Pizza in Argentina vs. pizza in America

December 28, 2012 at 7:56 pm

One of my favorite foods in Argentina is the pizza.  You can buy pizzas fresh from a pizzeria, pre-made at a supermarket or make one from scratch.

How Argentine pizza is different

Less tomato sauce

Pizza in Argentina looks like American pizza in a lot of ways, but has a lot less tomato sauce.  The tomato sauce is more a light film of sauce under the cheese in Argentine pizzas.

Softer cheese

While there are pizzas in Argentina that use mozarella cheese like American pizzas, many of the homemade pizzas made by natives use softer white cheeses.  The softer white cheese in Argentina is so soft you can cut the cheese with a spoon.  When the cheese melts sometimes it becomes more liquid than American mozzarella cheese.

Different topping patterns

While American pizzas generally have toppings equally spread across the entire pizza, Argentine pizzas have unique patterns.  The most common pattern for making a homemade pizza in Argentina is laying the cheese in long slices from the center toward the crust of the pizza.  Sometimes cheese on the pizza looks like spokes on a bicycle before it is cooked.  Since the cheese is so soft and the cheese slices are so thick, the cheese will often cover most of the pizza after it’s cooked.

Different pizza varieties

In Argentina I’ve visited pizzerias with dozens of creative varieties of pizza.  At one pizzeria- Roka Pizzeria- we had a delicious cheese pizza that was like a calzone with very thin crust, stuffed with several types of cheeses.  On top was crumbled cheese and fried onions.  It was so cheesy I would eat bread with it.

Other Argentine pizzas had raw bacon, cooked eggs, sliced tomatoes, olives, artichokes, etc.

-Written by Alex Balinski (Argentina Neuquen Mission 2008-2010)

Leave a reply