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Pizza

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A pizza bagel is a bagel topped with pizza toppings. The simple tomato sauce and cheese pizza bagel is the most common, though a layer of cream cheese sometimes is used as a base under the tomato sauce and cheese. Toppings can vary as widely as pizza toppings can.

A bagel is cut in two. Preferably, the bagel should then be toasted lightly to control absorption of the tomato sauce. Each side is then covered with tomato sauce, cheese, and other toppings. The pizza bagel is then placed through a conveyor toaster or in an oven to melt the cheese and warm the bagel. The dish is usually served open-faced. A commercial product, Bagel Bites, is sold as platters of smaller frozen pizza bagels with a variety of toppings.

The creation of the pizza bagel is often attributed to the demographic composition of the New York metropolitan area. Often Jewish and Italian immigrants settled together in areas such as Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the early 20th century and more commonly today suburban areas such as Long Island and Northern New Jersey.

These immigrants quickly began to sample the culture and cuisines of their new neighbors and began the process of merging the pizza bagel as a token of the Jewish and Italian neighborhoods multicultural nature, with the Italians supplying the pizza elements of the dish on top of the Jewish-made bread, the bagel.

New York city is known today for its unique cuisine, namely in having the best bagels and pizza in the whole of the United States, subsequently the pizza bagel is a notable fixture in the culture of New York.

The term "pizza bagel," inspired by the food, has today began to take on the meaning of an individual who is half ethnically Jewish and half Italian, or a Jew of Italian decent, especially in mixed ethnicity communities on Long Island and South Florida as well as other communities around the country.

[edit] Cultural References

In the Futurama episode 'The Day the Earth Stood Stupid', Earth is referred to "home world of the pizza bagel."^[1]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ [1]

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