Italy acts to safeguard the Neapolitan pizza

PIZZA-MAKERS beware. Italy has outlined specific guidelines to protect the real Neapolitan pizza from bogus copies.

The regulations by the agriculture ministry touch on everything from size to ingredients to the type of oven used.

They will enable rule-abiding restaurants in Italy to get a special label attesting that real pizza can be eaten there.

However, the initiative is broader, part of Italy’s efforts to protect its cuisine across the European Union, although it was not immediately clear what steps would be taken in Brussels for its enforcement. The guidelines, eight articles printed in the country’s Official Gazette, rule that real Neapolitan pizza must be round, no more than 14 inches in diameter, no thicker than 0.1 inches in the middle and with a crust of about 0.8 inches.

“The texture must be soft, elastic, easily foldable,” the guidelines said.

The norms specify what kind of flour, yeast, tomatoes, oil must be used in the real pizza. They recognise only three types of real Neapolitan pizza: Marinara, with garlic and oregano; Margherita, with mozzarella cheese from the southern Apennines, and basil-extra-Margherita, which requires fresh tomatoes, basil and buffalo mozzarella from Campania, the region that includes pizza’s home town, Naples. The dough must be rolled out manually, and do not even think about electric ovens: the real pizza is only baked in wooden ovens that can reach the required temperature of 485 degrees C (905 F).