Bakery pizza, an endangered heritage of São Paulo’s gastronomy – 03/26/2024 – Cozinha Bruta

Yesterday there was a parents meeting at my son’s school. It started at 7pm. A good friend has a daughter in the same class: I arranged with him, an hour before, to have a beer at a nearby bakery.

Arriving at the paddock, it was there, in the greenhouse: the bakery pizza. I can’t resist bakery pizzas.

It was a modest pizza, just like the bakery. Don’t get me wrong: this is a compliment.

The bakery in question, called Elite das Perdizes (someone needs to do a thesis on naming patterns for paddocks and pet shops), is one of the few left without a turnstile in São Paulo.

A little bigger than a garage in the visible part, it serves a memorable ham that can come on bread or PF, with rice and beans. From some point in the afternoon, pizza starts to come out.

It’s the classic bakery pizza, which is scarce around the city.

Thin, measured coverage, a São Paulo style par excellence. Skinny, to overcome the hunger that arises between lunch and dinner – or at any time when you are on the street and make eye contact with the greenhouse.

I’m not going to lie, I would never do that to you.

In an objective assessment, pizza from a bakery in São Paulo was recovering. But it’s the affective memory thing, right? We all have it. Cariocas like Globo biscuits, Gauchos like cheese with peas and corn, São Paulo people like Padoca pizza.

You might, by chance, arrive at the bakery at the exact moment the pizza comes out of the oven.

In CNTP, it would be the height of pizza. Oven pizza, however, emotionally requires some maturation after baking. For the pasta to soften and integrate with the tomato sauce. So the cheese remains warm and elastic, although no longer exactly melted.

Then you receive it on a small plate and saturate it with olive oil. There must be 1 (one) unit of olive per slice, necessarily, and you decide whether to eat it at once or take chunks out to eat in several bites. Olives with pits are more rooty – that’s how they came from Elite das Perdizes.

São Paulo bakery pizza is a gastronomic heritage that is under threat. Disfigured. Because of the bakery owners.

Some want to extrapolate the social function of the bakery and serve pizzas in the style of pizzerias, targeting the worst examples. Stuffed edges, excess coverage, unlimited creativity.

Others don’t care and make bar pizza, entirely on the thighs, with pre-baked dough purchased ready-made.

A pizzeria is a pizzeria, a bar is a bar, a bakery is a bakery. Some order in this area, please.

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