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Fun Facts Daily — Fun Facts About Pizza. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyam, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know and the story is moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we play in personal finance strategies and dive into the industry shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. Quotalistener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. In January of 1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance, became encased in the ice in the wettle sea. Through determination, grit and savvy, Shackleton would lead his men through a brutal winter, then over hundreds of miles of Antarctic ice, followed by 800 miles across some of the roughest waters in the world. It is one of the most extraordinary and inspirational journeys in the history of exploration. In this story and many others, at the Explorers Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts
or at ExplorersPodcast.com. Welcome to Fun Facts Daily, your source for just the good stuff. Monday through Friday, we're bringing fun facts and news you can use all carefully curated to uplift and inform. So give yourself a break, relax and learn something awesome in just a few minutes every day. Hi everyone, I'm Kyle. I'm Adicus. And I'm Philly. While every episode of Fun Facts Daily is clean and appropriate for listeners of all ages, on the first Friday of every month, I like to do a family fun Friday with my kids co-hosting as we explore a topic we love and hopefully you will too. Today we'll be learning all about pizza. But before we get into the facts, let's warm up our brains with the little challenge to see if you can tell fact from fiction. Consider this. Many food historians claim the modern tomato and cheese pizza was invented in 1889 by a
baker named Raphael A. Esposito, specifically to honor the visiting Italian queen Margarita of Savoy. According to legend, he designed the toppings as a combination of red tomatoes, white mozzarella and green basil to mirror the three colors of the Italian flag. It's a delightful meat and patriotic origin story to one of the most famous Italian foods in the world. But is that really how it came about? What do you think? Is that an actual fact or too good to be true? We'll find out at the end of the episode. Now for your word of the day. Our word for the day is pizza yolo. It's P-I-Z-Z-A-I-O-L-O. A pizza yolo is a professional chef who specializes in the traditional art of new
politin pizza making. Unlike general line cooks, a certified pizza yolo undergoes extensive technical training in a slow dough fermentation, manually stretching dough without a rolling pin, and managing heat inside wood-fired ovens at temperatures reaching around 900 degrees Fahrenheit or 480 degrees Celsius. The craft has taken so seriously that in 2017, UNESCO officially added art of neapolitan pizza yolo onto its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The word pizza yolo comes from Latin. The root pizza first appeared in Latin legal documents in central Italy as early as 997 CE. While linguists debate its precise etymology, one leading theory traces it to Latin pincere, meaning to pound or to stamp, describing the physical act of flattening the dough.
Other scholars connect it to the ancient Greek pitta for flatbread, or the lambartic pizza, meaning a bite or mouthful. The Italian suffix, Olo, refers to a person of a specific trade, so a pizza yolo is literally one who crafts the flatbread. This title has been recorded in Naples as early as the 16th century. Time for your daily high five are top five fun facts about pizza. 1. Hawaiian pizza actually came from Canada The Hawaiian-style pizza has some interesting international origins. In 1962, a restaurant owner named Sam Panapalas introduced canned pineapple to the standard cheese and tomato pizzas he was selling at his satellite restaurant in Chatham, Ontario.
Panapalas had immigrated to Canada from Greece, and he also noticed that customary customers were enjoying sweet and sour flavor pairings at Chinese restaurants in America, and that gave him the idea to experiment by tossing canned pineapple chunks and pieces of ham onto a pizza. He said it was a little experiment to see how customers would react to contrasting flavor profiles. He named it Hawaiian because that was the name printed on the label in the pineapple cans in his kitchen. A combination of sweet fruit and savory cured meat initially divided local customers before gaining popularity across Canada and spreading to the US. Eventually, it became a menu staple in pizza reas around the world. Today, Hawaiian pizza remains one of the most widely recognized and highly polarizing pizzas. 2. On average, Americans buy an estimated 350 slices of pizza every second.
Every year, Americans buy about 3 billion pizzas. According to some market research from the National Association of Pizza Operators, about 17% of all restaurants in the US are pizza reas. As Super Bowl Sunday consistently ranks as the highest volume sales day of the year, followed closely by Halloween and New Year's Eve. But many people don't need a special occasion to enjoy some pizza. Over 41% of Americans eat pizza at least once a week. Pepperoni is the most popular topping as it's included on over 35% of all orders. And all that pizza is big business. The industry is valued at more than 45 billion dollars annually just within the US. Globally, the pizza market surpasses 140 billion dollars with Western Europe and North America accounting for the majority of the sales.
Independent pizza reas make up more than half of all dining locations in America, while national delivery chains like Domino's and Pizza Hut make up the remainder. The average American eats about 40 pizzas per year, which comes to about 23 pounds of pizza per person. Number 3. The biggest pizza that people can actually call an order is 4 and a half feet wide. That feeds up to 70 people. No one as the great Sicilian, this square pizza was developed by big mamas and pop-as pizza rea in Los Angeles, California. Making just one of these pizzas requires 20 pounds of dough, 5 pounds of tomato sauce, and 15 pounds of mozzarella cheese. It takes around 2 hours to cook in a custom-built, oversized industrial oven. Customers have to provide the restaurant at least 24 hours advanced notice so the kitchen
staff can source the ingredients and schedule the bake. And even after it's made, the delivery presents some other unique logistical challenges. The box is too big to fit through standard passenger car doors, so they have a special rooftop storage rack mounted on the delivery vehicle. The base price for the pizza is over $300, and if you want other toppings, you better believe it's going to cost extra. In 2018, Guinness World Records officially verified this pizza as the largest commercially deliverable pizza on Earth. Number 4. Pizza Hut delivered a pizza to the International Space Station. In 2001, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Yusikov received a pizza delivery during his stay aboard the orbital laboratory. Of course, it wasn't without its hurdles. Let's start with the dough.
Any astronaut could tell you that regular bread produces dangerous floating crumbs that can damage sensitive electrical instruments, which is why astronauts tend to eat wraps with tortilla instead of a standard sandwich. Now, in this case, they modified the dough to minimize flaking. While pepperoni is the most popular topping here on Earth, it couldn't be used for delivery on the pizza up to the space station because pepperoni would degrade and grow mold over the prolonged launch timelines. So food scientists substituted seasoned salami cured with extra salt. The tomato sauce also required some modifications to the acidity in salt levels in order to stimulate taste buds which lose sensitivity in microgravity environments. The pizza was sealed in vacuum pouches and sent up on a Russian supply rocket, then reheated in the electric oven in the space station.
And for our fifth and final fun fact, spinning pizza dough isn't just for show. It stretches the dough evenly and it helps pizza makers get just the right texture and the crust. Signing pizza dough in the air uses centrifugal force to pull the edges outward while leaving the center intact. Rolling pins compress and pop carbon dioxide bubbles produced by fermentation, which can result in a dense, tough crust. That's why pizza yolos making authentic, neapolitan pizzas in Italy don't use rolling pins. The spinning motion distributes the mass evenly from the center to the perimeter while maintaining the gas bubbles caught in the gluten matrix that give it a nice chewy feel when you bite into it. Air circulation around the spinning dough also creates a brief drying effect that reduces surface stickiness without requiring more flour.
Too much raw flour applied to the base often burns at high oven temperatures which can give it a bitter taste. Experienced pizza makers usually start with a dough a little thicker in the middle since all the mass gets pushed to the perimeter as they spin it at speeds exceeding 20 revolutions per minute to achieve a uniform thickness. Now for some news it can use. To bake a pizza re-equality pizza at home, preheat a heavy pizza stone on your oven's middle rack at the highest available setting, typically around 500 degrees Fahrenheit. You're going to want to preheat the stone for an hour before cooking your pizza. A standard home oven transfers heat through ambient air, which conducts thermal energy far slower than commercial brick ovens. A thick baking stone absorbs thermal energy during the long preheat and transfers intense
heat directly to the base of the dough upon contact. This immediate heat transfer known as conduction instantly vaporizes water in the lower crust and drives rapid oven spring. That's the process that gives a nice neapolitan pizza that perfect chewy crust. Bakers yeast or saccharomyces syruvissi feeds on the simple sugars present in wheat flour during fermentation. As a byproduct they produce carbon dioxide gas and ethanol. The expanding carbon dioxide gets trapped in the gluten network inflating microscopic pockets in the dough. When exposed to heat exceeding 450 degrees Fahrenheit, this trapped gas expands rapidly. The high heat causes the moisture in the dough to convert into steam, which further expands the interior chambers. Simultaneously, the starches gelatinize and the proteins solidify around the perimeter of each bubble. This heat reaction locks everything into place before the crust hardens, giving it a light
interior structure surrounded by a crisp exterior shell. High temperatures are also going to reduce the total baking time down to just 5 to 8 minutes, allowing the crust to blister and crisp before the tomato sauce dries out or the mozzarella cheese separates into oil. If your oven has a top broiler element, switch it on during the final 2 minutes of baking. The direct radiant heat from the broiler mimics the rolling flame from a wood-fired oven melting the cheese evenly and creating charred spots across the outer crust. Finally, the moment you've been waiting for. At the beginning of the episode, I asked whether the margarita pizza was truly invented by Raphael's Esposito in 1889 to represent the colors of the Italian flag for the visiting queen.
This one's a fallacy. While the baker, Raphael's Esposito did deliver pizzas to the royal palace in Naples during queen margarita's visit in 1889, archival records show that the combination of tomato, mozzarella and fresh basil had already been eaten across Naples for decades. Historical texts dating back to 1790 describe local bakers topping their flatbreads with sliced tomatoes, salted curd cheese and basil leaves arranged in layered patterns. The famous so-called royal letter of thanks displayed in Esposito's historic pizzeria was later revealed by historians to be just a clever marketing document forged in the 1930s by his descendants in order to attract tourists. I hope you enjoyed learning about pizza with us today. Be sure to tune in every weekday for more fun facts.
Funfacts Daily is an airwave media podcast. It was written, recorded, mixed and edited by us, Kyle Atticus and Philly. Thanks for sharing a part of your day with us. Be sure to follow Funfacts Daily on your favorite podcast app so you can keep the good stuff coming your way every day. And if you like the show, please do me a favor and leave a kind rating review or just tell your friends about it.
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