You have the French/German Flammkuchen, which is an amazingly good version that I don't know why it's not widely known.
There's Lahmacun, which is the "Turkish Pizza" - a lot more spicy and thin version with minced meat with spice as topping. There's also Pide, which is thicker and closer to Italian pizza but the shape and the toppings are quite different(cubed meat, egg).
Then there are the American pizza types like Chicago-style that look significantly different than the Italian ones.
The one on the fresco looks like the Italian version.
No such thing has actually existed since at least WWI.
Let us not overlook the deep-fried Mars bar.
As you said it was invented in many places though.
And keep some "old dough" for starting the next batch. The general concept of a "sourdough starter" arises from that. This was pretty much the only form of bread yeast until 1850 or so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker%27s_yeast#History
And have a look at the wood-fired bead ovens in Pompeii. They're quite similar to the Pizza ovens down the road in Napoli. It's likely that the Romans made similar dishes: flatbread with cheese, meat, sauce and herbs baked on top.
But not tomatoes yet, until 1600s or later, after the Columbian exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/26/exceptionally-...
In some districts in Rome, they had large apartment blocks (insualae) several levels high, and fire was forbidden, so people had to buy food on the streets.
From wiki: The insulae could be built up to nine storeys, before Augustus introduced a height limit of about 68 feet. Later, this was reduced further, to about 58 feet
It wouldn’t even need to rise. Just heat dough and you’ll have something you can put other food on top of and eat the whole thing.
I'd say that running a bakery under those conditions: i.e. would always be yeast around and there is no refrigeration, so for any given dough it's a question of when, not if, a given piece of dough will start to rise.
Pineapple about same time.
People however usually think of the origin of pizza to be when tomatoes were added to the equation, and that has a much more well-defined history (mainly due to the limited availability and spread of tomatoes in Europe and around the world).
Presumably though the domestication of wheat had a symbiotic relationship with bread making. The (ancestral) wheat that exists today is like bread-powder when it is milled, but it was probably bred for that purpose (no pun intended). So I’m not sure we can be confident what the first breads were like, made with whatever pre-wheat grasses they had at the time. Perhaps it required other ingredients at first before those aspects were “automated” into the grass itself, etc
However, if you eg want to make a 100% rye bread, you really have to make it a sourdough, because otherwise the chemistry doesn't work out.
There are more factors at play here but the tldr is that, other than wheat, rye flour contains a very high level of amylase, an enzyme that breaks starches into sugars. Amylase prevents bread from rising, and rye contains so much of it that it stays active even with the high temperatures of baking. Add that to the fact that rye has very little gluten to hold up the structure of the bread…
That‘s where sourdough comes into play. The acids produced during a slow fermentation slow down the reaction of amylase, giving you a lighter bread. For a good rye bread, I ferment for over 24h in three steps.
Interesting you say that though, because I find three days about the limit, starts to really over-ferment, becoming really 'pockety', even at refrigeration temperatures. I suppose if I did it all in there as you imply, no fermentation time at room temp. at all, that might be better?
How active is your sourdough starter? Commercial yeast by contrast tends to be very active, so timings are shorter.
That said, I think they cultivate newer rye varieties to be less rich with enzymes. I presume that is to meet the requirements of industrial baking.
(Though you shouldn't use that kind of yeast for breadmaking, if you want it to taste good.. At least get some fresh yeast. (Which not quite coincidentally is also the 'normal' kind of yeast in eg Germany.) Better yet, make a rye sourdough starter.)
The problem is that rye doesn't have enough gluten. So you need to get the structure of your bread from the starches, and they only do the Right Thing when it's sour enough. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36504484 for a slightly more in-depth description.
American wheat flour has been the key innovation. No one else has the gluten to hang. People import Americanized flour from Italy with Italian names and such but you can get better in the US. The lower gluten flours from Italy are good for the style they make over there...margherita (the Italianized version of pizza--very thin, high temp).
Even Canadians I know will take home an American pizza because of the ridiculous amount of cheese we put on pizza compared to Canada.
Did some of the peoples involved in the parallel construction have their bloodlines wiped off the whiteboard of humanity? Or did they just get sick of eating it?
I think enough people, early enough, tried every combination of tasty things on bread. Oil and vinegar with bread were probably found thousands of years ago.
Tomato and corn don't arrive in the Old World until the early 16th c. Cheese goes back to 7th mill. BCE but was too expensive for most people.
I think we (humans) have been putting different things on bread for as long as we’ve had bread, like GP said.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Etymological_Dictionary_of...
But i haven't been able to find out if we know whether it was sweet or savoury, or anything else about it.