That’s not pizza and I have a diseased brain. How’s your 2026?

You may already know that I am not the guy who hollers, “That’s not pizza!”

Pizza can be rather broadly defined within specific parameters once you subscribe to the belief that pizza is bread with something on it.
 
But yesterday, my favorite flour purveyor ended up in my face with a social post that quakes me to my core. (Sorry. I’m high on over-the-counter drugs. I’m fragile.)
 
I thought, angst loves company so let’s see if anyone from my favorite flock of online friends is swimming in a similar pickle juice on this one. Ready?

ABOVE: The kinda weird photo that King Arthur Baking shared on their Facebook page and makes me fear that all I know is wrong. (If you click on the image, it will carry you away from all this and directly to the confusion I am feeling about this recipe.)

 
The photo looks vaguely like pizza.
 
Red sauce and cheese are involved.
 
But the crust looks wrong.
 
The text of the social post reads, in part:
 
“Warning: This pizza might ruin all future pizzas for you. Not only is it our Recipe of the Year, but we’re also highlighting it as our Bake of the Week: Flaky Puff Crust Pizza!”
 
I’d expect this from an unserious source prone to frivolity.
 
I did not expect it from an authority with the royal stature of King Arthur Baking.
 
 
My heart sank. Puff crust pizza?
 
I knew what was coming: pizza goes croissant. It had to be a laminated pizza dough.
 
If you don’t know, lamination is a process where a dough is rolled out, dotted with butter, folded over itself and rolled again.
 
This process is repeated to create ever more thin, buttery layers of dough. During baking, as with standard pizza, the moisture in the dough boils. But then, the fat in the butter fries that dough into flaky, shattering layers of rich pastry.
 
Yes, pastry.
 
 
Lamination is a technique distinct to pastry.
 
Not bread.
 
Ha! Take that, flour purveyor!
 
But of course, before I began venting my spleen publicly for you to join me in shared indignation, I had to be certain I’m not being an ignorant ass.
 
It took no time to ascertain the truth.
 
Ugh.
 
 
I’m being an ignorant ass.
 
Lamination is a common practice in various breads, including sourdough, apparently. Or so says chef Google.
 
SIDEBAR: I have learned to take chef Google’s tips with a pinch of salty skepticism ever since I caught Professor Google calculating the surface area of a pizza by multiplying pi times the diameter instead of the radius. A world where we have to check the work of our AI overlords is a world that’s doomed to lose the war against the machines. But that’s another rant.
 
In Wikipedia’s article titled (oddly) “Laminated dough,” there’s a list containing several laminated “flatbreads” from around the world.
 
Suddenly, it seems another article is begging to be written: “The Wide World Of Laminated Flatbreads: A Skeptics Delight!”
 
But I digress.
 
 
If pizza is a flatbread with something on it, does lamination invalidate it?
 
Laminated bread seems wrong.
 
That is, until you see images of these ostensibly laminated flatbreads and think, Pizza-ish.
 
What gives? 
 
These are philosophical questions for which I lack the qualifications and the hubris to answer.
 
 
But I fear: this King Arthur creation is perhaps pizza.
 
Of course, also being an inveterate rubbernecker, and seeing a potential social-media pizza battle brewing, my first foray was into the comments.
 
One commenter was begging the flour king by all that is holy to not call it pizza, suggesting it is perhaps “some other delicious thing.”
 
In the proper “Yes, and?” formula of improv comedy, the smiling person behind the King Arthur brand asked, “What would your name for it be?”, followed by a happy emoji.
 
There was no real seriousness and zero venom in this exchange. All in fun.
 
 
Nonetheless, is it pizza?
 
There’s an entire philosophical rabbit hole to be descended here, right after chugging a bottle of mushroom pizza juice labeled “Drink Me.”
 
But which school of philosophy?
 
Epicureanism seems obvious for its emphasis on good food and moderation. But the highly laminated slippery slope here could also send us careening into stoicism, bouncing off of cynicism, and skittering past Buddhism as we sniff at Pythagoreanism and crash into a college-level food ethics class pulling from a buffet of disciplines lorded over by existentialist and Nietzschean world views while everyone gets involved in a food fight around ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, epistemology, and political theory.
 
Mayhem!
 
 
I’m not smart enough for this. All I want is pizza.
 
And those math-y Pythagoreanists a) believe numbers are the root of all reality (including art, music and the universe—which by default includes pizza) and b) are also strict vegetarians.
 
Whither pepperoni?!
 
I’m sorry. I have a diseased brain. The influenza is upon me.
 
There is a belief that the croissant (everyone’s favorite laminated dough delight) straddles a land between bread and pastry.
 
Which leads me to another laminated hybrid of some crazy fame, the cronut.
 
A cross between a donut and a croissant born of confusion in 2013, the cronut was all the rage in NYC for about seven minutes in one of the world’s first viral internet food sensations.
 
 
So maybe this puffy thing isn’t a pizza, but a croizza. Or a pizzant.
 
I give up. I should dose myself with more NyQuil and head back to bed.
 
So before I do that, I lay the challenge at your door: is it pizza?
 
A simple yes or no is fine, but you get bonus points for bringing the nonsense.
 
Send your answer via the contact page. (Or if you received this message from me in an email, just hit reply.)
 
Is it pizza? Yes or no, and optional essay portion for extra credit.
 
If you’d like more intel on the “puff pizza,” visit The King at https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/flaky-puff-crust-pizza-recipe
 
That is not an affiliate link. That’s straight through the door into the realm of the baking authority himself. They pay me nothing.

Oh, and if you care, this is the king's "Recipe Of The Year." I'm not sure of that means this year or last year. Up to you, I guess. 
 
Next week, I hope to be back to a less flu-ish version of myself. Happy New Year!
 
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