Pizza of the Sea: Anchovy Pizza

This is the first in our Pizza of the Sea entries, where we will explore pizzas that make clever gastronomic use of seafood -- and a little about the seafood before it ended up on pizza.














Had my first anchovy pizza last night -- it was pretty incredible. Anchovies, hot chilies and fresh oregano. What a brilliant combination. We got the pizza from Gioia Pizzeria in North Berkeley on Hopkins St. I'm going to be bold and say that Gioia is the best pizza in the bay area. That's right. I said it.

(When it comes to pizza, I'm a purist of the east coast variety. Very thin crust. I am not fooled by any of this over-hyped Little Star thin crust pizza. Cheeseboard is good, I'll definitely admit that. But really, it's a little too California to even be in the running.

And why so much feta, Cheeseboard, why?)

But back to anchovies: Native to the Mediterranean, anchovies are small and greenish in color. Although they have a silver racing stripe on their back, which makes them appear very shiny. You can see them in all their silvery glory at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Anchovy Tank (you can do no wrong Monterey, no wrong at all).

It seems just about everyone in the sea eats the little anchovy, from halibut to sharks. Marine birds eat them too. As a side note- birds typically bore me, even marine ones. But Wikipedia, mentions that some bird called the elegant tern is pretty much dependent on the anchovy for its recent breeding success.

But here's the most interesting thing about anchovies: In September of last year, around 3 tons of baby anchovies beached themselves on a beach in Spain. That's a whole lot of anchovies.

But the crazy thing is that they did all these tests on the anchovies to figure out why the little guys would have just beached themselves- chemicals? toxins? Nothing. So the new working theory is that the anchovies were just trying to escape a hungry dolphin or tuna.

That makes no sense to me. These are fish -- they don't just take a wrong turn and end up out of the water. Why did all three tons of them screw up so badly this time?

I'm not buying this 'hungry dolphin or tuna' theory. In fact, I suspect this is part of some sort of mass global anchovy conspiracy. I don't know who's in this thing or how far it goes, but I'm thinking it could be big.

Huge.