Here we take a look at some popular, and some less popular, versions of pizza from around the world. As we shall see, your Tuesday night Dominos delivery is just the tip of a very cheesy iceberg…

Neapolitan

Personally, if I went into a restaurant and ordered a Neapolitan pizza, I’d expect it to have a vanilla slice, a strawberry slice and a chocolate slice. I’d be in for a disappointment though – Neapolitan pizza is the prototype for all pizza we eat today, and is cooked to very specific set of instructions. Chocolate is not allowed.

To make an authentic Neapolitan pizza, the dough must be kneaded by hand and stretched out manually, without using a rolling pin. The base must be no more than 0.12″ thick and must be baked for 60-90 seconds at precisely 485°C. If these instructions are not followed exactly, you may not call your pizza Neapolitan. Watching chefs spin pizza dough around their head always looks like a lot of fun, but following these strict rules must suck any joy out of the cooking process – it’s like a pizza recipe written by a team of tax inspectors.

Manakish

Manakish, Lebanese pizzas, are popular around the Middle East and in Australia. The base can be topped with cheese and minced meat (like a normal pizza) or just with a mix of herbs and spices (like an abnormal pizza). After the dough has been flattened, little dents are made for the toppings to sit in, which seems like an extremely good idea. I don’t know why all pizza chefs don’t use this technique – if the toppings were on more securely, maybe they could put the pizzas in the oven without needing that cumbersome shovel.

According to Wikipedia, manakish can be eaten for breakfast or lunch. It doesn’t say it can be eaten for dinner and it doesn’t say why not. Of course, I’d be happy to eat pizza for lunch or breakfast (or both), but sometimes I like it in the evening too. One of the advantages of pizza is that you can eat it at any time, day or night, without people judging you. It’s a shame if manakish isn’t as versatile.

Hawaiian

When you stop to think about it, the Hawaiian’s toppings of ham, cheese and pineapple offer a strange mixture of flavours. Strange and unpleasant. The fruit and cheese combo isn’t to everyone’s taste, but that hasn’t stopped the Hawaiian becoming one of the most popular pizzas around the world (except in Hawaii, where they don’t like it).

Pineapples are grown in Hawaii, but they’re not native and only began being farmed commercially at the end of the 19th century. Likewise, pigs were only introduced to the remote islands by human settlers. It’s difficult to understand why Hawaiian pizza should be topped by these two immigrant ingredients, while Hawaii’s native snails and bats are left off.

Nobody remembers where Hawaiian pizzas came from. The most likely theory is that they were invented in Ontario by pizza maker Sam Panopoulos, back when everything from Hawaii was considered cool (1962). The idea of pineapple on a pizza may still seem exotic today but, next time you’re tucking into a slice, remember that the Hawaiian is not a tropical tradition after all, just a cynical Canadian’s marketing gimmick.

Flammkuchen

Translating as “flame cake”, flammkuchen is popular in Germany and in France (where the dish is called tarte flambée). One major difference between flammkuchen and normal pizzas is that the former does not use a tomato sauce. The other major difference is that it’s usually served square rather than round. While pizza fans may be able to cope without the tomato flavour, I imagine eating something that isn’t circular could be quite confusing for them.

Flammkuchen has a thin bread base and is topped with bacon, onions and fromage frais. It looks delicious (assuming you like bacon, onions and fromage frais). The dish originated by bakers testing the heat in their wood-fired ovens – when the oven was hot enough, the tarte flambée would be cooked in just 1-2 minutes. My oven at home has a little light that goes out when it’s the right temperature, which is probably a more efficient system (although much less tasty).

Chicago-style

Lazy students around the world fill their stomachs (and their arteries) with Chicago Town’s frozen, microwavable pizzas. However, these soggy little snacks bear almost no resemblance to pizzas from the real Chicago, where they have a specific style called deep dish. These chunky pies feature all the normal pizza ingredients surrounded by a crunchy wall of crust – try to imagine a pizza in the shape of a child’s paddling pool, with the base as the inflatable bit and the toppings as the cold, dirty water.

The most surprising thing about Chicago deep dish pizzas is that they put the tomato sauce on top of the cheese. It’s unbelievable – they’ve got it completely the wrong way round. Everyone I’ve ever met knows that the cheese is supposed to be above the sauce, but somehow this important detail has failed to reach Chicago. Someone should really let them know.

Next time Nasa beam a digital message out of the solar system, in addition to information about Earth’s plants and animals, they should include a basic pizza recipe. That way, thousands of years from now, some extraterrestrial beings can decode the message and cook themselves one of our planet’s favourite dinners. There’s no way of knowing what these alien creatures will look like or what sort of culture they may have but, no matter how strange they are, we can be sure of one thing – even they’ll be able to work out that the cheese goes on top of the sauce.

Baobab. Even the name sounds a bit fat. I’m all for hugging trees (both metaphorically and literally) but it’d be a bit of challenge to get your arms around one of these baoblobs. The trees can have diameters of between 7 and 11 metres, with rare examples being even bigger. Before splitting in two in 2009, Africa’s chubbiest tree was the Glencoe Baobab with a belt-busting 47 metre circumference. That’s more than just fat; the tree was so obese it’s a surprise Channel 5 didn’t make a documentary about it.

As baobabs age, their trunk becomes hollow and this space has a variety of uses. In Sudan, for example, the trees are used to store rainwater to help people get through the dry season. In South Africa, they have used a huge baobab to tackle a different kind of drought – by cutting a doorway and building a pub inside. The Sunland Big Baobab is only 10.64 metres across, but (according to the tree’s website), the pub has held a party for 60 people. This may sound like it would be unpleasantly crowded, but it’s nothing compared to Christmas Eve in a Wetherspoons.

Sunland’s Baobab is a pub like any other, complete with draft beer, wine cellar and music system. There’s also a dartboard, which seems a bit risky given that the pub walls are alive. Having said that, the tree is over 1,000 years old and has been on fire several times so it can probably cope with a few stray arrows. The only thing preventing the Big Baobab from being the perfect venue for an evening out is the number of tree-based puns that drinkers must surely endure; “Wood you like another pint?”, “Tree packets of crisps, please”, “Leaf it, Gaz, he’s not worth it.”

Baobabs are sometimes called upside-down trees (because of their appearance), bottle trees (because of their appearance) or dead rat trees (because of their fruit). Despite the unappetising nickname (which, fortunately, refers to how the fruit grows rather than its taste), these nutritious fruits are increasing in popularity. Although looking like little more than a bald coconut, they have more vitamin C than oranges, more calcium than milk and are a good source of antioxidants. They can also help promote good bacteria in your gut which, as I learnt from a yoghurt advert, is something absolutely vital.

Health-conscious people across Europe are adding baobab fruit to their diet. Slightly less health-conscious people across Japan are adding Pepsi Baobab to their diet. The target market for Pepsi Baobab isn’t really clear but, seeing as other Japanese Pepsi varieties include strawberry milk, cucumber and adzuki bean, flavouring one with baobab fruit is a relatively mainstream choice.

It seems surprising that Australia, given the country’s history, would ever find itself short of prison space, yet there are two separate baobabs in Western Australia – one in Derby and one in Wyndham – that have been used for locking up criminals. This sounds slightly inhumane but, rather than being some bizarre, Wicker-Man-esque punishment, the hollow trees were only used as an overnight cell for prisoners being transported to trial.

Fingers crossed I’ll never have to go to prison but, if I am ever (falsely) accused of a violent assault against a work colleague, I hope I’m imprisoned inside a baobab. It might even be fun – instead of socialising with other criminals, I could pretend I was simply living in a tree like Robin Hood and his merry men. It would certainly be more fun than just sitting alone in a normal, concrete cell, with nothing for entertainment but my memories (and an adventure story from the prison library).

Named the Tree of Life, this leafy baby is located on top of a high sandy mound on the Middle Eastern island of Bahrain. The mound is a tell, which a basically a hill that’s formed around an old human settlement. The tell the Tree of Life is sitting on top of was formed around a 500-year-old fortress. But the really impressive thing about the Tree of Life is that it’s survived for around 400 years without any obvious, nearby source of water.

It’s thought that the tree has survived so well for so long because of it’s very deep roots. When I say “deep roots”, I don’t mean that he’s really well integrated with the local community; I mean literal roots. Trees and shrubs of the Prosopis genus, like the Tree of Life, are known to have one of the deepest root systems in the world, meaning he’s probably drinking from a water source many hundreds of feet underground.

You can see just how isolated the Tree of Life is on Google Maps (he’s the little green patch just to left of the marker):

A few years ago, the park manager invited students from local universities to come and study the trees to find out what caused their strange shape. However the mystery remains, although there are a few theories. A psychic once suggested that the forest is situated in an area where huge amounts of positive and negative energies collide, causing the trees to grow in this odd fashion.

Others suggest that the cause must be geological, blaming sandy and unstable soil. The most widely accepted view is that the growing trees were manipulated by strong winds that regularly blow in that area. Of course, there are the old legends too, one of which is about the Prussian prince Barty. While hunting in the forest one day, he heard a wonderful tune. Eventually, he found a beautiful girl sitting in a clearing playing the lyre. The prince proposed to her but she said she would only marry a man of her Christian faith.

The prince agreed to convert but only if she could show him the power of her god. As the beautiful girl started to play her lyre again the birds stopped tweeting and the trees started to dance. The prince immediately took off his bracelet and gave it to the girl as a sign of their betrothal. It was on this spot that the dancing forest grew years later. If you pay the forest a visit make sure you climb through one of the tree loops, and as you do, make a wish!

Of course every tree is important but, as with all things in life, some trees are simply better than others. And, perhaps anticipating that it would become a magnet for superstars of human society, the superstars of the tree world have also gathered in California. Here we take a look at the very best trees in three categories – biggest, tallest, and oldest – all of which have chosen to root themselves in the golden state.

Biggest

Giant by name, giant by nature – the biggest trees on Earth are giant sequoias and the biggest of them all is General Sherman. Found in the (imaginatively-named) Giant Forest area of California’s (imaginatively-named) Sequoia National Park, General Sherman isn’t the tallest tree or the widest; he’s just perfectly proportioned and a bit of a whopper.

General Sherman is named after an American Civil War leader. This doesn’t seem right – General Sherman (the huge tree) is 2,300-2,700 years old but General Sherman (the normal sized man) was only born in 1820, so surely it should’ve been the other way round… It seems rather unfair that trees get named after people all the time, but people are never named after trees (except perhaps Woody Allen).

When General Sherman’s largest branch fell off, and nobody was around to hear it, did it make a sound? Probably – it was absolutely massive. Whereas you or I would be terribly upset to lose our biggest limb, General Sherman didn’t seem bothered by it – tree size is measured by trunk volume so, with an estimated 1,487 m³ of wood, the General remains number one.

Oldest

The world’s longest living tree was, until the recent discovery of an even older specimen, a 4,845-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine called Methuselah. There’s probably a joke to be made here about “the oldest Meth-user(-lah) in California”, but I’m not sure it’d be appropriate. The newly discovered old age pine is yet to be named, but is known to be at least 5,063 years old (and has got the rings to prove it).

There was a tree even older than Methuselah, another Great Basin bristlecone pine named Prometheus, which estimates suggest may have been over 5,000 years old when cut down by mistake in 1964. A graduate student named Donald Rusk Currey was using tree rings to study the climate and, when his drill broke in Prometheus, he chopped down the tree and took it away. These things happen, I suppose, but as accidents go killing the oldest living organism on the planet is a pretty big one. Donald Rusk Currey is rightly viewed as a bit of a wally, but there’s a lesson here for all of us: never give a chainsaw to a man whose middle name is a type of baby biscuit.

Tallest

As with the biggest and the oldest, the world’s tallest trees are also found among the arboreal A-listers of California. Coast redwoods regularly grow to over 100 metres, with the tops only accessible to birds, small mammals and David Attenborough in a special rope harness.

Of all the coast redwoods, the tallest is one named Hyperion. This lanky individual somehow remained hidden until 2006, when it was discovered and measured at a record-breaking 115 metres. Woodpecker damage at the top prevented Hyperion from being even taller but, at just 700-800 years old, the tree is a relative youngster with plenty of growing years ahead of it.

Photo credits: EditorASC, Jim Bahn, Oke, Acroterion and WolfmanSF

The bark is fire-resistant and can be used to make cloth and rope. The leaves (when they grow, that is; the baobab spends most of the year naked!) can be used for medicine and for flavouring food.

The fruit, called monkey bread, can be eaten. Pepsi even released a baobab flavoured drink a few years ago in Japan!

Baobabs are able to store hundreds of litres of water, which can be tapped by boring a hole into the trunk, taking out the wet, soft fibres and ringing the water out. Sometimes, the centre of the tree dies and when that happens, the tree can form a sort of reservoir storing up to 1,000 gallons of water.

The wide trunks, if not storing water, can sometimes be used as shelters. Trees have been housed toilets, store cupboards, and in South Africa, there is even a pub that holds 54 people!

There are various superstitions around the Baobab tree. Africans believe that if you pick the tree’s flower you will be eaten by a lion, but if you drink water that the seeds have been soaked in, you will be kept safe from crocodile attacks.

Photo credits: Gavinevans, Pat Hooper, Bernard Gagnon, Lưu Ly and Olivier Lejade

On Sunday 12th May, London’s Regent Street will be closed to traffic to welcome destinations such as China, Argentina, Trinidad and Tobago and Turkey for an international festival. And we’re sponsoring the event so we’ll be down there too!

Throughout the day, there will be a range of different activities and displays, each giving you a taste of the countries represented, as well as plenty of excuses for a bit of shopping too.

Here are some of the highlights of the day:

• Wine sampling, cooking demonstrations and tango lessons from Argentina
• Folkloric performances, cuisine, fashion display and professional henna drawings from Egypt
• A professional steel pan band and dancing carnival from Trinidad and Tobago
• Turkish coffee shop experience and food sampling with a live music band and dance floor
• Chinese drumming performance with lion dancing and martial arts demonstrations from Chinatown

You can find more information about the World on Regent Street here:
http://www.regentstreetonline.com/Events/The-World-on-Regent-Street.aspx

If you’re on Facebook, you can RSVP here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/552581851431239/

We hope to see you there!

Ferdinand Cheval was born in 1836 and left school at 13 to become a baker’s apprentice. But I’m assuming this didn’t work out for him, as he eventually became a postman in 1869.

As the story goes, Ferdinand tripped over a stone one day and was inspired by the stone’s shape. The next day, he returned to the same spot and started collecting more stones.

Over the next 33 years, he carried on picking up stones each day on his delivery round and carried them home – first in his pockets, then in a basket and finally in a wheelbarrow. I can’t help feeling that, by the time he started lugging a wheelbarrow full of stones around, delivering the post had become something of a secondary concern for Ferdinand…

Each day, Ferdinand carried his stones home and used them to start building his masterpiece. For the first 20 years, he used them to build the outer walls, binding the stones together with lime, mortar and good old cement. I’m assuming these weren’t also picked up on his delivery route…

The palace is a mixture of different styles, with inspiration taken from Christianity and Hinduism. It’s been described as an example of naïve art, which is basically art that has a childlike simplicity to it.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many kids capable of building anything like the Palais Idéal. Then again, none of the kids I know are also postmen…

After finishing the palace, Ferdinand had hoped that, when he died, he would be buried in it. However, as this was illegal in France, he spent eight years building himself a mausoleum in Hauterives cemetery. He died about a year after finishing it.

Photo credits: M.Maselli, Ursus, Otourly, Pabix and Wikilug

May Day is traditionally celebrated on the 1st May and is a celebration of the first day of summer (if someone would like to inform the weather of this, that would be great!). It originates from Pagan tradition and celebrates fertility and hope for the forthcoming months. Or the way I like to see it, another excuse to party and have a few ciders in the evening sun! In some countries, mainly on the American continent, it is known as Labor Day and is used to highlight and celebrate workers’ rights.

Germany

The Germans love a good party and celebrations for May Day start the evening before with a bonfire, plenty of booze and a whole lot of dancing to see in the summer months. In Western Germany, it is traditional for men (except on a leap year when roles reverse) to deliver a maibaum (German for maypole) wrapped in coloured streamers to a lady they wish to declare their love to. Beware though – if you receive a pole wrapped in white streamers, it means you are disliked. I do wonder, though – why go through all the effort to tell someone you dislike them? And does the receiver then whack the giver over the head with it?

Finland

Again, festivities begin on the evening of the 30th April and start with the “crowning” of statues around the main towns in the country. This is usually done by students who wear their student caps from this day until the end of September, when they then get a winter version.

This is then followed by a party where people (usually students; it’s always the students!) eat, drink and dance the night away. May Day (or Vappu, as its known) consists of a mass picnic where people wear their caps and decorate their picnic area with streamers and balloons. They also drink a special lemonade concoction of lemons, brown sugar and yeast called sima, which contains the teeniest amount of alcohol so children can enjoy as well. I’m sure this can be adulterated as well… Vodka mixer, anyone?

Sweden

The Swedish go all-out for this festival, named Walpurgis Night or Valborg. Many different celebrations are held throughout the country. It is celebrated on the last day of April and the main tradition is to light huge bonfires, which are believed to scare off predators, which is important to the Swedes as their livestock are led out to graze on this day. Although, wouldn’t this scare the livestock away? Or maybe even cook it, thus spreading the smell of lamb for miles around? I don’t know. I’m sure the Swedes have it more under control than I would!

Apparently, it’s the university towns that celebrate the hardest, and the day often starts with champagne and strawberries (Swedish students are a little bit flashier than us Brits) followed by barbeques, a few alcoholic tipples and just generally enjoying the day. In Uppsala, an old university town, the students have raft and champagne races, which is quite simply people spraying champagne (or more realistically, sparkling wine) at each other! I find this quite shocking, though… Who’s heard of students willing to waste even a drop of alcohol? It wouldn’t have happened in my uni days!

In the city of Gothenburg, a huge carnival called the Cortege is held at Chalmers University of Technology and around 250,000 people attend each year. Geez, these guys take their beginning of summer festivities seriously!

Romania

Arminden, as May Day is known to the Romanians, is a celebration of the summer and the crops and animals of the land. It is said to be celebrated so that the people of Romania can enjoy good wine in autumn (from the sun soaked grapes, I assume) and to ensure they’re blessed with good health and protection from the elements. Romanians make sure they eat very well on this day, and feast on lamb, mutton cheese washed down with a cool glass of mugwort wine. Sounds like a concoction straight out of Harry Potter!

To promote good luck and prosperity, people hang green branches over doorways and animal shelters and these are left in place until the harvest season. The day before is a good day to be female in Romania, as women aren’t allowed to work inside (as well as outside) the home due to superstitions that if they do, the village will be struck with terrible storms. For Romanian men, this is fine. So hurrah – I’ll just put my feet up, thanks!

So it seems the Europeans have got the right idea about celebrating May Day, and most traditions seem to encourage drinking, partying and setting things on fire! Somehow, our morris dancing just doesn’t seem as exciting after all!

Photo credits: Awaya Legends, JIP, Teemu Mäntynen, eimoberg and USACE Buffalo

Allegations of underground bunkers and runways in swastika formation have lead to theories about Denver International covering everything from the Illuminati to aliens and Nazis. However, it’s the airport’s choice of decoration that has raised most concern. Perhaps in the future we will be told the truth, but for now one central question remains: Denver International Airport – high-level conspiracy or low-level art commissioning mistake? You decide…

Horse of death

Many international airports have a model or sculpture near the main terminal entrance. Heathrow, for example, has a model of a large aeroplane. Likewise, Denver International has a 32-foot blue horse with fiery red eyes. Both are equally sensible statues for an airport to display.

The horse is supposed to be called Mustang, but the sculpture’s bulging veins and demonic eyes have lead to terrified travellers naming him Blucifer. It’s unclear exactly what role a big blue horse plays in the creation of the New World Order, but they’ve put him in a prominent position so it must be something important. Some investigators have suggested that the horse represents the pale horse ridden by Death in the Book of Revelation – an idea that seems silly at first but, in the context of the rest of the airport, turns out to be one of the more plausible Denver theories.

Apocalypse murals

Art can teach us about death. A sensitively produced painting can educate us about the horrors of war and remind us to avoid such painful conflicts in the future. Unpleasant as they may be, there is a place for images of destruction and violence – and that place is on the wall at Denver International Airport.

It’s nice to have some colourful paintings to look at while waiting for a flight, but it’s a bit of a mystery why these pictures of dead children and burning buildings were chosen to entertain holidaymakers. Of course, some believe that it isn’t a mystery at all – they believe that these pictures were painted deliberately to show the sequence of events the Illuminati have planned for us in the near future. This theory assumes that the evil conspirators are simply hiding in plain sight but, even if correct, it seems a bit brazen of them to paint a comic strip detailing the ways in which they’re going to enslave the human race.

Whatever their political objective, there can be no doubt that the murals contain some disturbing images. From burning forests to gas-masked soldiers, the pictures clearly show a world in some kind of turmoil – whether that be in our past, present or future. The final painting shows people and animals gathered together around a magic plant so, whatever horrors might await us, it looks like everything must turn out OK.

Suitcase gargoyles

As all regular fliers know, there is a growing (and increasingly strange) list of items that are banned from your luggage: first scissors, then liquids, now toner cartridges must all be surrendered before boarding a flight. Surely, if these potential weapons are outlawed, it must also be against the rules to transport little flying monsters in your suitcase?

These winged terrors, as found in the baggage claim area of Denver International, are usually described as gargoyles. Technically, they should be called grotesques – they’d only be gargoyles if they had a water spout and were used to direct rainwater off the building. Sorry to be pedantic, but it’s important to get these things right. Still, gargoyle or not, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re pretty frightening and a peculiar choice for a modern airport.

So what do these strange creatures, emerging from suitcases, represent? Most people assume they’re depicting some kind of secret nastiness being transported through the airport, while others suggest that the creatures’ otherworldly appearance is a clue to who might really be running things at the site (it’s the aliens, obviously.) The official explanation for the presence of the gargoyles is that they’re there to protect the luggage and ensure it arrives safely. If true, rather than being reassuring, this seems to show a serious lack of confidence in the airport’s baggage handlers (who I’m sure are all trying their best).

Masonic stone

During the construction of Denver International Airport, a series of buildings were put up, then judged to be in the wrong place and buried underground. According to who you believe, this was either a costly error or the creation of a subterranean military complex. As soon as it was finished the airport was said to be the future headquarters of the New World Order, an accusation that was further fuelled by the placing of a capstone featuring Masonic symbols and, unhelpfully, a tribute to the New World Airport Commission.

Beneath the stone is a time capsule and, naturally, speculation is rife about exactly what sinister objects might have been stored here. The official Denver International website gives a sample of what’s inside, and I’m sure the people of Colorado in 2094 will be tremendously excited when they find a baseball and some 100-year-old casino tokens. The airport website also addresses any conspiracy theories about the New World Order with the words:

Rest assured the story is definitely a myth.

So that’s that all cleared up then.

Photo credits: sirqitous, paulswansen, pschmidt5, Vasenka, katsniffen, pravin.premkumar and AlternativeReality.org