The traditional view of “pizza”, as I’ve always known it to be, has a minimum of crust, sauce, and cheese and is known as simply, “cheese pizza”. Anything less than those 3 fundamental items is something other than pizza such as, “tomato bread”, “bruschetta”, or whatever.
“White pizza” is an abomination. None of that cream sauce or whatever they put on a “white pizza”.
While a stereotypical pizza is crust / tomato sauce / mozzarella, with other toppings as desired. I’m happy to eat other things and call them pizza. Like barbecue chicken pizza (bbq sauce vs tomato). Or that prosciutto/balsamic concoction mentioned upthread. But white pizza is just “I dunno. Some bread would be good. But none of that sauce or flavor bullshit”.
Decades ago, we had a book by Sandra Boynton, called “Chocolate, The Consuming Passion”. In it, there was a brief mention of carob, in that some people considered it equivalent to chocolate, because it was brown. IIRC, the summation was “for those for whom flavor and texture interfere with their enjoyment of chocolate” and “the same can also be said of DIRT”.
White pizza is the carob of pizza eating.
Proper pizza bianca (literally white pizza in Italian) comes in a couple different styles. One has a very thin layer of alfredo. It’s not common but it does exist.
Much more common is a simple brush of olive oil, some thinly sliced meat, finely grated hard cheese (not mozzarella), and maybe some minced garlic and/or arugula. It’s called bianca not necessarily because it’s white but because it isn’t red.
The fig/balsamic/etc pizza I’ve mentioned is a white pizza. No white sauce. But it is a pizza bianca.
The question I have is - what kind of egg? Are we talking a fried egg here? Scrambled? Hard boiled and sliced?
None of those sound good to me, although there are local dishes in Indonesia and Hawai’i that are typically topped with a fried egg (nasi goreng istimewa and loco moco, respectively) so I can sort of imagine putting a fried egg on a pizza. But I wouldn’t want to.
Thanks, not sure how I missed that. I thought I read the whole thread, but obviously not.
I’ve had it a couple times. It’s okay. Kind of a novelty. Not an every pizza sort of thing.
AIUI, the word “pizza” by itself describes the “crust”, the word being a cognate of “pita”. You can have a pizza without cheese or without sauce, but sauce and cheese without bread is nothing.
Yeah, if you’re a sociopath! 
Cheese is a 19th century addition to pizza, and tomatoes couldn’t have been introduced any earlier than 1492, but pizza as a discrete food item dates to at least the 10th century.
Tasting History did an episode recently on the history of Chicago pizza and noted that, in the '40s, it was understood that if you ordered a pizza with sausage or with anchovies, it was served without cheese, and a pizza with cheese didn’t get any other toppings, so cheese as a default ingredient is even more recent than that.
Yeah, my absolute favorite pizza was the Pizza Rosa from Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix back in something like 2007/2008. I believe around the time it was named by a New York Times writer as having the best pizza in America. We waited almost three hours to get in (but it was pleasant, as there was a bar outside and picnic tables, and it was a wonderful November day with weather in the 70s).
The Pizza Rosa is a “white” pizza, consisting of a crust, brushed olive oil, thinly cut red onions, fresh rosemary, chopped Arizona pistachios, and a grating of Parmigiano-Reggiano (no mozzarella or other cheese.) Holy shit on that night was that a foodgasm for me. Just absolute bliss, with the crust being as good as I’ve ever tasted it in a pizza (Neapolitan style) and a heavenly combination of flavors and textures. I’ve had it many times since, but since Chris Bianco stopped cooking for health reasons, it hasn’t been quite the same. Still very good, but not the 11/10 it was that night.
Well, sure, and state-of-the-art medicine once involved leeches and blood-letting. Now, we’re civilized! Stone Age “pizzas” don’t count.
And now, to be serious, there’s not a single pizza variation in this thread that didn’t fall somewhere between intriguing and yummy on my pizza spectrum.
Hmmm, gotta start adding aleppo pepper flakes on my pizza now. We have it in our spice rack.
Personally I love a good neapolitan pizza with San Marzano sauce, fresh mozerella, calabrese sausage, and calbrese spiced honey on it. Burrata is lovely on it too. As is pineapple
Ah - clarity achieved.
I would eat one of those pizzas (and have). Alfredo sauce on pizza, well, most alfredo sauce on pasta is fine, just boring and not terribly flavorful. I want my 'za to have TASTE, dadgummit.
Not related to white pizza per se, but there used to be a restaurant near us that served “pasta pies”. Basically a personal-sized pizza crust - maybe 9 or 10 inches - baked with cheese on top, then they’d dump a thick pile of pasta/sauce on top.
Sharing one of these, my husband and I never managed to finish one in a single sitting. The carb overload would kill a diabetic at 10 paces.
The location near us closed years ago. There used to be one last holdout, about 25 miles west of here, but it appears to be gone as well. Sigh.
Mozzarella cheese goes nicely with feta, provolone or sharp cheddar. It is slightly dull by itself but the cheese is rarely the star of the show.
Best toppings are salty: crisped prosciutto, anchovies, bacon, quality sausage, feta crumbles. I agree this pairs nicely with fruit and pickled peppers.
Good pizza is mainly about the crust.
I have never had breakfast pizza with scrambled egg and breakfast meat. The online copycat recipe I saw gave recipes for two sauces: cheese and sausage gravy. Although I have never had a pizza with sausage gravy instead of sauce, it sounds amazing. I enjoy pesto pizza from time to time if at a very good place, or even a mix of pesto and tomato sauce. White pizza needs an impeccable crust to be good.
As @Cervaise wrote above, sunny side up and it’s delicious. If it’s good enough for the Italians, it’s good enough for me.
It’s only in the past few years that I’ve really figured out how to cook mushrooms properly. I think of the four stages of mushroom cooking as follows:
- Soggy
- Soupy
- Squeaky
- Savory
I used to think that they were cooked when you got to the first stage, but it is only after they release their water, then the water boils off and they squeak, and then they brown, that they achieve their full glory. At that point, they are fabulous in anything. I have never had a pizza at a restaurant with savory mushrooms, they are always soggy or uncooked, but at home, I put them on, and they are better than meat.
My restaurant order, when possible, is spinach, walnut, and feta. it hits the spot. When I make pizza at home, I put on some combination of Kalamata olives, feta, pickled onions, savory mushrooms, walnuts, and herbs.
Prefer Asiago, which is one of my other ingredients.
Eggplant is the other one.
Basically my favorite pizza is veggie, including eggplant, with tomato sauce, asiago cheese and an egg on top with whole-wheat crust.
Egg on top is also common in the Italian-speaking part of Switzreland.
Yeah, sometimes they contain enough water to go through that whole process, but I’ve taken to adding a splash of water to the pan to help them along. Once they stop stewing and resume frying, they’re much more tasty.
It’s widely speculated that pizza came from the Greek word “pitta,” which means “pie”
Try selling me a pie that is nothing but crust and see what happens. 