Lately I’ve been noticing several social media posts about pizza with the hashtag #noflop and the photo of a pizza being held with the point being stiff enough to stick straight out. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) See photo below.
That is me holding a piece of pizza from one that I made. Usually this photo has the person that posted it gushing with pride. That was NOT me with this photo – at least not on the No Flop part. It did taste great, but I was much more excited about the slice in the next photo, which is from the second pizza I made that day.
This is why you fold the pizza.
I can’t fathom all of these posts where people are so delighted with their No Flop Pizza. How did this even become a thing? Before I go further and lose any readers that are fans of the No Flop Pizza let me say that I will acquiesce to the idea that there are many ways to prepare different types of foods, and that everybody has their own tastes, likes and dislikes, and just because they’re different than another’s, doesn’t mean they are wrong.
To me the flop, or droop, which is what I call it is how it SHOULD be. The orange oil drip is a good thing too.
I’ve been eating pizza for over 50-years. I grew up and lived in New Jersey, near NYC for the first 33-years of my life. I have almost never had a NY-style pizza in NY/NJ that didn’t have the point droop, which is why you FOLD the pizza in half lengthwise. They also almost always have what I call the orange oil drip. This is from having enough extra virgin olive oil to mix with the tomato sauce – so much so that some of it runs off. As recently as a year ago, in November 2021, I did a little pizza tour in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens and guess what? They all had the flop and the oil drip. If they didn’t, it wouldn’t be real NY pizza to me.
When I posted my Top 10 Best Pizzas in St. Petersburg earlier this year, one of the comments in part said, “What’s this predisposition with NY pizza? As if that’s the one to measure pizza by?” (By the way, they all weren’t NY style pizzas.)
My answer to this is that the first pizza to ever exist in the USA was NY-style pizza made by Italian immigrants. That’s where it all started. It is the OG of pizza in America.
