Canotto: Pizza with Botox?

Naples and its surroundings are at war. This time, it’s not about the rubbish. Nor is it a battle between rival families. It’s a pizza war. Or rather: a crust dispute. To canotto or not to canotto? Marjan Ippel, editor of the pizza bible Where to eat pizza, investigates.

The latest pizza craze in the birthplace of the baked savoury dough disc is the canotto. The Italian word for inflatable boat. One of those rubber boats with a very thick, air-filled rim.

Cornicione
And that is exactly what the canotto looks like: a thick, airy cornicione (crust) around the pizza. Reason for a split between yes-men such as Pizzeria Da Lioniello and naysayers.

To understand how ‘bad’ the canotto is—or isn’t—you need to know that traditional Neapolitan pride originally has a modest rim. Nothing that looks even remotely like Botoxed lips.

Canotto: a pizza crust like Botoxed lips.

The controversy has even reached Instagram, where supporters proudly post photos of the inflatable crust under the hashtag #canotto. The thick cornicione has not gone unnoticed in New York either. Sullivan Street Bakery, for example, bakes a seriously Botoxed rim.

Pizza guru
Pizza guru Daniel Young, compiler of Where to eat pizza, has this to say: ‘A crust like that can be the result of slowly fermented dough. Then it’s magical: soft and light as a cloud. But the extreme examples seem to survive on steroids.’

When Young asked the famous Neapolitan pizzaiolo Enzo Coccia of Pizzeria La Notizia for his opinion on the crust controversy and published his answer—‘pizza stronzata’ (bullshit pizza)—hell really broke loose in Naples.

Meanwhile, savvy entrepreneurs are cashing in on the war by producing a T-shirt with a clear position on it: ‘Say no to canotto’.

Are you team canotto or no canotto?