On second thought, I don’t think I will try the anchovy pineapple garlic. I was talking with the wife about it last night and my stomach just started tightening-up.
Fresh herbs is a good idea.
One thing people aren’t mentioning is the quality of the sauce. I wonder how many people make their own sauce?
I make my own sauce for puttanesca pizza. Takes about ten minutes.
Pizza sauce is very simple for me. Just 6-in-1 brand canned tomatoes, salt, and a little bit of garlic and maybe a touch or oregano. But just plain crushed tomatoes is fine. Most my favorite pizza places use a very very simple sauce like this.
My favorite is mushrooms, green peppers, and onions. Diced tomatos, sure. Other veggies can be nice as well, but I don’t want it ruined with a bunch of broccoli! (Broccoli is great on its own, esp with hollandaise sauce or just melted cheese. But not on my pizza, thanks!) Oh yeah, artichokes, they’re good.
As much as I love meat, I’m not a fan of meat on pizza. It makes it greasy and indigestible. But if that’s what’s served, count me in; I’ll eat it. Big exception: bacon. Bacon makes anything better. I’ll also accept ham, ideally with pineapple. Least favorite meat on pizza (barring stinky fish) is chicken or turkey. It’s just not right!
No anchovies or green olives, please. Green olives are fantastic, just not on pizza – not usually. No doubt there are recipes where they’d work. I won’t close my mind to the concept. But for the typical American style pizza, no thanks.
I’m a big lover of deep dish or thick crust. I remember my first deep dish, called “Sicilian”, at Thano’s Lamplighter in Ann Arbor MI, in 1975. Wow, yum. I was never a big fan of thin crust.
But then I visited Sicily. In 11 days around the island, we ate a lot of pizza, but never saw any deep dish pizza on a menu. But I learned what thin crust is SUPPOSED to be! Wood-fired brick ovens, crisp, almost flaky crust, delicate, and a real treat. Yum!
That’s also when I became a fan of Pizza Marguerite, which is tomatoes (usually sliced), pesto, and mozzarella. It’s gotta be real fresh cheese, too. With no brick oven, a pizza stone is a suitable compromise.
But I admit that for American style pizza, I prefer provolone or perhaps romano, which doesn’t turn into a rubbery blob. Or anything that doesn’t turn into a rubbery blob. I’m not sure why that happens, but it’s gross. My suspicion is it’s mozz that’s not super fresh.
Spinach & feta pizzas are great too. There are a lot of what I think of as Mediterranean variations to American toppings that are yummy.
Pizza is bread, tomato sauce, cheese, crumbled or sliced tube meat, basil, and garlic. Acceptable additions are onions, olives, and peppers.
It does not come with thin crust or thick crust, there is just crust. Cooked properly, the crust comes out of the oven crusty.
Every one of you, with the sole exception of Ranger Jeff, are misinformed, poorly-nourished, and pitiful. Throwing whatever meat you can catch upon a flat piece of bread and then dragging it through the garden is a practice that proper Americans should leave to those who have no access to processed foods.
Chicken Franchese – chicken with lemon, garlic and cheese. An unholy slice of deliciousness served around here in NJ. Really good sausage with some nice mozzarella and good tomatoes is generally my go-to pizza if the Franchese is not available.
For me, it’s only good on pizza (with chicken and pesto) if you dry-saute it with some olive oil first. It has a firm slightly crisp texture. Wet, soggy, over-steamed broccoli is awful on anything and this is probably where kids get turned off to it, much like brussels sprouts.
I’ve listened to enough purists about pretty much everything to know this is when I should stop listening. The conversation stops being about what tastes good and starts being about traditions.
I think the best you can say is that pizza is basically bread baked with stuff on it. I can be purist about a lot of stuff, but I can’t get too much more fine than that when it comes to pizza. It doesn’t need sauce; it doesn’t need cheese. The only thing it needs is some sort of dough base and something on top. That’s overly broad, but I can’t think of anything much better.
Laugh it up fuzzball. In my vegetarian days I got a perverse craving for McDonald’s hamburgers and started making a meatless cheeseburger pizza of ketchup, mustard, sauteed onion, pickle and cheddar cheese. Swear to Og it tasted just like a McDonald’s burger. To my chagrin, my sister will still occasionally ask me to make one.
It does! I’ve had those ketchup pickle burgers!
My favorites:
Sausage with Green Peppers and/or Onions
Mushrooms (very underrated IMO)
Ham and Bacon
While I like Pepperoni, I’m not a fan of it on pizza as I feel it makes the pizza too greasy.
Taco pizza. I like it with refried beans, ground beef and lettuce & shredded cheese
The refried beans paste makes the base of this pizza so yummy. I want one now.
recipe
After reading these posts, I am really tempted to try making an honest-to-goodness cheeseburger pizza, complete with ketchup, mustard, pickles and possibly lettuce and tomato (all but basic crust, sauce, ground beef, and American cheese added on after baking.)
Nonsense. Pretentious as well as ignorant nonsense, to be precise.
There are two options: Either you narrow the idea of pizza down to the original Verace Pizza Napoletana. Then it is crust, tomatos, mozzarella, olive oil, garlic, basil and/or oregano. No meat, no onions, no pepper.
Or you accept that pizza is a fresh bread baked with any toppings you like.
Personally, I perfer the second option.
(And I like pizza with a) frutti di mare (shrimp, clams, sepia), spinach and garlic, b) ham and pineapple or c) tuna and onions, no corn.) Sliced Turkish sucuk (smallish garlicky beef sausage) in place of salami can be very good, too, especially when combined with olives and feta.
^Don’t forget that pizza marinara, which is crust, tomatoes, garlic, oregano, olive oil, (no cheese even) is also a VPN pizza. Seems to blow people’s minds that pizza doesn’t even need to have cheese.
The only pizza I don’t like is the desert pizzas.
If I want desert then I’ll have a cookie or slice of pie. Don’t hand me a pizza covered in sugar and chocolate.
Yeah, the sand ruins the texture.
Need two s’s :smack:
See I eat so few desserts that I forgot the extra s. 
They’re lighter without it.