Pizza porteña

The porteña pizza is the pizza of Buenos Aires, created by Italian immigrants who arrived in the city between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The most-cited starting point is the La Boca neighborhood, near the port, where many Genoese bakers lived. There the pizza arrived as a tradition and was transformed with local ingredients and the tastes of the city's residents.

The most typical style is pizza al molde: tall, fluffy dough baked in a pan, topped with a generous layer of mozzarella, which in Buenos Aires is written muzzarella and ordered as muzza. There is also media masa, with medium thickness, and a la piedra, with thin crust. Porteña pizza is meant to be shared or eaten quickly, in portions, often standing at the marble counters of old pizzerias.

The fugazzeta is the city's best-known creation. It comes from the Genoese fugassa, a bread with onion: in Buenos Aires it gained a lot of cheese, filling the dough, and onion on top. The most widespread tradition attributes the invention to the Banchero family, of Ligurian origin, in La Boca, and tells that Juan Banchero split an onion pizza in half and put cheese inside so it wouldn't be dry. The family's pizzeria was declared a Site of Cultural Interest by the city government in 2002.

The fainá, a thin batter of chickpea flour baked in the oven, is the classic companion to porteña pizza, also of Ligurian heritage. Some eat it on the side, some put it on top of the pizza slice in a custom called a caballo, and some use it as bread.

The Subsecretariat of Cultural Heritage of the City of Buenos Aires recognized dozens of pizzerias of patrimonial value and treated pizza as part of the residents' identity. Some establishments opened in the 1920s and 1930s still operate with ovens and dining rooms from that era.