Pizza: Hawaii's Road of Foreign Fired Bread

Landing in Hawaii that is known for its pristine views of nature, sometimes people want a slice to take with them, for a smell to add to the view. The pizza in Hawaii starts as always by watching the dough, keeping an eye on the fire, and making sure that the sauce to ingredient ratio works together. As the movement of steel meets the brick and a crust that has a nice glaze slides out of the heat a colonial pineapple pizza comes out for a few tourists who hadn't even thought of a strategy of ordering their dish. Grass huts and pineapple fields with a touch of sweet and smoky. The flavor they thought they wanted, until they tasted things that are less familiar. The pizzas that are made often depend on the oven and there are several, but when wood is involved, another layer is added to the mix, but with the mass amount of orders coming in it is hard to justify a wood burning oven, so many of these wood burning ones are in the backyard of local homes.

It might make a person think if a Hawaiian pizza is a thing in Hawaii, but those who really know will stay quiet, meanwhile they know it all will say there is no authentic Hawaiian pizza implying that it's connected to exclusively historical ingredients added to it. Foodies laugh on the side knowing that the local niche pizza aficionados, many who worked at pizza places know how Hawaiian pizza inside and out. It falls under the main two opinions that keep circulating over those who don't know anything about a proper and secret slice of lost knowledge of the days of Chico's and Magoo's. The first one is the Pizza Tourist who believes it's a singular idea of Canadian bacon and pineapple, or the Pizza Grifter who believes that it's a political debate on indigenous ingredients.

Then there are people who really know the intricacies, the variations, and the culinarians who don't stop because someone told them pizza was purity or bad, but told to get out of the kitchen. These sorts of pizza minded people never needed the argument in the first place, because they've been living the answer since the days of the old guard. When people have too much time they turn pizza into a hot debate, because they have nothing else to argue about, they are looking for inches in a political space.

The purity of an Italian pizza from the homeland was never what made a regional pizza what it is. Unapologetic creation is a good place to start — New York (1905), Gennaro Lombardi, tried his darndest with the New York water and weather to recreate a Naples pizza, and realized it wasn't possible. The 800–1000°F wood-fired oven, soft Italian Tipo 00 flour, and fior di latte mozzarella was out of reach cost-wise and business-wise. This would have to be changed to a coal-fired bread oven because that's what existed in New York bakeries, 500–650°F, American winter wheat, and buffalo mozzarella, which were substitutions that changed the final product of "The New York Pizza". This happens all over the world and people don't rename these dishes, no disclaimer, just built culinary identity, a growing industry, and a lasting rivalry with other regional styles on a dish that resembles the original in name only.

The go-to argument that can mark someone as not in the know is the usual ask of a cheeseless pizza because of the islands' history, or the ignorance of food history by shunning those who use elevated kanaka cuisine seasonings of the times of the Kingdom. You don't hear these people talking about the classic french aromatics, classical herbs, victorian era imported spices, the local flavor foundations, and european butter and creams either. Because it debunks the taro, kalua pork, and imu argument. There is no use arguing with those who don't know what they are talking about, because they won't even look at the menus of back then, so why would they look at the menus of now? Some people simply just want to win an argument and not be the change, a waste of time.

But for those making the pizza they have been looking for miles, not inches, and been making miles worth of fired up dough for years without needing to philosophize their stance on the food. They make it, eat it, live it, breathe it. While people keep yelling about what goes on the pizza, the people making it, keep making it, until the ones yelling start their own pizza place to enter the battlefield. Because as far as they are concerned, someone yelling about pizza can't stand the heat of the real kitchen. If they can, it's a war amongst dishes at Kitchen Stadium, where there are real stakes of personal reputation battling it out for who is right with flavors and people in the stands. Because a Hawaiian pizza is defined by locally treated water with its flavor intact, locally sourced wood or charcoal, in a locally sourced oven, an extra punch of seasonings, and a chewiness of dough that has a crisp seared crust. 

Hawaii Pizzeria Fever and the Disco, there was a particular movie that really boosted Pizza silently, which is the usual in Hawaii, because it was all about food awareness of the next Hawaii thing or trend. People wanted to eat what was cool back then and one of those items was not a memory of childhood, nor a growing up with a particular food, but seeing it on the disco-themed movie Saturday Night Fever. It was a particular scene where the pizza looked amazing which heart throb John Travolta walking around with the extra cheesy slice. Was it responsible for pizza getting popular, no, but it surely didn't hurt it being in the Hollywood lime light.

With no background training of people serving Pizza from Italy, many of the residents would have to experience the food through the tongue. It wasn't common to have italian cuisine places all over the place, so it was about understanding it from the customer's point of view and less so from the kitchen itself. The development of Pizza Hawaii could be seen either as a convenience by take out; or a nice accident of people eating their way through the city menus of the existing pizzerias. In the beginning the heartier, saltier, and chewier tastes were what Hawaii was being trained to expect from a slice. The more people ate the more the question would come to people of where did the pizza come from, with every bite, the question lingered. But of course some just ate to fill up and never even had a single thought in their mind, nevermind them. The arrival of Pizza in Hawaii was unusual to say the least, but it was developed the same way as many places around the states and that is through families. 

The first Pizza ever depicted is from an ancient 2,000-year-old fresco discovered in the ruins of Pompeii. Then the Modern pizza came from 18th century Naples, Italy, and began as a cheap peasant food, featuring flatbread topped with items like tomatoes, garlic, oil, and cheese. Italians arrived, they settled together, it grew in Manhattan (1905), then Brooklyn, and East Harlem, so it was within the neighborhoods of immigrants until after the Second World War. Neapolitans opened shops in New Jersey (Trenton), in Massachusetts (Boston). Pizza happened to people rather than being decided by anyone being a Pizza Authoritarian. But how did it arrive in Hawaii, Italian immigrants and the plantation recruiters never went to Italy.

Instead, somehow the popularization through cosmopolitan agricultural workforces would lead to a wide range of developments with shipping lanes, colonial relationships, sugar economics and chance. Italian emigration ran overwhelmingly toward the American East Coast and South America. Nobody decided to keep Italians out of Hawaiʻi though, but the people themselves would have much of their history developing elsewhere and not the Pacific Islands. Hawaiʻi had the ovens and none of the pizzerias, but people were already baking the Madeira, Portuguese flatbread Bolo do Caco. There was simply no way to introduce pizza to the people in Hawaii for a very long time.

Which meant that when pizza finally reached these islands, it could not arrive the way it arrived everywhere else, so it grew first from the commercial space and the people working there brought it back to their families that were almost always not Italian. Somebody out there was going to have to take a strong liking to this dish and make it grow for the local palettes, keep it going, and actually carrying it up the ladder of food to make it much more familiar. Arguably it wasn't until franchises started coming in that Pizza became so common that it was no longer able to be called simply a trend, but a food that was going to stay, due to its pure popularity. People just really liked how it tasted, so it kept chugging along.