Archives for the 'pizzas' tag
Pizza in Pyongyang: Kimchi Pie?
North Korean Dear Leader Kim Jong Il has accomplished a miracle: Pizza in Pyongyang.
It has taken almost 10 years of work, but North Korea has acquired the technology to launch a project very dear to its leader’s heart—the nation’s first “authentic” Italian pizzeria.
That’s a long time to go without a decent slice, and I feel for the guy. But this is a pretty serious case of reinventing the wheel, no?
For those of you keeping score at home:
- New York, center of capitalism: 1,520 pizza joints (search pizza and pizzeria here)
- Pyongyang, communist hermit kingdom: 1 pizza joint
(To be fair, there are those who say it’s impossible to get a decent slice outside New York, even in the good old U.S. of A. While I’d submit New Haven pizza as holding its own, I understand the sentiment.)
And the Pyongyang v. New York pizza smack-down above doesn’t even take into account per capita figures. New York has 9 million residents. North Korea has 24 million (starving) residents. Thus this charming contrast:
Despite the food shortages high-quality Italian wheat, flour, butter and cheese are being imported to ensure the perfect pizza is created every time.
Via Volokh Conspiracy, where we are reminded of another glorious chapter in North Korean culinary history: “Kim Jong Il’s plan to provide pizza for the toiling masses of North Korea seems to have worked out better than his earlier plan to alleviate food shortages by breeding imported giant rabbits, which was aborted when the greedy Dear Leader decided to eat the initial batch of rabbits himself.”
Go here for the recipe for the delicious looking kimchi pork belly pizza pictured above.
Semi-crossposted at Reason.com
Mystic Pizza Dough
Sam’s Italian Foods has called Maine home for nearly 70 years. It’s safe to say they know a thing or two about dough — the Famous Breakfast Pizzas notwithstanding.
That’s probably why officials in Lewiston, Me. seem to be leaning toward a theory that a Sam’s location there may be responsible for a “50- to 60-foot doughy mass” that’s clogging up a city sewer that runs underground in front of the pizzeria. Sam’s employees refused comment.
When asked about the clog, city public services director David Jones commented the city will likely have to replace a section of pipe. Jones’s description of the situation makes it sound like a X-rated version of The Blob.
“We have to go back in and pump out the manhole every eight hours,” he said… “We’ve tried punching through it, but each time we do, it just oozes back over the hole.”
More in the Sun Journal. Baseball writer Rob Neyer somehow predicted all this, back in 1999, when he wrote about a “wad of dough thick enough to clog a Paris sewer”.
