the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Saddle River NJ, Last week’s episode of The Walking Dead had pizza purists yelling molto bene when the show delivered a reprimand to ignorant Pizza Hut eaters: Never, ever, put pineapple on a pizza.
During a scene where one of the characters is going for surgery, the patient’s brother promises him pizza when he wakes up.
“No…no pineapple!” the character begs, struggling to eke out the words before he passes out from anesthesia. “I’m serious…pineapple on a pizza…makes no sense!”
Any real Italian will insist on this, especially a Sicilian.
“It’s barbaric,” says local celebrity Thomas Giacomaro, who learned how to make a proper pomodoro from his Sicilian mama.
“As a boy, I used to stand on a chair at the stove and stir the sauce all day,” he says.
Author of The King of Con: How a Smooth-Talking Jersey Boy Made and Lost Billions, Baffled the FBI, Eluded the Mob, and Lived to Tell the Crooked Tale, Giacomaro tells us actor Stanley Tucci—of Calabrian descent—gets it right.
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On Tucci’s foodie-travel show, Searching for Italy, “he made a pizza and kept it simple—mozzarella, fresh basil, a sprinkle of pecorino, a drizzle of olive oil,” says Giacomaro. “That’s it. That’s all you need.” (Tucci tops the casting dream list to play Giacomaro in a bio-pic of his life, he tells us. We see the resemblance).
According to Tucci, pizza is “probably the most loved food in the word.”
Which is why when Giacomaro went to prison in 2002 for a dozen years-plus (money laundering, embezzlement) he had to get creative.
Do all that time without pizza? Fuhgettaboutit.
Using ingredients he stole from the prison kitchen, “I’d get four flour wraps, wet them, layer them, and spread them out on a piece of cardboard,” he describes. “Then I’d press them together until they made a layer of dough, crimping the edges like a pie crust. Next, I’d let it dry for 15 minutes. Then I’d top it with jarred sauce, mozzarella, and garlic. Then, two minutes in the microwave.”
Stay tuned for the King of Con’s own cooking show to come in 2023: “The King of the Kitchen.”