Over the last 10-15 years, there has been a movement, particularly in frozen pizza, towards 4-, 5- ,and even 6-cheese pizzas. They now completely dominate the frozen food aisle, and have almost entirely replaced plain 'ol mozzarella pizzas.
I don’t understand this trend one bit. For me, a good cheese pizza has good mozzarella, and a dusting of parmesan along the edge. The other cheeses are superfluous at best, and gross in many cases. Why include cheddar in a pizza?
I’m not trying to say that the fans of multi-cheese pizzas are wrong, I’m just trying to understand the trend. Who prefers a bunch of cheeses over one or two classics, and why? Enlighten me, please.
I don’t have an answer for ones with 4-5 or whatever, but I do enjoy goat cheese on pizza quite a bit. So mozz, parm, and goat is delicious, it’s the tang.
I’ve also found that a bit of Gorgonzola or other blue cheese adds a nice tang. My wife usually puts some on her pizza quatro fromage.
To the OP: why should a couple of extra cheeses be a less legitimate topping than, say, pepperoni? It’s not as if people don’t put crazier crap on their pizzas.
I was a pizza cook for years while putting myself through university. The cheese we used was a mix of mozzarella and edam. It gave the cheese better flavour and consistency than pure mozzarella. We made good pizzas.
Because a pizza with a lot of super-cheap, tasteless cheese plus a tiny bit of three other, more strongly-flavored cheeses is cheaper to make.
Also, vegetarians.
And to be fair, chances are most of the pizza you think just has mozzarella on it probably had a couple other cheeses in there as well; people weren’t advertising it that way because they weren’t hiding anything (aka, what Latimera said).
Mozzarella (the real stuff) doesn’t freeze well and the fake versions are pretty flavorless, so other cheeses add some flavor. The use of alternate cheeses in frozen pizzas started long ago and now it’s common for freshly made pizzas at some restaurants reinforcing the notion.
The office of Dairy Management, part of the USDA spends $140 million/year trying to get more cheese into your belly by teaming with manufacturers to cram more more of it into your food. From the article “Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese a year, nearly triple the 1970 rate.”
As a lover of pizza but a hater of cheese in general (I know, it doesn’t make sense) I’ve definitely noticed what the OP is talking about. I’m not sure what the question is though; most people the world over love cheese, the more of it the better.
I avoid the multi-cheese pizzas but lately even pies with other toppings boast a rainbow of curdled milk products and I have to scrape most of it off before baking it.
I’ve found that, as someone said, a nice gorgonzola adds a nice tang to the flavor. I like to add the sharp taste of aged italian cheeses, like peccorino, but they don’t melt as well or evenly, so mixing them with mozzerella adds to to mouth feel. A nice blend of cheeses makes a nice, complex blend of flavors.
I don’t think that a bigger variety of cheeses on a pizza necessarily equates to a bigger volume of cheese. Pizza places are crazy stingy with their cheese. I highly doubt when you pay an extra $2 for Four Cheese you are going to get 4x the amount of cheese as regular.
