Happy 100th Birthday, Pizza!

When a hot pizza hits the table, who can wait for it to cool off?

To a chef, pizza is a holy trinity of ingredients — bread, cheese, and sauce. In the right combination, it's nothing less than a sublime creation.

But let's face facts: most of us don't savor pizza; we inhale it.

Whether it comes from a delivery boy, the corner hangout, or even the frozen food section, the pizza industry claims Americans wolf down some 350 slices per second. That's 100 acres of pizza per day — 3 billion pies per year.

Chef Bobby Flay, a contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning recently took a stroll with his fellow New Yorker, Ed Levine, a food critic and author of "Pizza: A Slice of Heaven: The Ultimate Pizza Guide and Companion" (available at amazon.com), a new guide to buying and baking pizza — a book, he says, that was more than 1,000 slices in-the-making.

(Of course, as they walked, they ate — guess what? — pizza! As Levine says: "It's one of the great walking lunches."

And that's certainly not all he has to say about pizza: "There's no place to hide with pizza… It's a naked food… You can't say, 'Oh, you know, it's all right if the chicken's overcooked; the sauce will compensate.' What are you gonna do with pizza? … It's three ingredients. You can't compensate for bad crust."

It's Levine's mission to make everyone to stop and smell the pizza — to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into a good slice.

Flay: "When I was a kid, the first thing we would be able to point to was the slice we wanted. Describe to me that slice. What's the slice that we want?"

Levine: "Again, in a slice place, you're gonna want — first of all, you don't want the pizza that's been sitting there for 60 days. The test I do, is I rip it. And do you get the whole structure of bread? That's what you want, right?"

Flay: "So you think of it as bread?"

Levine: "Yeah, absolutely. It — it is bread, first and foremost. Now some people say you could never put too much cheese on pizza. I am not one of those people. I believe there should be a proper — there should be discreet areas of sauce and cheese on pizza. Now some people think that's ridiculous. And, you know, the Domino's of the world make a lot of money by: When in doubt, add more. Add another layer of cheese, right? But it's like anything else: it's about balance. And it's about ratios. So you want the right ratio of sauce to cheese to crust. And that's key."

In fact, the original pizzas, as baked in Italy more than 200 years ago, were dressed with little more than a light drizzle of oil or with a few bits of salted fat.

The pizza we eat today is truly an Italian-American phenomenon, which took root exactly 100 years ago. That's when immigrant bread-baker and grocer Gennaro Lombardi received the first license in New York City to run a pizzeria.

Lombardi also lent a hand to his paisans, and his fellow immigrants went on to spread pizza across the city, opening restaurants that still bear their names: John's (278 Bleecker Street) and Patsy's (2287 First Avenue) in Manhattan, Grimaldi's in Brooklyn, and Totonno's in Coney Island, where five generations have upheld family tradition.

Lawrence Cimineri is the great-grandson of Anthony Pero, best known by his nickname, Totonno, a pizzaiolo (or pizza maker) from Naples.

Flay: "So for 81 years, same store, same oven?"

Cimineri: "Same oven, same store, same equipment, even."

Flay: "Same pizza?"

Cimineri: "And pizza."

Flay: "What's the secret to your pizza? Why is it —

Cimineri: "Well, if it's a secret I can't tell you."

Flay: "It is a secret?"

Cimineri: "It's really not. Just fresh ingredients. Really high-quality ingredients in a coal oven."

Cimineri still cooks with one of the few remaining coal-fired pizza ovens in New York. It can reach more than 900 degrees inside — almost twice as hot as a typical pizza oven. Also, the dough doesn't get tossed around like a Frisbee.

Says Cimineri, "It's a fun thing for people to see, I guess. But, you know, my fun is when you eat. That's the key. I don't — I don't put on no show."

As for the customers, they're all-business, too. Says one, "This is the only pizza I eat with a knife and fork." And another: "I just got off the plane at JFK and came straight here."

But as good as the pizza is at Totonno's, it bears little resemblance to most of the pizza made in the USA.

From Domino's delivery to Chicago stand-bys like Gino's East, Americans like to load their pies with cheese, meat — and even more cheese.

Baked in easy-to-maintain gas ovens rather than bulky wood or coal-burners, pizza became popularized by GIs who'd returned from Europe after World War II with a taste for the dish.

And it proved to be the perfect snack for a country that was now permanently on the go. There are now more than 60,000 pizzerias in America — feeding, and employing, thousands more.

Flay himself got his start in a pizzeria. He recalls, "It was sixth grade, and my after-school job consisted of grinding the mozzarella, opening the cans of tomatoes and, of course, delivering the pies."

For him, the pizza from that place "is what pizza is supposed to taste like. And that's the great thing about pizza: Everybody thinks their local place is the best."

Says Levine, "You talk to anyone anywhere in the country, and they'll tell you about a pizzeria that they — the pizzeria that they grew up with… The first pizza that you experience as a child becomes the pizza of your dreams and the pizza by which you judge all other pizza."

Maybe that's why it takes a lot of nerve to come up with something truly original. Flay's friend, Wolfgang Puck, did just that back in the 1980s when he began selling pizzas with goat cheese, smoked salmon and even Peking duck toppings. And a few years ago, another pal of Flay's, Ciro Verdi, created what Flay thinks is the next-best-thing to sliced bread (available at Da Ciro Restaurant, 229 Lexington Ave).

But even with its rich tradition, pizza is also a blank canvas. As Flay says: "From my friend Wolfgang Puck to Ciro, when it comes to pizza, good taste can come from anything under the sun."