You’re eating your pizza the wrong way – but do you care?
By By Jagdeep Worah | 15 Oct 2016
No doubt you always thought there is only one way to eat a pizza – hold a slice by the crust and bite into the middle. Right? Wrong, or so a pizza purist from the town where it originated would have you believe.
The correct way is to avoid slicing the pizza at all, but instead to fold the entire pizza once, then a second time, hold it in a napkin, and take a big bite into all the four folds.
Italian pizza expert Enzo Coccia from Naples says the delicacy is a street food and in the first place should never be hard, but soft even at the crust.
According to Coccia, folding the soft Pizza into a 'wallet' (portafoglio) is the right way to enjoy it. ''Because Neapolitan pizza was eaten on the street, folded twice upon itself like a wallet,'' he explains in a YouTube video that has gone viral. By using the wallet technique, Coccia claims there are minimal chance of losing the toppings which otherwise tend to slide off.
Daniel Young, the author of Where to Eat a Pizza – a guide to the world's best pizzerias, who was taught the secrets of pizza eating by Coccia himself, says, ''It is ridiculous that Enzo thinks there is a right way – but I always think it is best to learn the rules before one breaks them.''
In the video where Young explains the method of eating it the right way, he says, ''Rather than eat pasta al dente and pizza soft, in the Neapolitan way, foreigners learned to do the opposite.''
He says that if one tries to lift a traditional Neapolitan pizza by its crust, the toppings will all slide off into a big muddle of cheese on the plate, leaving just sauce-glazed dough – and this is partly because genuine pizza is always much softer than its commercial counterparts.
But then, if you tried to eat a commercial takeaway pizza in India – or anywhere else, for that matter – the 'right' way, you'd probably end up making a big mess. And in any case, few of us can master chopsticks while eating Chinese food, and today many of us use forks and spoons for Indian food traditionally eaten by hand – so why bother, as long as you enjoy your pizza?
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