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02 August 2010
There are certain things that do not belong on pizza. Chicken. Corn. Pineapple.→[More:]
I maybe can see chicken on a pizza. Maybe if it combined with rosemary and asagio or something. But not corn. Not pineapple. And not BBQ sauce.
Canadian bacon and pineapple makes a good pizza, IMO.
(Back in the old days, some of us would gather at a pizza place for pizza and beer for lunch. I started ordering a mini anchovy-jalapeño pizza, in order for it to not get poached. I grew to like them.)
I could see chicken, pineapple, and BBQ sauce on a pizza - the corn is what strikes me as odd. Lettuce is perfectly acceptable on a BLT pizza, but it's only to be put on (with fresh tomato chunks) after the pizza has been baked.
The Westerners seem to like pineapple and ham. LT has pushed me to give it a chance, and I have, and though it isn't disgusting, it's just...not appropriate to pizza, IMO. I'm from NJ, I'm a hard sell.
Fruit is just a no-go. At some point in your life you may encounter rumors of some sort of fruit on pizza, and because the fruit isn't your typical wax-fruit-bowl fruit, but something sort of exotic and "foody" (like figs, let's say) — you may give it a second's consideration. But don't! Fruit is wrong.
(also, whatever that thing is that some people would like to term a "dessert pizza" is in fact a tart. Not a pizza.)
Also? Fish. No fish at all. Tx. And don't try to distract me with anchovies. Anchovies are just condiments with fins.
My brother is pretty strict in his definition of pizza--he says if you don't draw a strict line, then any kind of bread with stuff on it is "pizza."
I'm a little broader in my definition (peaches, prosciutto, goat cheese & rosemary? yum!), but BBQ, baked beans, corn and lettuce are beyond even my limits.
I was gonna say that bleu cheese doesnt' belong on pizza, but then I remembered bleu cheese and caramelized onion pizza, which is delish. So it just doesn't belong when it's part of a "Buffalo Chicken" pizza.
Wuh? I thought you were all such cool and open minded people?! And here you are making PIZZA RULES.
No, no, no. Pizza is merely a blank slate for the brilliant chef. For example.
Among the fantastic pizzas that I have eaten that haunt my dreams . . . in the sense that I dream of eating more of them . . . are pizzas adorned with anchovies, with mussels, and with barbecue chicken. And one of my all time favorites, GASP, too.
The more I think about this, the more I realize that for me pizza is just a cheese delivery device. Most any toppings are welcome to come along for the ride.
If pizza has anything other than tomato sauce, cheese, mushrooms, pepperoni, sausage, peppers, and maybe pineapple on it, then I think of it as something else. It may be good, but I don't think of it as pizza. I live in a narrow world.
So Pizza Night is Sundays, chez gaspode. Sometime in the near future I'm thinking of trying a "fish and chips" pizza, with fish, potatoes, dill and something else that I haven't thought of yet....
mushy peas? (hee!) But really, I'm serious about the pizza. IMO anything can go on a pizza.
You people who are fussy about things that shouldn't be on a pizza would hate this place, then. My favourite is the 'Triple X Special', although the meat lovers is a close second. They seem expensive, but two large pizzas will feed our family with enough left over for lunch the next day.
I am a bit of a purist. No meats except Italian-type meats. You put chicken and/or fish on a pizza and I ain't eatin' it. I'm flexible on cheese - I love feta on pizza as well as traditional cheeses. And white garlic sauce is oh-so-good. I'm picky about veggies - onions and garlic are good, mushrooms and bell/green pepper are tolerable, keep the rest away.
The best pizza in the world is Round Table's Italian Garlic Supreme. OM NOM NOM NOM! No tomatoes tho' - I want my tomatoes either cooked into a sauce or fresh, not half-cooked on a pizza *shudder*.
I was in Japan hanging out with a Japanese friend. Her family ordered a pizza, and because they didn't like cheese, they chose one of the other options Domino's had - kewpie mayonnaise. There was a strange dried crust over the cooked, thick mayonnaise. It was... odd. Thick warm, encrusted kewpie mayonnaise does not belong on pizza.
BBQ, BLT, taco, and buffalo chicken pizzas are abominations. These are not great tastes that taste great together. Keep 'em separated. Pizza should be pizza flavored.
I'm waiting for pizza right now... It will have pesto sauce, chicken, red onions and goat cheese on it. Yum!
Pineapple, ham and bacon onna pizza are delish, imho. Another fruit that is very nice on pizza with pesto and goat cheese is pear. Add walnuts or pecans and you're golden!
Pineapple, onions, garlic, hot pepper and thinly sliced almonds = divine pizza. Pineapple plus ham = meh.
Legend has it that back in the 60s/70s, the Pizza Pizza opposite Toronto's Rochdale College used to serve all kinds of fruit on pizzas. Not just pineapple, but mandarin orange pieces and maraschino cherries.
The ultimate YOU MUST BE BLOODY KIDDING pizza has to be the Halifax specialty: donair pizza. It's like the kebab pizza, but worse. I gave it a valiant try when I was down east, but -- no. Recipes here.
I am willing to admit pretty much anything on pizza (and my go-to is pepperoni, roasted red peppers, and pineapple), but I still can't deal with chicken on pizza unless it is presented as some weird novelty thing. I love Thai Chicken pizza, I used to love Tandoori Chicken pizza when I lived in a place where that existed, but I never considered either of those "pizzas" so much as "indulgences" -- they taste wonderful, but they're so far removed from any Italian ideas of pizza that they're their own category.
I actually started adding pineapple to my pizza when the pizza delivery place ran out of mushrooms; pineapple provides the same texture/consistency/umami that it worked well as a substitute. And I still dream of fig & carmelized onion & gorgonzola pizza from Figs in Boston; Todd English has a similar-ish flatbread at his place in Vegas but it's not quite the same.
Oops, I lied. Looking at the Figs menu, it's figs, gorgonzola, balsmamic jam, and prosciutto. Sigh. I crave very little from Boston, but that's pretty much #1 on the list.
I'm a Pinappleholic myself (Pineapple Salsa? A dream for dipping. Crushed Pineapple on an Ice Cream Sundae? Don't knock it til you've tried it.) so on pizza it's a natural. But not so much the traditional "Hawaiian Pizza" with Ham or Canadian Bacon. I like it with Pepperoni, Onions and Green Peppers (which I just realized is closely related to the Pineapple Salsa recipe. D'oh!).
I have a strange aversion to mushrooms (no MetaPortobello for me) for unknown reasons. (I think I have repressed memories of something involving the dancing mushrooms in "Fantasia".) So that's one traditional pizza topping I avoid. And anchovies: if there's a category of things I don't think belong on pizza it's seafood. I have enjoyed pizza using White Garlic or Barbecue Sauce, but don't think of them as 'real pizza' and neither go well with most 'traditional' pizza toppings. Veggie pizza with white sauce okay, but small pieces of veggies please (so no Artichoke Hearts). And Chicken only works on pizza with non-traditional sauces, IMO (Barbecue Chicken with Onions is good, but again, not 'real pizza').
Where was I? Oh yeah, don't diss my Pineapple Pizza.
Well, you see there? I've actually learned something. I had no idea so many people actually liked pineapple on pizza. I thought it was mostly a joke, a tattered pennant of '50s tiki culture. For fun. Kind of like jello mold salads.
Of course, here's the thing I can never be sure of: maybe it was that way when we still lived in the U.S., but popular perception has changed. Like with PBR, for example. When we lived there, PBR was the polar opposite of a "cool beer."
As an aside, my friend is fond of random-combination pizzas. Recently he discovered pepperoni-jalapeno pizza. It is awesome.
My favorite slippery slope pizza (you know... everyone has a "if you're adding pineapple you might as well add " ingredient) is a whole roasted chicken. Just a pizza pie, no sauce or cheese or anything, with a whole roasted chicken on top of it.
I don't have any doctrine about allowable toppings or what does and doesn't belong in Platonic pizza, but there are a few things I don't WANT on pizza.
The ham-and-pineapple combo is up near the top of that list, as is blue cheese or gorgonzola (not a philosophical thing --- I just can't eat blue-mold cheeses).
Almost everything else you guys mention sounds pretty delicious to me, even if some of them sound a little wacky and non-traditionally-pizza-like. I would push you aside right now for a slice of that kebab pizza. Holy hell, that looks gooooood.
Even the lettuce Janetland mentions --- it depends. A local pizza place offers a fresh-baked cheese-and-sauce pizza topped with a big pile of dressed greens. The heat wilts the greens a bit, so in every mouthful you get chewy cheesy pizza, savory tender cooked greens, and a tangle of crispy fresh salad. Fantastic.
And figs sound AWESOME. As soon as the cold weather hits and I'm willing to crank up the oven to a zillion degrees, I'll be trying out a fig and smoked cheese pizza. Maybe I'll add roasted squash. Take that, haters.
I ordered my first pizza in Polish about a month ago! The place has the amusingly juvenile/appropriate name "Gruby Benek" - Fat Bennie's! The phone call was quite tricky but I got a sympathetic operator and tipped massively and now I think I'm on the "favorite customer" wall, because from hanging up the phone to eating, it's never more than 20 minutes!
Unacceptable pizza flavors/toppings/varieties I am forced to endure in Poland include the aforementioned kebab meat, green olives, pickles, smoked sheep's-milk cheese, and clams. Poland does not do clams well.
A bunch of actual restaurants in town do have brick ovens, though, so you can get cheap, delicious pizza all over - just not delivered. :(
wait, wait, I'm not a hater! I actually chose figs, for example, entirely out of the blue, as being a fruit with one of the most intense "sweet" flavors I've experienced... and sweet seems antithetical to me for pizza, beyond the barest suggestion of sweet. Like, for me, caramelized onions would be the edge of my envelope: sweet, but good if the other items supported it. But you guys are threatening to expand my envelope, because now I kind of want to sample a fig and smoked cheese pizza.
We actually have a pizza place in Athens that makes pizza with Cannabis. It's not psychotropic, of course, but so far it's the best pizza I've had here. Unfortunately, our house is in an area where they don't deliver (they have only two locations, and while we're sort of right in the middle of the two, we're apparently juuuuuuust out of range of their delivery area for each).
By "take that, haters," I obviously meant "enjoy a slice of delicious pizza, haters." When cold weather hits, taz, you are cordially invited over for fig and squash pizza with caramelized onion and smoked cheese.
aaaaaaand...my Machiavellian plot to be invited to partake of delicious pizza globally evolves apace. *rubs hands together in a more or less maniacal way*
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