You know, when it comes to having a slice, probably the most important
thing is the crust. Yeah, the crust. It's gotta be thin,
but not so thin that you can't pick up a slice with one hand.
For New Yorkers, it's gotta be just right. Let's discuss. Welcome to
another Happy English podcast, coming to you from New York City. And here's
your English teacher, Michael. All right, thank you John, and thanks
everyone. It's Michael here from Happy English and I help people speak English better.
And this is Happy English Podcast, Episode six eighty seven. New York
Pizza. When I was living abroad, the one thing that I really missed
from New York is pizza. Pizza is such an important part of the culture
here that I thought we could spend some time today talking about this Italian import.
Let's dive in. First of all, pizza came from Naples, you
know, Naples in Italy, And like most imports, there were changes and
adaptations made basically to fit the local people's tastes and the ingredients that were readily
available at the time. The first New York pizzerias and their pizza chefs had
to come up with a way to make their Italian creations work in the Big
Apple, and I think here's how it went. Neapolitan pizza became New York
pizza with some particular differences, And the most obvious one is the size.
So a Neapolitan pizza should be about thirty five centimeters or thirteen inches, but
these days a New York pizza is about forty six centimeters or roughly eighteen inches.
It seems like when pizza first came to New York, the only American
food that they could compare it to was a pie. You know, pie
is round, it's served in slices, so they came up with the name
the pizza pie. And I remember as a kid growing up, my father
would often say, Hey, it's Friday night, why don't we pick up
a pizza pie for dinner. So yeah, so it was a pizza pie.
And these days we pretty much just call it a pie. So if
your co workers in New York suggest going out for a pie, they're probably
not talking about apple or blueberry or peach. When we say let's go out
for a pie, we're talking about let's go out for a pizza. By
the way, pizza is accountable noun, so you can have one pizza or
ten pizzas. But you know, at forty five centimeters, that's a little
bit too big to eat, right, So we cut the pie into slices.
A slice, Let's get a slice. So in New York they sell
pizza by the slice, so you can go in and get a slice,
or get a couple of slices. Let's get a slice. Speaking of slices,
here in New York City, we have something called dollar pizza. Yeah,
you can go into these small pizza shops where they sell pizza for you
guessed it, a dollar a slice and some of them are pretty good.
Are you getting hungry? Yet? Aside from the size, the other important
aspect of pizza in New York is the crust. The crust is the thin
layer of bread where they put the tomato, sauce and the cheese. And
most New Yorkers, I believe, like and prefer thin crust pizza, which
is the most commonly found style of pizza here. But at your local pizzeria
you can probably get something called a Sicilian slice or a Sicilian pie, which
is around one point three to two and a half centimeters thick, and the
bread or the dough or the crust actually of a Sicilian pie is very soft.
Oh yeah, and I should also mention Chicago Deep dish pizza, which
is also thicker than regular pizza. In fact, Chicago Deep Dish pizza is
somewhere between six and seven centimeters thick. The last key ingredient are the toppings.
And in addition to tomatoes and cheese, New York pizzas have sliced pepperoni,
slice sausages, mushrooms, onions, and so on. The list goes
on and on, and of course what you put on your pizza kind of
depends on your personal taste. But my advice to you is top your pizza
with whatever you like. Just leave the pineapple back in Hawaii. All right,
that's all the time we have for this English lesson today. Remember this
key vocabulary, the crust, a slice, a pie, and the toppings.
Well, that's all the time we have today for this English lesson podcast.
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