The Inglorious Glory of Soup On Pizza, Part II: The Clam Chowder Pizza from Hell!

As promised in last week’s episode about the glories of soup on pizza, I’m bringing you a pizza that is a product of one of the nation’s leading food-fight Donnybrooks.
 
We’re talking a hyperventilating madness of misbegotten rage—specifically about soup.  
 
Yes, soup.
 
And not even soup on pizza, which will surely induce apoplexy.
 
This bare-knuckle battle royal is over chowder (red versus white) and is about as gloriously inglorious as food fights get.
 
Why are we even discussing this in Free The Pizza? After all, you’re here because you enjoy making pizza in your home oven.

This is happening because a week ago Wednesday--as with every February 25 since its sacred designation by parties unknown--the day was host to a hallowed celebration of soupy reverence.
 
 
Last Wednesday was officially National Clam Chowder Day.
 
And since you know how absurd and tenuous we are here about pizza connections through history, you’ll be unsurprised to know there’s a cockamamie connection between chowder and the pizza we all know and love.
 
It’s all representative of the crazy, fantastic melting pot of food cultures in these greatest of United States.
 
And none of this is to mention that, whether Red or White, clam chowder goes great with pizza, atop pizza, or alongside the world‘s best sandwich made with a home-baked bread born of leftover dough for pizza. (It’s called “panuozzo,” and it makes a fantastic BLT.)
 
And remember, we do these things so you don’t have to. Instead, you can just watch my "progress," shake your head, and go make a pizza the correct, approved and accepted way: by calling Domino’s.
 
Now, for just a moment, let’s talk about that chowder…
 
 
If you grew up in New England as I did, you understand the challenge of chowder chauvinism.
 
The typical Yankee curmudgeon (as I often pretend to be because it’s easy and fun to apply such comedic crankiness) is known for a hardcore hatred of the tomato whenever it gets too close to the clams.
 
And Yankees love their clams.
 
The New England clam bake is an institution unrivaled in feasting complexity.
 
Dig a pit, heat a bunch of rocks, throw in the shellfish, and cover it all with wet seaweed.

Iconic! Delicious! Yankee ingenuity at its finest!
 
 
Who in the world could possibly come up with something like that anywhere else in the world?
 
New Zealand? Portugal? Spain? Poland? Peru? All over Coastal North America as practiced by Native Americans for 4,000 years?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. All of the above! So what?
 
Despite today’s prohibitive prices on the namesake bivalve of clambake fame, it’s fun to note that early colonists in America declared clams “Revolting!”

They served clams not at backyard parties but fed them to their pigs.
 
But I digress.
 
Cranky Yankees love their clam chowder. And they’re very vocal about the rule of white chowder: It’s a stew of clams in a milk-infused broth. There are typically onions, celery, bacon and potatoes.
 
 
Cranky Yankees also love to get up in arms over red chowder.
 
Instead of dairy, there’s tomato involved. 
 
Yankees lose their cockles and mussels over tomato-based chowders. Violence can ensue.

This despite a very clear history of red chowders born in New England.

The most notable of New England red chowders is the Portuguese-style that hails from Rhode Island.
 
 
And here’s where your historical Pizza Link comes in.
 
Strap in and hang on.
 
That most sinister of red chowders is that which is known as Manhattan Clam Chowder.
 
Manhattan clam chowder was indeed born in NYC.
 
It is also believed to have been evolved by those fun-loving originators of our most treasured of food stuffs…
 
 
Pizza!
 
That’s right. Neapolitans stormed ashore in the US in the late 1800s armed with recipes for not only pizza, but for something called zuppa de vongol.
 
Neapolitan immigrants served “Soup with Clams” in their New York fish houses, and a craze to wrankle the Yankee was born.
 
And that’s just the Manhattan edition.


Let’s not forget the other Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Irish, and the English, all up the coast from Manhattan making chowders of their own cultural device.
 
Interestingly, the late, great Chef Jasper White--whose book 50 chowders (affiliate link alert!) is one of the most well-worn in my vast library of cooking books--subscribes to the opinion that red chowder versus white might be the result of a long-dismissed baseball hatred between the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Yes, it could be connected to Boston’s trade of Babe Ruth to New York.
 
(Chowder is not recognized as a part of Babe Ruth’s famous Wheelbarrows Of Beef diet, so no reference is available regarding the Babe’s preference for either tomatoes or milk in his chowder. And since The Babe was born in Baltimore, if he had any seafood soup preference, one might speculate his alliance was to Maryland Crab Soup which is made with [GASP!] tomatoes. He was by his own admission, after all, a delinquent youth.)

ABOVE: A bowl of "clear" Rhode Island-style clam chowder. Baby clams and bacon galore!

​
It’s also important to note that not all New England chowders are either white or red.
 
My personal preference is for the so-called “clear“ chowder as a represented by Rhode Island’s namesake soup.
 
And my personal favorite red chowder is not even called chowder, but cioppino: the feasty seafood soup of feisty San Francisco Italians. It’s loaded with crab, clams, shrimp, scallops, squid, mussels, and fish, all swimming in a tomato and wine broth.
 
Crusty sourdough bread along side, please!
 
 
And it’s not like chowder is by definition a bowl of milk with seafood swimming in it.
 
There’s an entire range of “farmhouse” chowders.
 
Let’s let some cranky Yankees lose their minds over Shaker Fresh Cranberry Bean Chowder before they even learn there isn’t even any cream in it.
 
Egg Chowder with bacon and potatoes? Imagine how many people can lose their minds over desecrating the holiness of their bacon and potato soup with hardboiled eggs.
 
Nantucket Veal Chowder? Doesn’t get much more New England than Nantucket.  
 
Turkey Chowder With Sage? I know what I’m making with next Thanksgiving’s leftovers.
 
Pheasant And Cabbage Chowder has nary a dairy product in sight—but oh, there is plenty of cabbage, caraway seeds and cloves.
 
Holy Mother Of Pearl! Is nothing sacred?!
 
Let's face it:  National Clam Chowder Day is a de facto celebration of a simple truth: Nothing can divide a nation with as much spectacular fisticuffs as questioning whether a chowder should be colored red or white.
 
 
Somebody please throw a pineapple into that soup so we can at least have a common enemy.
 
Not that I’m anti-pineapple on pizza. I’m more agnostic. I’m still waiting for the pizza that makes pineapple an imperative. Right now, I feel that I’m a man without a country stuck with a pizza without a pineapple.
 
Anyway, for National Clam Chowder Day—which celebrates all colors of clam chowder—I decided to tweak the snot-nosed pretense of dairy dogmatism and make [GASP!] Manhattan Clam Chowder!

ABOVE: The offending Manhattan Clam Chowder style prepared for this story. The photo is purposely garish to incite as much ire as possible. (Remember: At Free The Pizza, we don't hide the ugly side, we parade it!)


And since there was plenty of leftover devil chowder, it found its way onto a pizza in short order.
 
I did this because I enjoy two of my own creations: The Rhode Island Clam Chowder Pizza, and the Deconstructed Clam Chowder Pizza.
 
The former is made with leftover clear clam chowder. The latter is made with clam chowder components before they ever get into the soup together, so it's more of a clam chowder homage. 
 
 
All of these chowder pizzas were born of experimentation, which I heartily encourage.
 
Along with the pizzas I mentioned last week—gumbo and étouffée—these soup pizzas are born of the strain and thicken method described last week.
 
You strain the solids out of the soup, then thicken the remaining “soup juice” to a saucy consistency.
 
Assemble the pizza as you see fit, and revel in the results.
 
Or don’t.
 
I like to claim far more successes than failures in my pizza questing.
 
But I’m sorry to say this...

ABOVE: The Manhattan Clam Chowder pizza baked on the deck. The crust was good. 


The red chowder pizza is not a winner.
 
I made the red chowder pizza twice—once as a pan pizza (below), and once as a traditional on-the-deck pizza (above).
 
Neither one of them held their own.

The chowder by itself was enjoyable.

Both times, however, the pizza was insipid.

​ABOVE: The Manhattan Clam Chowder pizza baked in a pan. Yes, the crust was good. 


​A far better red pizza is one I threw together last summer on Cape Cod.

The Cape Cod Clam & Bacon Pie was a typical red sauce and cheese pizza.

Using fresh clams and bacon as the topping put it in a category we refer to as the Eatable Repeatables.

ABOVE: The Cape Cod Clam & Bacon Pie. I have heart palpitations just thinking about it.


The white and clear chowder pizzas are also Eatable Repeatables.
 
The red chowder pizza, sorry to say, is just not worth the effort.

That said, you’re welcome to try and prove me wrong. I welcome it. Tell me about your success here. (Or feel free to commiserate about your failure. I’m here for ya.)
 
But while I was venturing into the soups last week, I did something spontaneous that paid off really well.
 
And remember: this is not self-aggrandizement. It’s just my accounting of trials and errors so you may perhaps glean answers to questions you have not been asking and probably never would.

ABOVE: One of many clam Rhode Island chowder pizzas we've made around these parts. The technical word for this pizza is "yummy." (And check out those micro-blisters!)


In my local supermarket, I was walking past the soups—and a product hailed me from the soup shelf.
 
It was a high-quality brand of mushroom bisque in a jar. I thought, Hey! This could be really good.
 
Yes, that soup cost about three times the price of Campbell’s after you account for the fact that Campbell’s is condensed and you add a can of water to make 21 ounces of soup against the 16 ounces contained in the jar I was looking at.
 
And I’m someone who buys almost nothing in a can that isn’t an ingredient. I don’t think I’ve eaten a canned soup or stew since I was in college—unless I was using it as an ingredient in a spate of lazy cooking. (See also: Mom's Pork Chops in Campbell’s Golden Mushroom gravy.)
 
I looked at the label of this pricey mushroom soup and the main ingredient was (get this!) portabella mushrooms.
 

ABOVE: A mushroom soup and sausage pizza made with mushroom bisque from a jar.
 

The resulting mushroom bisque pizza with mozzarella, Romano and Italian sausage is a winner—and you can make it yourself!
 
I also guarantee, you can find someone who will tell you that it isn’t a pizza.
 
My wife is discriminating in her judgments of my hare-brained pizza projects. (She won’t even taste my Wild Hare Pizza.) But has been going after the leftover Mushroom Bisque Pizza prototype and even eating slices cold from the refrigerator.
 
If you want to make something like this yourself, it’s so simple you don’t even need a recipe.
 
As with any pizza, restraint is your friend. Less is more.
 
Stretch your dough and sauce it with the mushroom bisque.
 
Spread a scant amount of mozzarella and Romano or Parmesan.
 
Add some nuggets of Italian sausage.
 
Bake and enjoy!
 
 
And thank you for not contributing to our nation’s despicable color wars over chowder.
 
There are so many other battles to be fought—especially for the constitutional right of chowders of all colors and proteins to coexist.
 
New England is where the United States began. It’s unflattering that so many of my fellow Yankees can’t discern the value of all chowders.
 
In fact, they’re so ignorant of chowder history they don’t even know where the word comes from.
 
 
Indeed, “chowder” may be derived from the French name of the heavy iron pot in which chowders were originally cooked: chaudière.
 
And once you get the French involved, you know what’s going to happen.
 
Snails and frogs on the table.
 
In the chowder?
 
On a pizza?
 
That’s a question with a story for another day.
 
But I know where you can find recipes for soup made with either. (Yes. Snail soup and frog soup. And the soups always come back around to the pizza…)

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