 Are you at all creative and experimental in the kitchen? If so, it doesn’t take long for you to start thinking about what interesting new pizzas you want to create. There’s a game to play here. I’m not sure you’ll want to play along. There is danger ahead. Have you ever considered a pizza with roast pork, or gravied ground beef, or shrimp, or fresh corn, or lobster or oysters? Do those possibilities make you wonder what the hell is wrong with me? Would you believe they’re not my ideas? (Well, not most of them.) Would understanding where these pizza ideas come from lead you to a “crazy-idea pizza” of your own that represents your own stomping grounds? You might be surprised.
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 “The potatoes are so, so creamy!” Not the first thing you expect to hear about a pizza? Stick with me, and you’ll hear all kinds of things about pizza you didn’t expect. And the first thing is: you can feel good about putting clam chowder on a homemade pizza. Really. Are you one of those people who’s glancing at me sideways now? I recommend letting the scales fall from your eyes along with the clam shells and any other rigid protective coverings worn by sea creatures in an effort to stave off predation by a threatening beast like, oh, me. As you know, a lot of people out there enjoy living by a credo of “That’s not pizza.” And a simple fact is that yes, clams on pizza is genuinely a thing, both here and abroad. (If you already know this, just bear with me. You might find out about a different pizza you’ll also want to try, though leftover soup will not be involved.)  Thank you all for rising to the challenge of “Pizza Toppings You’ll Hate Until You Try Them.” A couple of your suggestions made me laugh. Nobody elicited a gag reflex—which is both reassuring and appreciated. And the bad-idea pizza toppings were thoughtful and delightful. For my favorite reply, we have a tie. And contrary to my “fried grasshoppers on pizza” suggestion, neither of these pizzas involve insects. Fave #1 is from Paul, a technically-minded gent in Southern California. He lives within easy reach of a legendary pizzeria and brewpub in Solana Beach called Pizza Port. (The place is special. It has a natural-wood/chalkboard-menu/SoCal-hippie-surfer vibe that makes you say, “I don’t care what that pizza tastes like as long as I can eat it in here.”) The pizza topping that Mr. Paul believes doesn’t belong on pizza is…  We’re going to get to the fried grasshoppers on pizza in a minute. (I was eating the fried grasshoppers from a galvanized bucket on the street in Cholula Puebla, Mexico. ¡Hola, food-safety standards!) Earlier this week, I was having an unusual conflict on social media. I’d posted about a delightful mango. A proud Cuban-American warned me away from putting the mango on pizza, as it would be an insult to the mango.  “I put the red bell peppers under the cheese, because when I put the pizza in the oven, the peppers kept rolling off.” That’s a smart thing to do, right? Maybe. It depends on the bell peppers. Are they raw? If so, you’re probably going to end up with a soggy pizza. This is one of those things that any of us can do thinking we’re being smart (been there, done that) and it results in unintended consequences--like a tasty but wet pizza.  I was at the Pizza & Pasta Northeast trade show last weekend in Atlantic City. (I know! You're getting New Jersey jealous, aren't you?)
There was a session on the last day, last session of the day, which always seems like the place for a straggler session of some kind. Somewhere, a show administrator was saying, “What can we put here in the last slot that nobody wants to teach and nobody wants to go see so we keep at least two people out of the bar as long as long as possible?” Nothing could have been further from the reality of that session. Melissa Rickman, a New Jersey transplant to Fort Lupton, Colorado, operates an award-winning restaurant called Wholly Stromboli, an “East Coast eatery.”  Do you know what the world’s most popular topping pizza is? No, you don’t. Because the world is a big, crazy place with no two nation’s pizzas alike. But here in the US, where we think of ourselves as the center of the world, the favorite pizza topping by far is pepperoni.
All the rage right now is the notorious cupping pepperoni. You see it all over social media: ongoing pizza porntography of strangers’ pizzas awash in fleshy red meat cups that have been sizzling in an oven and are brown around the edges and filled with rendered fat to the point where each individual pepporono (I’m pretty sure that’s not a word but it fits with my scant understanding Italian and Latin grammar regarding singular versus plural constructs and I’m going with it) is like a tiny hot tub filled with rendered grease colored red from the ingredients contained within the meaty mass of the cured sausage product. What is going on here? How does one encourage such glorious cupping behavior in our sliced cased meat products?  The Ongoing Modernist Pizza Review, Volume 2, Chapter 10, "Toppings" |
AuthorBlaine Parker is the award-winning author of the bestselling, unusual and amusing how-to pizza book, Free The Pizza. Also known as The Pizza Geek and "Hey, Pizza Man!", Blaine is fanatical about the idea that true, pro-quality pizza can be made at home. His home. Your home. Anyone's home. After 20 years of honing his craft and making pizza in standard consumer ovens across the nation, he's sharing what he's learned with home cooks like you. Are you ready to pizza? Archives
July 2025
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