Italy: World pizza day celebrates quality

Rome: Every year in Italy about 450,000 tons of flour go into the production of more than three billion pizzas. Italmopa – Association of Industrial Millers of Italy – highlights this on World Pizza Day, which is celebrated every year on Jan. 17, the feast day of St. Anthony, patron saint of pizza makers and bakers.

“Pizza, as well as pasta, is the flagship of Italian gastronomic culture in the world,” says Andrea Valente, President of Italmopa. “It is a sublime food that includes the main ingredients of Italian food: authenticity, flavor, fragrance, and conviviality. And we are proud, as millers, to be able to contribute our flours, whose unparalleled quality and versatility are unanimously appreciated even in foreign markets, to the success of a product like this. A true emblem of global food and cross-cultural integration”.

Flour is the main ingredient in pizza, according to Italmopa. The most commonly used in classic dough is wheat flour, which comes in various types. There are no universal rules, and each pizza maker is to be free to experiment, within certain limits, with his own dough. In fact, the choice of the appropriate flour is strictly conditioned by the type and characteristics of the result you want to obtain, and by the processing systems you adopt.