In a world full of crazy, pizza seems to be the only constant. Bad day at work? Pizza for dinner. Having friends round? Pizzas for everyone, so you can mix and match slices. A person breaks up with you? Pizza. Get sent a scheduled promotional email with very little off a pizza even though you swore you would be good this month? Pizza.
No matter what your prefered poison, pepperoni (or pineapple) pizza is a lot of people's go-to comfort food, their safe space; there are very few problems pizza can't solve. Apparently, however, there's a level of pizza we are yet to unlock - pizza can be even tastier because we've been eating wrong this whole time.
According to London-based food expert Daniel Young, author of Where To Eat Pizza, we have been making a massive booboo. Our bad pizza eating methods maybe affecting the taste and much worse. But it's not too late to make things right.
Young learned his pizza strategy from Italian pizza chef Enzo Coccia, who's been firing up the pizza oven since childhood in his father's pizzeria, so you know it's legit. Like the men above, the ideal way to eat your slice is to fold the pizza up like a cheesy packet and not hold it by the crust.
For an individual-sized round pizza, this means folding it in half and then half again, so the resulting non-slice is a four-layered triangle. Then dig in from the crust end first. Bet you thought calzones were the peak of deliciousness. Nope! But why eat pizza the folded way?
Well, first and foremost, the folding method traps all the toppings safely inside your serving, instead of letting them slip-side off the slice. It also causes you to experience the pizza in thicker bread-first bites as a delicious pocket with fillings, instead of as a thin mess of stuff that you have to stuff into your mouth haphazardly.
The folded pizza method can also help protect against the dreaded "pizza palate" injury — when molten cheese at the top and tip of the pie hits and burns the roof of your mouth. This can, however, work as a double-edged sword when the pizza is particularly sloppy. Too rapid a bite could cause an explosion of molten cheese and sauce to hit not only the roof of your mouth but your tongue too, causing a world of hurt in the process.
Last but not least: a folded pizza slice might help to re-squish cooling cheese, instead of seeing it congeal into an unappetizing blob on the exposed top of the unfolded slice. All-around win.
To be fair, your incorrect pizza-eating may not really have been your fault. For one thing, you were probably surrounded by bad influences as a child, like family members and classmates who were eating pizza the wrong way, by the crust, with toppings perched precariously in the air. Go forth with your new knowledge and thrive.