What Makes A Great Pizza?
There’s no doubting that pizza is one of the most popular types of food in the world whether you’re picking one up from your local Clapham takeaway or dining out a restaurant. Given it’s so popular you’d be mistaken in thinking pizza’s been eaten in the UK for centuries but in fact Brits have only been enjoying the dish in their own country since after the second world war.
Despite its relatively short history in food terms (the first shop selling the dish opened in 1738), pizza has become the most widely eaten dish across the planet with billions of slices sold each year. Although the people of Europe and North America consume the most, every continent and country has a love of a good pizza. Asia is now closing in on America in terms of the revenue generated from demand for the dish.
Toppings vary depending on where in the world you are and they typically reflect regional tastes and cultural preferences. If you find yourself in India, you can expect the locals to have toppings such as mutton, cottage cheese (known as paneer) and pickled ginger. The Russians like a fish combination of sardines, mackerel, salmon, red herring and tuna. Japanese people like a pizza topped with eel, squid, mayo, potato and bacon. Take a seat at a local Clapham pizza restaurant and you’ll find most British diners enjoying pepperoni with extra cheese. Of course just because these toppings are considered the most popular in each country, doesn’t mean that’s what you have to order.
The beauty of the dish is that no matter what your food tastes, there are many ways and unlimited topping combinations to ensure you can have a delicious meal. The basic constituents have remained consistent as bread base, tomato sauce and cheese, but even these elements have been developed and improved by restaurants in different countries. Changes to the type of cheese, the tomato sauce and even how the dough for the base is made produces remarkable and delicious results.
Pizza is also considered a healthy food when the ingredients are well balanced and the cooking method is correct. Depending on the use of toppings it can provide a nutritious meal largely because of the health benefits of tomatoes, vegetables, olive oil, garlic, herbs and spices. These elements form the basis of the ‘Mediterranean diet’ which is considered to be the healthiest in the world. This is due to the ingredients containing antioxidants which help prevent chronic diseases such as cancer. In fact, recent studies have shown pizza can be beneficial in reducing rates of throat, skin and colon cancer.
So what makes a great pizza? Well, we all have our favourite toppings and preferred bread base whether its thin, deep pan or stuffed crust. However, you have to base a good pizza on the original recipe created by the Neapolitans in Italy because everything else is just personal preference. The base should light with a chewy crust and the dough made by hand each day. Top it with a sauce made from the best crushed tomatoes, fresh mozzarella (from cow’s milk) and basil. Ideally it should then be cooked in a brick or wood-fired oven which can achieve a high temperature (900 degrees or more). Get this right and the pizza emerges with a light, sumptuous, and slightly charred base with oozing cheese and a tangy, fragrant sauce. Perfect.
The ‘Eco’ Friendly Clapham Restaurant
What does good eating mean to you? Is it the quality of the food, good service and a great atmosphere? Perhaps the provenance of the ingredients is high on your list of priorities when dining out. Maybe you look for a healthy menu or the ‘green’ credentials of the restaurant. Now, what if you could find a Clapham Common restaurant that caters to all of those criteria? Well, there is one, and it’s aptly named ‘ECO’.
The healthy approach
This Clapham restaurant questions the way it sources ingredients, cooks them and then disposes of surplus waste. In doing so they’ve developed a healthy approach to eating and a healthy approach to the environment. When dishes are created fresh, the food looks and tastes better and with that comes a reputation for serving fantastic meals. And when a restaurant builds that type of reputation they naturally become the destination for discerning food lovers.
How food is grown, gathered and delivered is a high priority for cooking nutritious meals but today’s consumer is also looking for convenient menu options that are of the highest quality. The need to eat on the go, or when there’s no time to fit in a home-cooked meal, puts the emphasis on restaurants and takeaways to step-up and offer food that people really want. Unfortunately, the food in most high street establishments just doesn’t cut it.
At ECO, the provenance of ingredients is vital in creating fresh, delicious pizza and pasta dishes and preparing food the right way increases efficiency of output (to help reduce wastage and energy costs). As an example, the base of their famous ECO sourdough pizza is the lightest and healthiest in the country. Although created using a slow fermentation process, dough is prepared well before the torrent of orders come flooding in so the chefs can load pizzas into the ovens and have meals delivered to hungry customers quickly (but with an eye always on quality).
As a popular Clapham pizza restaurant they also take their responsibility to the local community and the wider population seriously. Rather than sending food waste from the cooking process (not from the customers’ plates because there’s rarely ever anything left!) such as peelings, bones and skins to landfill or incinerators, ECO operate an environmentally friendly program that sends it all to be bio-degraded. Now that’s socially conscious dining!
The ECO experience
Of course all the quality and convenience of the food is sometimes meaningless if service and atmosphere fall flat. Until you experience it, you’ll have to take the word of the local Clapham community and their understanding of good dining out.
Take a stroll to Clapham High Street and see for yourself how many people enjoy the ECO experience. If it’s not happy diners it’s happy children spending a Saturday morning at the restaurant’s unique kids pizza school. They really do cater for everything and everyone.
Clapham Pizza Restaurants
If you’re looking for great Italian food in South London then you can do no better than to go to a Clapham pizza restaurant. Mouth-watering antipasti, bread, lasagne, spaghetti and pizza are just some of dishes to enjoy in the Italian restaurants on Clapham High Street. Before waxing lyrical about these restaurants, let’s take a brief look at the history of that most famous of Italian dishes the pizza…but not for too long, what we really want to talk about is the food!
Pizza
We all think of Pizza as being from Italy and quite rightly so because the Italians perfected the great dish we all know and love. However, its origins are Greek where large, round flat bread was baked using oils, herbs and spices – no tomatoes though, they hadn’t been discovered. It wasn’t until the 18th Century that Italians picked up on flat bread baking and sold the inexpensive food they termed ‘pizza’ in local markets to poor people.
Until then, the idea of putting toppings onto the bread was unheard of until Queen Margherita (there’s a recognisable name) saw Neapolitans eating the bread and decided to try it for herself. She summoned her head Chef to bake a selection of pizzas on which he put tomatoes, mozarella cheese and basil (red, white and green – the Italian flag colours). Once word spread that this was the Queen’s favourite dish, it became popular with the people and has remained so ever since right across the world.
Pizza didn’t begin to become popular in England until after the Second World War when soldiers who had been fighting in Italy tasted the dish for the first time. In America, Italian immigrants had been selling pizza for many years but demand from returning troops took the dish from the Italian neighbourhoods out into the wider population.