Types of pizza

Starting here is a discussion of Flammekueche which are pizzas by any other name.

The discussion continues down to about post #130.

English muffin pizza. I haven’t had one in over 40 years but I remember them as being a pretty good go to when I was a kid with no way to get real pizza.

I’ll see your cafeteria pizza and raise you the MRE pizza. Natick worked on if for years and is proud of it but…

We’ve been told these new pizzas are supposed to taste like pizza left over from the night before, so we decided to do a blind taste test with three frozen pizzas available at the grocery store.

To be clear, this was an extremely unscientific test. We just wanted to see how the MRE pizza compared to brands that you can find in the freezer aisle. For our test, we settled on personal-sized pizzas made by Celeste, Totino’s and Screamin’ Sicilian Pizza Co.

The MRE pizza can be heated in the MRE Flameless Ration Heater, but officials from the Combat Feeding Directorate said the idea is for troops to eat it straight out of the package.

We didn’t have an MRE heater, so I tried it unheated and it definitely tasted better without heating it in the microwave.

I live in Italy and I second this.

If I think the pizza is going to be good, I will always go for Margherita or perhaps buffalina, a Margherita with buffalo mozzarella.

I think the list of common pizza styles in Italy are:
Neapolitan (high, fluffy crust)
Regular pizza (thinner base)
Pizza al taglio (big square sheets of pizza that you buy by the slice as street food or for parties)
Home-made (though depending on the dough, people are often quick to say it’s focaccia not pizza)
Calzone (folded)
Calzone fritto (Deep-fried calzone. Yes, that’s a thing. Delicious, though don’t be on a diet)

A lot of things can be on it, though Italians do freak out at the very mention of pineapple and the some purists will only acknowledge Margherita and Marinara (which in Italy is tomato sauce, garlic and oregano - no cheese) and a famous pizzeria in Naples sells only those two options.

This sounds not unlike what I’ve seen, in various mom-and-pop fast food restaurants here in the Chicago area, as a “pizza puff.”

The MRE pizza has been the Holy Grail of MREs. Soldiers have asked for it for decades, but previous attempts have failed miserably.

BTW, one of the reasons it’s best not to heat the pizza is because the formulation of the mozzarella is such that it will not melt at all. It’ll brown and burn before it melts. A side effect of making it shelf-stable.

Here is ‘YouTube King of the MRE Taste Testers’ Steve1989’s take on MRE pizza:

Let’s get that out onto a tray.

Nice.

We just call that “pizza” here in Chicago.

Pequod’s is a bit thicker crust wise than standard deep dish. As far as I know, Burt (RIP) himself calls it pan pizza (look at the menu), so I go with him. But they’re all kind of related. I think of Pequods kind of like Detroit style in a round pan. It’s all good.

I had deep-fried pizza in Edinburgh once, but it was too salty for my taste.

This is probably a joke to offend both sushi and pizza lovers:

What about the middle eastern equivalent Mana’eesh or Manakeesh? They were quite the craze at lunchtime at work for a while. A pile of salty $2 oregano ones preferably.

Dayton style pizza! With a thin crispy crust and cut into tiny squares.

Found at Marion’s Piazza, (Vic) Cassano’s Pizza King, Ron’s, and Joe’s. Columbus-based Donatos is also supposed to be Dayton-style, founded by an expatriate Daytonian.

https://pizzatoday.com/conversation-roger-glass-marions-piazza/

The square-cut pizza of Dayton can be characterized by a few features: cracker thin – typically salty crust that’s sometimes dusted with cornmeal, very light sauce, and whopping, edge-to-edge toppings. Most importantly, of course is that the pizza is cut into small, easy-to-eat squares. If you look at a Dayton style pepperoni pizza, for example, you really can’t tell where the pepperoni ends and the crust begins. And, one Dayton-style chain, Marion’s has a distinctive sausage with fennel seed that they crumble onto the pizza.

And a related style cut into thin strips instead of squares, with teeny tiny toppings, found at Jerry’s in Chillicothe.

The “tavern cut” (squares) and the “party cut” (strips) have been mentioned several times in this thread. Seems a lot of localities have their own version with a local name.

In Nebraska ‘party cut’ is squares. Don’t be messing with our pizza superiority!

Another one I enjoy from time to time (when I’m in the area) is Old Forge style pizza. Old Forge, Pennsylvania, bills itself as the “Pizza Capital of the World.”

It’s basically a Sicilian-style pizza with a more oniony sauce: it’s cooked in sheetpans and cut into squares. The pans are generously brushed with olive oil, giving it a crisp crust. That said, my favorite pizza in that area is Victory Pig in Wyoming, Pennsylvania. I don’t know if it’s quite “Old Forge Style” or not – to my eyes it seems the same, and it’s in the same area, but they use a lot of peanut oil in their pans for an extra crispy crunch. Plus they have “pagachi pizza” which is a white pizza with mashed potatoes that I swear tastes like potato pierogi. Pagach/pagash, which are also called “pierogi pizza,” are found in coal country Pennsylvania, and were developed by the Slavic immigrants.

Heck, let’s include a link to that, too:

https://www.nepapizzareview.com/2018/02/simple-ways-to-make-pagash-pizza-at-home.html

I liked the chef-boyardee pizza kit, as would smear crisco in the pizza pan. It was onion pizza. The sauce was really good, and the savory, salty cheese

I’ve taken to ordering “bacon and bacon”. If the order taker doesn’t ask for clarification, it’s a toss-up whether I get a combination of Canadian bacon (ham) and crispy (real) bacon - which is good - or just a double quantity of real bacon - which is great, but greasy as hell.

The cut by itself isn’t the entire style.

I remember that, and it was tasty.

If you live near a Casey’s General Store (gas station), do get a piece of their breakfast pizza. It could raise the dead. When I visit family in Illinois, I drive past Casey’s and enumerate all the things that are probably bad about the dish. But resistance is futile. Drooling as I write.

Most unusual pizza I’ve ever had: a veggie pizza in Calcutta, India. Mrs. L version 1.0 and I were visiting her family. Sister in law ordered me one. The crust was similar to what we have, but not as airy. The sauce was sweet, like you’d put on spaghetti. The capsicum (i.e. bell pepper) was pretty sweet. There was a scant bit of cheese on it. And of course…

Chili powder

I’ve posted elsewhere in here that a local place makes a pie with alfredo sauce and grilled chicken, and it’s killer. Mrs. L version 2.0 disagrees, says it just tastes rich, fatty, etc. I say po tay to, she says po tah to?

I’m content to call things “flatbreads” if they don’t fit my definition of pizza. I remember really seriously disliking one pizza in my life—at a place where they put American cheese on a standard pie. My bro and I each took a bite or two, looked at each other, stood, and left the rest.

Yeah, here in Chicago, “party cut” I know as squares, but it’s not necessarily a term super widely used. We’re more likely to just say “cut in squares” if we needed to describe it, but I do know the term and do use it. Similarly, our thin crust is now often referred to as “tavern style” pizza (which comes party cut) but “tavern style” – to me – seems to be a relative newcomer in local pizza nomenclature. Growing up, we just called it “pizza” or “thin crust” if we needed to differentiate it from deep dish or stuffed (which we really didn’t, as growing up I never had anything but thin crust growing up in Chicago, even though our fair city is synonymous with a deep dish pie.) I feel “tavern style” gained some descriptive momentum starting in the 2000s.