Why pretend this style of pizza is a misbegotten disaster? You know if you were drunk, you’d fall on it face first.

​Please forgive the inflammatory nature of the headline and its oblique connection to making great pizza at home. The pizza in question is closer than you know.
 
Today, I was reading a pizza magazine called (oddly) Pizza Today.
 
The article was about the evolution of traditional American pizza styles. It included some of the usual suspects, like Detroit pizza and Philly tomato pie.

There are also some styles that you’ve never heard of—and which likely haven’t even been heard of by the people who eat them all the time. See also: Ohio Valley Pizza and New England Beach Pizza. 

 
The article also contains an amusing juxtaposition: the description of California Pizza is immediately followed by the description of Altoona Pizza.
 
Altoona Pizza is ridiculed far and wide—at least, far and wide among the minority of the pizza-eating public who have only heard of it, have never actually tried it, and feel obligated to vent their spleen upon it.
 
But California Pizza is applauded (by the people who prize such things) for its scintillating superiority as an unequalled product of the fabulous and foodie left-coast culinary intelligentsia.
 

The writer of the magazine article is the world-famous John Gutekanst of Avalanche Pizza in Athens, Ohio.

The man is a force. I’ve seen his pizzas and his breads on Facebook, and they all look amazing. Plus, he’s a very funny human being.

But here, he seems serious. Or at least agnostic on these matters of pizza style. No judgments, which is as it should be.
 
He says of California pizza: “This pizza tends to lack a particular crust, size, style or even bake." It seems the similarities of these pizzas "lie in the dissimilar nature of them.” He says they lean on “seasonality” and “artisanal ingredients."


Here now, allow me to be the judgmental party (which is not my normal position). 

Speaking as someone who has made contact with California pizzas in the wild, my experience has been mostly of the “So what?” variety. 

It feels like so many California pizzas are busy yelling, “Look at me!” when they haven't yet done the important, introspective work of developing a foundation. Lackluster crust abounds. “Crust? No! Look at my toppings! Yak cheese, Wasatch ditch tomatoes, fiddlehead ferns and lark’s tongue!”

 
That said, California must also be taken one pizza at a time.
 
Nancy Silverton‘s Mozza is exceptional.

Eating at Mozza is a kind of epic, artisan-pizza dream state. Squash blossoms are never more enjoyable than when they’re lovingly fried up and nestled next to the high-dairy ambrosia of Mozza’s Pizza Burrata.
 
And California is a big state. I've not yet tried all the pizza. I'm always hoping to be surprised once again. 
 
 
Now, let’s talk for an overlong moment about the alleged crime against pizza being committed in Altoona, PA. 

As Mr. Gutekanst says, Altoona Pizza "was originally topped with Velveeta over deli salami and green peppers, but now most places place the salami and pepper slice under processed American cheese."

I suspect the biggest difference between Velveeta and processed American cheese is convenience. The latter comes in easy-to-use slices instead of a rubbery brick the size of a doorstop. Either way, each is a study in pasteurized processed cheese food delight, right?

Anyway, every time I see somebody post a photo of Altoona pizza on social media, there’s always a nattering gaggle of self-righteous naysaying keyboard warriors lined up and waiting to piss on it. "What fresh hell have we here?!” Who did this!?” “That’s disgusting!”
 

I want to yell, "Dude! It’s not disgusting. It’s drunk-food love! You know this! You’ve done it! Is this some kind of projected self-hate? You clearly remember whipping up something just like it the last time you staggered home after a long, hard evening of solving world problems over dollar beers only to find you were out of microwave burritos and boxed mac & cheese. You scraped together bread and Velveeta and some kind of meat, toasting and melting were involved, and you loved it! You thought you were a culinary genius."
 
What? Not you? Just me? Oh, well.
 
Altoona pizza was invented at a restaurant called the Altoona Hotel. It was the 1950s, the 1960s, or the 1970s. Nobody is clear in that matter. At least based on the 30 seconds of intensive research I performed on Google.
 
 
My guess is that it was invented during a time when drinking too much was fashionable. It seems like a pizza designed to serve a purpose, namely: filling the hole after a martini too far.
 
Altoona pizza is a pan pizza with a thick, Sicilian-style crust.
 
The Altoona pizza topping tradition is clear and specific: red sauce, a slice of salami, a slice of green bell pepper, and a slice of orange American cheese.
 
That’s it.
 
Self-appointed pizza police see a picture or hear about it, then greet it by unleashing their bowels upon it. Why? I say: Fear. Probably because it either a) doesn’t seem to jive with the snob’s definition of pizza, or b) elicits repressed memories featuring guilty enjoyment of post-adolescent processed culinary debauchery like the kind mentioned above.
 
 
To be 100% clear to myself about what this pizza is, I made myself a slice.
 
After all, I’ve never been to Altoona and I have no plans to go there soon. But it is evident that this is a simple product of 20th-century pre-hangover culinary thinking. And to quote one of my favorite lines from a Dirty Harry movie, I gots ta know.
 
Working myself up into a froth while imagining yet a new spate of undeserved Altoona pizza hate, I threw down my device and stormed to the fridge.
 
I whipped open the French doors, making condiment jars smash against each other, evoking the sound of alley cats fighting inside a trash can.
 
 
From the fridge, I grabbed a slice of my own leftover homemade pan pizza. Stripping off the mozzarella, I scraped up and reapplied the sauce that came off with it by employing a butter knife as a trowel.
 
Then, I heated it on the cooktop in a steel pan before slipping the pan under the broiler for a minute and a half.
 
Removing the pan, I placed a slice of salami and a red bell-pepper ring (I had no green pepper) atop the pizza and put it back under the broiler for a minute.
 
Then I removed it again, added a slice of not orange but white American cheese. (Color in American cheese has no flavor, only stigma.) I put it back under the broiler for another minute.
 
 
I took it out a final time, grabbed the hot, thick slice, took a bite, and swooned while the molten cheese-food product scorched the roof of my mouth. It was fantastic. And not Chris Bianco or Nancy Silverton or Tony Gemignani fantastic.
 
It was “This is what Stouffer‘s French Bread Pizza wishes it could be” fantastic.
 
It was “Food-chemistry delights when I’ve had too much to drink” fantastic.
 
It was, “Why does this remind me of those long-ago sinful satisfactions of midnight microwaved chili cheese dogs at the Store 24 on Comm Ave?” fantastic.
 
It was a “So much better than high-school cafeteria pizza” fantastic without even trying to be.
 
 
During a football game, I would consider making such a pizza for that bunch of beer-swilling hooligans in my den.
 
That said, those beer-swilling hooligans would probably prefer my regular artisan-style pizza. (The hooligans I know possess sophisticated palates.)
 
But it wouldn’t matter. Altoona Pizza is the stuff of a hot, crunchy, cheesy, fatty, salty, umami goodness that unleashes a swirling, baboon-sized dopamine rush that proclaims, “I love life! And American cheese!”
 
This is a pizza that indeed pairs well with the act of beer swilling. And sophisticated palates notwithstanding, the hooligans in my den will all eat it because it’s free.
 
Anyway, I have a hot nut for California Pizza pretense because I lived there for over a decade with people trying to tell me how fantastic it was when it clearly wasn’t. I’m sorry to be missing the post-pandemic California pizza renaissance. 
 
I have a different hot nut for people who piss on something just because a picture of it fails to pass their snobbery sniff test.
 
 
Clearly, I need therapy.
 
But pizza guru Peter Reinhart likes to say there are two kinds of pizza: good pizza and great pizza.
 
I find the idea of Altoona pizza delightful in its lack of pretense. It’s not great pizza, but it’s good pizza that meets a need.
 
I suspect Altoona pizza was a loving and empathetic gesture by good cook who recognized his or her customer and developed exactly what was called for in the moment.
 
 
In a way, it evokes a sense of nostalgia for simpler times and simpler food.
 
And simpler media.
 
Three television networks, hardwired phones with bells, and meeting up socially with people you know at wherever there might be pizza and beer.
 
And nobody is unleashing a fear-based pissing contest all over a perfect stranger’s imperfect pizza choices from halfway across the country.
 
Nostalgia. It’s what’s for dinner. Served with a side of pizza love. 
​
 
P.S. Apropos of nothing beyond the word “nostalgia, if you’ve never seen Don Draper’s pitch to Kodak, you might like to click here and watch it. And if you don’t know his backstory, Don Draper is an orphaned, dysfunctional, charismatic, womanizing creative genius who has destroyed his own marriage, alienated his children, and produced brilliant advertising. (I do not recall ever seeing pizza in any episode of Mad Men.)
 
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