​The pizza toppings you'll hate to try until you try them. (This is way beyond eggs, pineapple or spam...)

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.

Knowing that mango pizza had already been done by Serhan Ayhan (whom we interviewed for this lofty blog), I shared an image of his mango pizza, topped with “mozzarella, feta, and scallion, finished with pineapple habanero hot sauce and homemade shichimi.”
 
Notice, there’s no tomato sauce. And the mango is alongside other ingredients you could very easily see appearing in a salad with mango.

Serhan's mango pizza (photo credit Serhan Ayhan)

It’s a pizza that I’ve never tried, but I want to. And reading about it, I feel like the rest of the toppings honor the mango.
 
That didn’t matter. The resulting ire and disappointment by my online friend (who’s actually a very nice guy and was likely being sardonic) got me back to thinking about what topping really doesn’t belong on a pizza.
 
In fact, I’ve asked a question to several of the pros I’ve interviewed: “Pineapple on pizza, yes or no?” And they’ve all answered yes—with a qualifier: they don’t see pineapple on a pizza with tomato and mozzarella.
 
They’re more interested in pairing pineapple—GOOD pineapple, fresh pineapple—with tropical or Asian flavors. That’s a very cheffy thing to say.
 
And yesterday, when I was writing a piece about the fried grasshoppers, I did say the following:
 
“Know what? They don't taste like chicken. More like fried shrimp shells.
 
“A fried grasshopper seems mainly to be a crunchy delivery system for salt and hot sauce. Not sure I'd try them on a pizza. (Of course, the second you say that, you start thinking about how it might work. And I think I'd start with a pizza blanca, and probably a béchamel sauce.)”
 
And there it was: the second I put ink to the idea that something doesn’t belong on a pizza, there’s an internal polarity response.
 
It becomes a challenge to figure out a way to make it work.
 
This is how I’ve ended up with a shrimp & chicken gumbo pizza; a shrimp & andouille etouffee pizza (which made the Fabulous Honey Parker say, “I’ve wasted my life.”); and a grilled spam, serrano chili & pineapple pizza (really, the pineapple was unnecessary, it was just a challenge).
 
I’ve also made plenty of hog jowl pizza. The number of vocal naysayers on that one is epic—yet if you ask those same naysayers if a guanciale pizza is OK, they assure you it’s just fine.
 
Never mind that the word “guanciale” is Italian for “jowl.” Ah, the bliss of romance languages and ignorance.
 
So here’s a pizza topping challenge for you: What topping would you NEVER put on a pizza? And then, with that topping in mind, how might you make actually it work?
 
The pizza is a blank canvas. It need not have tomato sauce or mozzarella or even cheese of any kind. (I’ve seen plenty of tuna poke pizza, but never with cheese. Thankfully.)
 
Send me your answer. Feel free to make me laugh. If I receive at least one interesting reply, I’ll write another one of these screeds about it (or them). I might even find a permanent home on the Free The Pizza website where your answer will reside and you can be internet famous among your friends and family.
 
In the spirit of my fried-grasshopper pizza (which is purely mythological at the moment), what topping would you never put on a pizza—and then how would you then make that topping work? Send your answer by clicking here. 
 
P.S. Grasshopper pizza is actually a thing. Sorry. 
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Need a place to put those unusual pizza toppings? Maybe you need a copy of Free The Pizza. Really, it’s A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. It’s a manual that takes you from zero to pizza with a few laughs along the way. Also, if you buy a hard copy, I'll send you an autographed book plate. If you buy the Kindle edition, know that there are printable cheat sheets on this website so you can take them into the kitchen and spill red sauce all over them.