We’ve all done it, getting the munchies and scarfing down days old pizza. Was that the point, all along? Thin slice everything, bake the water out and it keeps like jerky or pemmican.
Was that a thing?
Try keeping a piece of pizza without refrigeration. It won’t last like jerky does.
Pizza started as a poor people’s food in naples as a way to add flavour to bread, it was usually baked and served immediately so nope, not a method of preservation.
Damn, now I’m hungry. BRB, going to get pizza…
never seen moldy bread?
Biscuits can keep much longer than bread, if preserved correctly (and preserving them correctly isn’t that difficult), but pizza nope.
There are many types of biscuits, many of which are as moist as bread, and will get moldy just as fast. If you want to avoid mold, get the super-dry hardtack.
I would also point out that compared to most other questions posed here, this is among the easiest to answer experimentally in your own home. I’ve had day-old pizza, and it’s not bad. But that’s not how we define “food preservation”. I invite the OP to leave a slice out for a few weeks or months, and keep us posted on your observations.
My guess is that cheese might get inedible even before the bread does.
How long does pizza last at your house? Doesn’t at mine.
The ingredients that make up a pizza pie would last longer than the pie itself …
“Authentic” pasta is made from hard wheat. This means that it takes ~15 minutes boiling to cook, instead of ~7 minutes with soft wheat, the kind used for cakes and english white bread.
As I understand it, the advantage of hard wheat pasta is that hard wheat, and hard wheat pasta, lasts much better in stoarage than soft wheat does. This was an important civilisation advance for the roman empire.
… pasta didn’t exist in the Roman empire, AFAIK.
Exactly true.
Flour keeps fairly well, unmilled grain even better
Tomatoes can be dried
Ham and salami are methods of preserving meat
Cheese is a method of preserving milk (mozarella doesn’t have a very long shelf life, but that’s not the only cheese that can be put on pizza)
Herbs can be dried
I think it probably would be possible to make something resembling pizza, then bake it to the point of dessication and it would keep for weeks or maybe months - but it would be like ‘pizza crackers’.
I swear it was here on the Straight Dope that a poster told us the story of nailing a pizza to their dorm room wall during their freshman year of college, and it basically looking the same four years later when they graduated.
Out in the open if it dries out fast enough it should be fine. Same like that McDonald’s burger that made the rounds a few years back.
Cooking is a means of food preparation. I’m sure only a few of us older dopers recall the days before refrigeration and understand this concept. While pizza dough existed during Roman times (it’s just bread) tomatoes didn’t. Those few of you who have been to Rhode Island may be familiar with the Party Pizza or Pizza Strips, which is nothing but pizza dough with tomato sauce on it, no cheese or other toppings. After cooking this hideous mockery of true pizza requires no refrigeration. In general tomatoes are acidic and with sufficiently reduced moisture will last quite a while without refrigeration. But tomatoes were found in the new world, the Romans more likely had some kind of baked bread coated or saturated in olive oil, dry and oil saturated it would not have spoiled quickly. Dry cheese also lasts a long time unrefrigerated, and even wet cheeses with active cultures last a long time as do other cultured products such as many pizza toppings because the active bacteria prevent the undesirable sort from growing.
So in conclusion, pizza is a food dish, not a method, and the answer to the OP’s question is that pizza will last a long time unrefrigerated when made for such a purpose, but neither is it highly cured and dried to maximize it’s useful life in the manner of other products like jerky or pemmican.
It’s literally being mummified. Ramses Pizza anyone?
how’d that work with concern toward bugs ? I live in the desert if I tried that the weevils would be colossal … I mean they haven’t been bad in the past few years but sometimes I have to put oatmeal in the fridge other wise I get the weevils full grown and flying after mere days and that’s not the flavored instant oatmeal …
Depends where you are in the world, I guess. Norse flatbreads were stored by just hanging them in the rafters.
I would say that sausage lasts quite a while, and is a sort of preserved food. Cheese and bread last reasonably long, although they do succumb to mold. But pizza as such, not so much.
Soft cheeses, probably, but hard cheese, nope - if it dries out it can still be grated, and even if it starts to grow fluffy mould, you can just cut that away and the rest will be OK - maybe not all that palatable, but not dangerous, especially if cooked. And what, after all, is blue cheese but cultivatedly mouldy?
Bread, on the other hand, will go irretrievably and probably dangerously mouldy in a matter of days.
Nitpick, but it’s the drying and salting that preserves those. Uncured ham goes bad just like any other fresh pork cut.