Nagasaki style pizza. Back in the early 80s. We did some vacations down there, and occasionally wanted a “western” meal. Baby squid (small) all over the pies. Didn’t even have to ask for it.
A few pizzerias around here have tried to establish “Cleveland-style” as meaning “completely covered with pepperoni with no gaps between”, but it hasn’t caught on.
Far from the worst thing one can do to a pizza.
Hey, that’s how I make my pizzas! I start with a typical supermarket frozen pizza as a base and glom on the toppings.
I think it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. I make french bread pizzas at home, and too many toppings will just slide off, or tip the bread over while it’s baking. Even on a traditional pizza, I don’t overload it with toppings.
I see that pepperoni means something completely different in the USA. In Europe, at least in Italy, where the word comes from, and in Germany, where it is probably one of the most popular pizza toppings, a pepperoni looks like this when fresh:
or like this when pickled:
If those peppers are not very spicy, we’d call the pickled ones pepperocini.
Yes, they are called that as well. The ending -cini means small.
ETA: And they can be spicy, but not necessarily.
I learned that the hard way.
See, to me toppings on a pizzas are like toppings on a hamburger: they can enhance its flavor and texture, but they shouldn’t overwhelm it. A good pizza is good with nothing more than tomato sauce and cheese.
At least, calling it that is an American thing. I think that other nations use the same topping, but call it “pizza salami”.
American pepperoni is also smaller in diameter than American salami, but I imagine that both come in different sizes elsewhere in the world.
Here it’s “Calabrese” Pizza, probably because of a variety of salami called “calabrese salami”
I can assure you that we have pepperoni, as in the sliced meat, here in the UK, both available as a topping in pizza places, and also sold in supermarkets.
Pepperoni is normally placed edge-to-edge before it goes into the oven. But it shrinks due to all the fat melting, so it ends up having large gaps between. To have it covering the pizza after baking, they’d have to put on double, so it overlaps before baking. Which is quite possible; double pepperoni is easily ordered. People mostly just don’t do it.
“Although now people will realize three-per-em space that all this time I’ve been using weird medium mathematical space whitespace characters in my hair space hair space hair space speech dot dot dot…”
Victor Borge would like a word… if he were still with us.
From History of the World, Part I:
But, dot dot dot, you don’t understand!
As would Allan Sherman.
Allan Sherman interrobang‽
Where? The typical pepperoni pizza I’ve seen has maybe three pieces per slice, which isn’t even close to being edge-to-edge. It doesn’t shrink that much.
Godfathers Pizza. That’s how they make them.