The case of the Swedish pizza.

Sweden has not, until recently, been well known for its spectacular food. One thing that Sweden has always excelled at, however, is pizza. If you are ever in Sweden–try some Swedish pizza. Now, I am not alone in feeling this way. I have had guests from around the world taste Swedish pizza and they too find it irresistible. Why, exactly, is that? Go to any pizza shop, any, and you will find a menu of pizza names that count at least 30-40, but sometimes upward a 100 different types of pizza.

You do have your standard calzone and you have your ham and mushrooms – type of pizzas. But they are soon dwarfed by pizza combinations that are generally not seen at an everyday pizza place in most places around the world. Check out Africana… curry, banana, pineapple. On pizza? Yes – and it’s insanely good. How about Venus? Tabasco, ground beef, chili, garlic and onion. Or how about Cozze? Mozzarella, mussels, giant shrimp, garlic and parsley. It struck me that Swedish pizzas employ a fascinating range of food combinations and that, usually, these food combinations are surprising to people outside of Sweden. At some point, clearly, Swedish pizza makers stepped into some Intersection and created a Medici effect - one that made the pizzas taste very, very good.

Comments

[/pd]

How sure are we that Swedish pizza makers did not just follow the impulse of an indivual request ?? Lets say I wanted a curry, pineapple and banana pizza and the cook just made it up for me.. but kept it on the list of 'can do' pizza's , so therefore they actually have a lot of individual but fascinating range of food combinations !!

Now the punch line, did they actually walk thru an intersection of creativty ???

[mbe]

how does the japanese pizza fit into all this?

[Darrill Sandberg]

What's the point of this article if there's no apparent access to a recipe? I won't be going to Sweden in this lifetime.

[Laurens]

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[Dwarfsmoker]

Seriously, completely agree. Swedish pizza are so good its baffling. It´s not just the fact that they have different ingredients either, even the normal ham an mushrooms, or calzone pizzas are out-of-this world good compared to most other countries. The reason? They use different cheese, one that taste more and better than your typical mozzarella-tasteless-as-paper cheese, and the tomato sause, usually contains a plethora of ingredients (12-13 different ingredients in the typical, as compared to most other countries using only 2-3 different ingredients) making it really stand out. I have been to 9 different countries, and its basically all the same, except in sweden.