else. But a lot of people also really enjoy it. And Chicago-style deep dish pizza, as the name hints, is baked in a very deep dish. So there's a thick metal dish that usually goes down probably a couple of inches, four or five inches. they make the pizza in layers, right? So there's the dough, which sort of goes on the outside, and there's a bunch of sauce, a bunch of cheese, a bunch of meat, right? And it builds up these layers of pizza to be almost more like a pie, right? A thick pie, right? You can't really eat a slice of, deep dish style pizza because it's not really holdable. You have to eat it with a fork because it is so thick. It looks a lot more like cake in a lot of ways. However, when it's done correctly, it is delicious. I don't really care if it's considered pizza or not. It's very, very good, and it's called Chicago style pizza, so whatever. Who cares? There's also plenty of styles of pizza all over the rest of the world. There's even ones that don't really have names, right? It sort of depends on what you do. Here in Mexico, a lot of people or most people eat pizza with lots of salsa on top, right? Sauces and hot sauce. And that's the default. That's the normal thing. If you get a pizza without hot sauce, it's weird. However, it's the opposite in the US. Nobody eats their pizza with hot sauce on it. It's just the pizza, but you don't really put anything on top unless you're putting on some cheese or maybe some pepper flakes if you like chili. For example, in Rome, there's also a couple of different styles of pizza. All over Italy, you can find different styles of more original pizza. And those pizzas are often much smaller. They're typically for one person or maybe two people. So they're not the humongous monsters of pizzas that you can find in the US for a whole party of people. But they're also very delicious. I have not had the pleasure of eating pizzas in Italy. However, I have had sort of that Italian style of a different kind of crust and with a lot more burning on the bottom because one of the trademarks of Italian pizza is cooking in a really high temperature. Um, and that's important for cooking pizza quickly because you don't really want to cook anything too much on a pizza, right? The, uh, the toppings on top should be melted and sort of warm and cooked, but you don't want them to be burned or just like really soggy and in there for too long. And so a lot of pizza there has a very wet dough that when cooked becomes pretty crisp ideally, not too crunchy, like just crispy and like finished very quickly in 30 to 60 seconds. And one thing that I hope to do very soon in my life is go and eat lots of pizza in Italy because I do really like pizza. And one of the things that I like to do is make pizza because it's actually not too hard to do really, really well because a lot of pizza places are fine, especially here in North America. Pizza places are, have a very average quality, right? You can get a pizza and it's okay. It's fine. Like it's pizza, right? But it's not the best pizza you've had. That is just really good and delicious. However, if you make it at home, you can do it really well. It's a little bit difficult if you don't have a nice oven to do it in or the correct stuff to use. However, if you do have that, it's quite simple, right? Making the dough is actually pretty easy, right? You don't have to do much more than just mix together ingredients and wait a while. With cheese, you just have to find the right kind of cheese. But again, once you find it, it's not too difficult just to grate or cut up. And then with the sauce, it's also pretty simple, right? You just need tomatoes and some ways to season those tomatoes and then blend them together. And so if you, if you want to have really good pizza and you have an oven that gets hot, I definitely recommend trying to make pizza. There's tons of recipes online, so I'm not going to go through them. But one tip that I do have is to use a heavy metal pan. If you can do not use Teflon or anything that you can't put in the oven, use a heavy metal pan, make your pizza in there. Cook it in the oven until the top is done and then finish it on the stove because that way the bottom of the pizza will be nice and crispy and done without burning the top because that's pretty easy to do. Anyways, I'm going to end this episode here because I'm now hungry because I just talked about pizza for 10 minutes. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and I'll see you again tomorrow for another one. Bye.
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