You like silicon based products and cheese? Pizza Hut mixes both for your pleasure!

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Americans like their food different from europeans?

 

Definitely.

 

Of course. But don't try to make it a 'qualitative' thing (like Americans like shitty pizza, and poor ingredients). A lot of it comes down to familiar tastes.

I think it has a lot to do with catering to the local tastes ending up destroying the authenticity of it all. I think Europe and the US have different 'authentic' foods. Mexican, latin american, etc. foods in the US are going to be tons more authentic than anything in Europe (every attempt at mexican food in Europe was horribly bland and, well, bad). I think Asian foods are more authentic in the US because we have a much higher 1st generation subculture density than Europe does that demands the authentic taste. Indian food and middle eastern food, however, is probably more authentic in Europe because of the same reason.

 

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Just in case anyone still cared about the original topic, here is the follow up to the OP:

http://www.themilkweed.com/Pizza_Cheese_Update_March_2006.pdf

The company makes a good rebuttal, and I see no evidence to support the assertion that they are using the process described in the patent.

Not that it should affect your opinion of the publication, but Brooklyn WI only has about 1200 people, and while I have been there several times I have never heard of this publication before in my life.

 

Bah, sorry about that, must have misread your post, thought you were re-posting a different link to a pdf of the original one.

 

Even within areas that have a dense population of Indians, you'll find a mix because they have no qualms about either the traditional eats or the milder and more generic interpretations served for the sake of the Western palates. The latter is often considered suitable for a change since they can get authentic food at home, after all, whereas the stuff served in most Indian restaurants in the US is often dressed up, enriched and "fancified."

As a rule, I've found that within the US, if you want to find authentic Indian food in a restaurant, you'll need to look for Indian grocery stores. Chances are that there will be a number of Indian restaurants within a few blocks (or feet) that will serve something closer to authentic. Granted, that also means that you'll get a lot more regional variances based on who's running the place. For instance, if you find a place run by Andhra folks, you'll likely get something that while authentic, is a few orders of magnitude hotter than you might be used to from other places (and no, that's not an exaggeration). If it's run by Punjabi folks, then the strong point will likely be breads, and the weak point will likely be crepes.

Another rule to apply is that authenticity of Indian food is inversely proportional to price. If the approximate menu price in US dollars is not a single-digit number, it's not very authentic Indian food.

 

Exactly, the real Pizza comes from a brick oven and looks like described above.

And we're not bashing the american cuisine here. Surely there are tasty "pizzas" there, it's just the usage of the word pizza that sounds totally wrong. What you call pizza in the US would rather be described as a fat-ass pancake around here.

 

You must have very strange pancakes where you come from.

 

Not meant literally of course But not like pizza dough for sure, more akin to the creamy yeast-free mixture we use for pancakes. Pizza dough is elastic and corny with big bubbles inside, not spongy.

 

If you think that pizza's in America have dough like pancakes, you're horribly mistaken. Or eat really really bad pizzas or pancakes. One of the two.

 

Well I can't find a better comparison, but it's definitely nothing like (italian) pizza dough.

 

I don't know how anyone can eat the pizza from one of those chains. They all taste like plastic to me.

IMO, the best pizza is in NY (obviously, I'm biased). I've even been to Napoli and ate the pizza there, but I prefer the pizza in NY. It's what I grew up eating and to me, nothing compares. I've also had the 'original' NY pizza where they put the cheese on the dough and then the sauce on top of the cheese (so the sauce doesn't saturate the dough). It was pretty good, but not really the same taste I am looking for when I want pizza.

 

I think what he's getting at is the fact that most chain pizzerias in America use relatively underworked dough with deliberately undeveloped gluten and are chemical-leavened (e.g. baking powder) rather than yeast-risen, which is certainly accurate if you're talking about the large chains. And that puts them in the same category of "quick breads" as pancakes. Being spongy and having large numbers of small air pockets rather than a few large air bubbles is also analogous to pancakes. You could also group this together with the likes of scones and southern-style biscuits.

Local places and small chains or places that specialize in specific "stylizations" of pizza are another story altogether. Nonetheless, what people tend to know of American pizza is more defined by the 800-ton gorilla that is Pizza Hut than by the indisputably supreme edification of glory that is Giordano's .

 

Which large chains are you talking about?
AFAIK, not Domino's, Papa Johns, or Pizza Hut. You might be able to say that about Gatti's and Little Caesers (or maybe the vile CiCi's), but in general, I don't think that's the case.

 

In short: while they are called the same and might look a bit alike in a short glance, they are and taste quite different.

 

Nothing beat's Giordano's. NOTHING. The closest I can get here in the Twin Cities is Davanni's, which beats all the chain restaurants hands-down but can't hold a candle to Giordano's. If you want to experience Giordano's, you can actually order their pizza and have it FedEx'd to you, no need to go to Chicago

 

What you think is largely wrong, then. Pizza Hut, Domino's and Papa John's all do that. They may have things like their thin crusts which actually develop the glutens a little more, but they're only exceptions because they have to be. Domino's does a little more working of the dough than others, but that's only because they have a policy about fitting the dough into the pan by hand rather than by rolling. Papa John's or Round Table have a few specialty crusts which are handled a little differently, but they're still not really the main lines of sale. Pizza Hut also briefly offered something that had a partially yeast-risen crust, but it was short-lived for various reasons (among which was that it was harder to maintain the consistency demanded by being a chain).

I don't know about CiCi's or Gatti's, but in general chain pizzerias all use quick-bread type crusts (or at least predominantly quick-bread with only a little bit of yeast-risen dough mixed in to generate some 'starter' air pockets). They'll also use proportionally large quantities of added oil (Pizza Hut being among the worst offenders) to ensure that the end product isn't as dry as quickbreads often are when the uncooked dough itself is inherently low-moisture to begin with. All in all, this isn't so much a folly as it is a necessary evil for them because they demand speed and consistency, which they do typically have. The places that uphold certain standards are also sit-down pizzerias that aren't necessarily going to be quick.

Yay, someone else said it. Indeed, nothing beats Giordano's.

Here in the Bay Area, the closest thing I can get is Patxi's, which is still quite excellent in its own right, but there are subtle differences like the overt tartness of the sauce and the lack of the buttery aroma in the crust which still puts it below Giordano's. Gino's East is another well-known Chicago place, and while I don't think as much of it as Giordano's, they are doing the whole packaging and selling (frozen) in supermarkets thing if you're really curious for something akin to true Chicago-style pizza. Obviously, it does lose something due to being frozen, but it's still better than chain pizzas.

Then you have things like Pizz'a Chicago and BJ's, which both put up a front of being Chicago-ish, but what they make is more like a thick-crust pizza with chunks of tomatoes in addition to sauce. Still, either of them is light years beyond the chain crap. As you might guess, I do think a little higher of Pizz'a Chicago than of BJ's (which is more of a sports pub that happens to have decent pizza), but BJ's has the advantage of being more widespread.