Interesting link - The LARGEST LIST of pizza types and varieties IN THE WORLD!!
This is yet another "interesting link" I posted to Cohost over a year ago. See this post for some information about what that was about and why it's now here on my blog.
Below the post, I've included some facts I learned from some cohost users when I posted this link to that site. It turns out that the list of all pizzas failed to capture that different countries legitimately think of pizza as having a completely different set of affordances and possibilities! Fascinating!!!
Interesting link - The LARGEST LIST of pizza types and varieties IN THE WORLD!!
I was googling "pizza archive" and "list of all pizzas" because I thought the idea of an "exhaustive list of all pizzas" was very funny. Pizza is inherently combinatoric. Making a list of all pizzas is clearly a fool's errand, so I was really interested to see if someone had done it.
I found plenty of sub-100, amateurish, listicle-style attempts to catalogue pizzas. This link, however, caught my eye: a list of five hundred pizza types. It claims to be
...a full list of different types of pizza, topping names and styles and all kinds and varieties of International pizza recipes.
This mysterious pizza registry bulks itself up by mixing regional varieties like "New York style" alongside simple topping descriptors like "Broccoli." (Confusingly, it also specifies that broccoli pizza MUST include ricotta cheese?) It's deeply unclear to me what razors were used here for defining "a type of pizza."
But the standards must have been clear to the writer, because the list has tons of detail and is impressively annotated with historical backgrounds, pizza lineages, and so on. It all seems very book-report-y but it's still impressive.
Pizzas in Argentinia have a thicker crust than the Neapolitan and New York Style Pizza. The crust is called “media masa”, which means “half dough” and is always topped with cheese except for the cheese-less canchera. The most popular type in Argentinia is “Muzarela” which is similiar to the Italian “Mozzarella”. The classic Argentinian Muzarela is topped with tomato sauce, two or three types of cheese and olives. It is traditionally served with Moscato d’Asti, an Italian vine.
In Germany, similar pizzas are popular as in Italy. However, with the exception of the Original Italian restaurant there, the dough is mostly much thicker and is usually not baked in a wood oven. The most popular type in Germany is Salami (24%) followed by Ham (20%), Margherita (9%) and Hawaii (3%). Instead of mozzarella, other cheeses are often used in Germany. Also popular in Germany is the German version of a “pizza”, the so-called Flammkuchen (tarte flambée). However, the Flammkuchen is not a pizza in the true sense. Widely spread in Germany are also different sizes of pizzas like Normal, Big, Family and Party. The first two are shaped round, the last two are square and much larger.
Please check this list out. The bizarre brain of its creator shines through in the decisions they made about every section. There are so many strange pizzas here! I particularly liked:
- The Banana Curry pizza, Sweden--"Curry sauce, Banana slices, Pineapple slices"
- The Härkis pizza, Finland--"Long Island sauce, Härkis (Fava bean mince), Salad"
- The Tropical pizza, Colombia--"Tomato sauce, Cheese, Pineapple, Cherry, Raisins, Plum"
- The "Vodka Flamed", Russia--"Goat’s cheese, Caramelised Apple slices, Caramelised Onions, Flamed with Vodka"
- The "Cheesecake," South Korea--"Cheesecake mousse, Shrimps, Lime juice"
I had a ton of fun reading this list but I am extremely suspicious of its accuracy and it seems extremely google-translated. It routinely refers to peppers as "capsicum." All the pizzas of Africa are grouped together. And there are plenty of entries like the one for "Argentinian deep dish," which has this unhelpful ingredient list, and no preparation details:
Tomato sauce, Mozzarella, other ingredients vary
The site exists almost only to host this list and a few pizza recipes, all written by someone simply named "Alex." I'm guessing they're German, as the page's footer also links to a German chili sauce website. This is clearly the raw effort of an enthusiast working without a clear ontology of pizzas, striving in a mad scramble to simply be the biggest pizza lister on the internet. But size is not enough... the data must also be clean! And useful!!
How should pizzas be grouped? What makes one pizza with similar ingredients and preparation different from another? Which local flatbreads should be included as a type of pizza in their region? This list has an entire entry for a specific pizza invented by Wolfgang Puck, which is the biggest argument IMO that this person needs strict assistance from someone with a library science degree, or something. How famous do you need to be for your personal ingredient mix to become "a type of pizza"?? What are our pizza-listing best practices? Our pizza razors???
I think the most interesting thing about this list to me is its rejection of the concept of a choose-your-own-toppings pizza. Here, pizzas are the creation of chefs, and nations. I wouldn't be surprised if this list was scraped from the menus of various nations' top pizza chains.
Getting the official house pizza off the menu was never something I did as a kid. I always chose toppings myself. I grew up in Connecticut, the US state with the most violent Pizza Nationalism. Connecticut has more pizza places per capita than any other American state and has become extremely loud about its pizzas within the last fifteen years or so, thanks to food television shows, I think.
My favorite pizza? Thin crust, fried eggplant and sausage bits, with mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce. Maybe it's better that it's not on anyone's list. It's my secret combo from the place down the block from my parents' house. Nobody scraping menus is ever going to find it!!
New Pizza Information
Cohost was always great for comments--the site was set up to prevent comments from hijacking the context of the post, and it led to a very calm and fruitful commenting culture (as opposed to twitter, where comments tend to lead much more easily to conflict).
In the comments beneath this Cohost post, I learned the following facts from other people:
I assumed that "capsicum" was a Google translate error, but I was wrong--some folks in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka do commonly use this term to refer to peppers normally, or sometimes in the context of a craft like gardening or cooking. However some of those countries are simultaneously home to people who use the term "pepper" more commonly. (I won't begin to speculate on the encroachment of American English here, but it's a fascinating topic I'd love to find an Interesting Link about, haha.)
The Colombian tropical pizza is real, and tasty. Apparently some people in Colombia do not think of pizza as combinatorial at all, and only order set pizza types, not "make your own" pizzas like the ones common in the US.
Even though we might assume that Pizza Alex is German, his description of German pizza seems to not be correct--mozzarella pizza is in fact the norm in that country. Another point of evidence that Pizza Alex may not be human at all, but rather some form of space alien attempting to understand humanity through the Lens Of Pizza