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Any Way You Slice It: Talking Time's Top 50 Pizza Toppings

Issun

Issun

(He/Him)
It's Pizza Time!


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Wikepedia defines pizza as such:

Pizza is an Italian dish typically consisting of a flat base of leavened wheat-based dough topped with tomato, cheese, and other ingredients, baked at a high temperature, traditionally in a wood-fired oven.

The term pizza was first recorded in AD 997, in a Latin manuscript from the southern Italian town of Gaeta, in Lazio, on the border with Campania. Raffaele Esposito is often credited with creating the modern version of pizza in Naples at the end of the 19th century. In 2009, Neapolitan pizza was registered with the European Union as a traditional speciality guaranteed (TSG) dish. In 2017, the art of making Neapolitan pizza was included on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage.

Pizza and its variants are among the most popular foods in the world. Pizza is sold at a variety of restaurants, including pizzerias, Mediterranean restaurants, via delivery, and as street food. In Italy, pizza served in a restaurant is presented unsliced, and is eaten with the use of a knife and fork. In casual settings, however, it is typically cut into slices to be eaten while held in the hand. Pizza is also sold in grocery stores in a variety of forms, including frozen or as kits for self-assembly. Store-bought pizzas are then cooked using a home oven.

In 2017, the world pizza market was US$128 billion; in the US, it was $44 billion spread over 76,000 pizzerias. Overall, 13% of the US population aged two years and over consumed pizza on any given day.
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Everyone likes different stuff on their pizza, but some ingredients are more popular than others. Let's see what our favorites are!
 
#50 & #49 (tie)
Italian Seasoning
32 Points, 1 Vote (LBD_Nytetrayn)
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Italian seasoning is a blend of herbs that almost always contains sage, rosemary, oregano and thyme, with basil and marjoram also being common ingredients. You can also dd parsley and sage, taking you all the way to Scarborough Fair. The seasoning can be mixed into the sauce, but is more often used as a finisher or added at the table. Despite the name, it's not something you're likely to find in Italy pre mixed, as they tend to prefer to add individual herbs and spices individually.
Buffalo Chicken
32 Points, 1 Vote (Purple)
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Buffalo chicken is generally served as wings, boneless or otherwise, basted in buffalo sauce, mixture of cayenne pepper sauce (often Frank's Red Hot) mixed with butter. It provides a vinegary, spicy, rich flavor that pairs well with chicken, and is often associated with bars and/or sports events. On pizza, however, the sauce tend to be the base with grilled chicken pieces on top, though those can also be coated in the sauce. A good buffalo chicken pizza is amazing but recipes for the sauce can vary wild in flavor and quality, so you may have to try a few different places before you find one you like.
 
I've wanted to try Buffalo chicken, but I live with a purist who very much dislikes poulty on pizza
 
oooh... that's a good Specific Chicken that I hadn't thought of. Nice pick.
 
Issun said:
In Italy, pizza served in a restaurant is presented unsliced, and is eaten with the use of a knife and fork.
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Like most children, I ate my pizza by picking it up, but ever since I started eating it with knife and fork, I've never looked back. No greasy fingers, no mess, and you can invert each bite so that the hot cheese doesn't burn the roof of your mouth, which used to happen to me basically every time that I ate pizza.
 
Wow, nobody else? Also if this is an indication that the other stuff on my list did have other people voting on it, I need to prepare to get shocked a lot more.

Anyway, I'm unaware of a pizza place in Connecticut (the secret pizza holy land) that can't hook you up with a really good buffalo chicken. Even places that are otherwise pretty crummy, particularly those of the more Italian style, seem to nail a really perfect spice level with the sauce that can overcome a dry hard crust or lack of sufficient cheese. Lived by a place for a while that was otherwise pretty sub-par but open super late and this was my go-to when it got too late to really eat anything else. Also seen a place or two that do an amazing buffalo chicken stomboli and just give you a whole tub of blue cheese to dunk it in.

Didn't think to mention spices since I'm spoiled with some local places that throw so much in the sauce it isn't even red anymore in some cases.
 
Buffalo chicken on its own has never been my thing, in part because I'm not a big fan of vinegary flavours unless they have a good compliment of some kind (I can't eat pickles on their own). But with a thing, like in a wrap, it's pretty good. Still, I've yet to try it on pizza. What sauce goes with Buffalo Chicken?
 
JBear said:
Like most children, I ate my pizza by picking it up, but ever since I started eating it with knife and fork, I've never looked back. No greasy fingers, no mess, and you can invert each bite so that the hot cheese doesn't burn the roof of your mouth, which used to happen to me basically every time that I ate pizza.
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I discovered a few years ago the best way to eat a pizza slice for me is to roll it up on itself then chomp on that cilinder (provided the base is soft enough, if it's very crunchy at most you can fold it once in a sort of sandwich). That way you get a bit of everything (each ingredient, soft center and crunchy/spongy crust) in every bite.

Or there's also The Spiral
 
Sensenic said:
I discovered a few years ago the best way to eat a pizza slice for me is to roll it up on itself then chomp on that cilinder (provided the base is soft enough, if it's very crunchy at most you can fold it once in a sort of sandwich). That way you get a bit of everything (each ingredient, soft center and crunchy/spongy crust) in every bite.

Or there's also The Spiral
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I support this in theory, but honestly, any pizza that's soft enough to do this to is probably one that I'm not going to care for. My preferred crust these days is thin and so crispy that any attempt to fold it would snap it like a twig.
 
Italian Seasoning is underrated on homemade pizza. I think because as kids, you often eat a lot of kind of lousy pizza, so when you get some that has a bit of seasoning, it really makes it pop.

I love me some buffalo chicken pizza. My college had an NY style pizza by the slice place near my studio and I would pretty frequently get a slice of buffalo chicken pizza. Where I live now doesn't have any places like that, so if I want it, I make it at home.
 
I was about to say, "oh, I didn't think of seasonings..." but then I realized I actually put one of the ones in this mix on my list - it probably won't make it on it's own so I'll just say it was Rosemary, which I love, though by itself it only really shines with a few particular combos of other toppings. I'm also now realizing that when I make frozen grocery store pizza at home I usually reach for the Oregano to punch it up a bit, so I probably *should* have voted for that one too, but I didn't.

As for the other entry, I'm happy to let other people have those pizzas as I just don't care much for chicken, but that's just a me thing. Buffalo sauce itself is pretty tasty, though I didn't vote for that either.
 
I've never heard of Italian seasoning, must be an American thing. Oregano is totally a classic, though, it immediately reminds me of childhood pizzas.
 
Our local pizza place growing up always added a ton of what they called “crumbles” which was parmesan absolutely loaded down with basil and oregano. It was too much, honestly. I’d take the cheese off and just eat saucy bread. Didn’t realize pizza could taste good until middle school.
 
I've had buffalo chicken on pizza--I tend to gravitate toward whatever interesting specialty pizzas a given place offers, and that's a style that has started showing up around here in recent years. It didn't make a huge impression on me, though. I like pizza, and I like buffalo chicken, but the combination lacks any particular synergy to my palate.
 
#48
Monical's Seasoning Blend
35 Points, 1 Vote (Torzelbaum)
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Monical's is apparently a very Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Wisconsin) pizza chain whose signature seasoning Torzelbaum describes thusly:
The website says that the seasoning is a blend of garlic salt and basil but there's also a general extra/light spices option when ordering online so I'm not 100% sure exactly what is in the seasoning but I do know that it is delicious and I don't think I've ever had anything like it on pizza from anywhere else.​
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Sounds delish!
 
#47
Fennel
36 Points, 2 Lists, Highest Vote: WildcatJF (#11)
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Fennel is an herb most closely related to the carrot (!) with a flavor that most approximates anise (or licorice, more specifically, but a milder version of that). It is an acquired taste but Pagliacci (the Big Deal Puget Sound area pizza chain, be ready to see it mentioned a lot in this thread) had at one time a spring pie with a local lamb sausage and roasted fennel and it was divine.

But yeah, you are gonna want it with very specific ingredients.
 
fennel is usually in sausage, which I almost always have on my pizza, so I've never thought of just putting fennel on one by itself.
 
I’m not really an anise/licorice-flavor-liker so I’m wary of fennel, but I bet if it were roasted down like a caramelized onion I’d like it.
 
I love an anise but I'm having a hard time conceiving the flavor combined with tomato sauce and cheese
 
*insert photo series of me dousing a bulb a fennel with tomato sauce and cheese and biting into it like a carrot.*
 
I'm a twenty years Wisconsinite and haven't heard of Monical's. looks it up ah, just one location in the state, and nowhere near me, alas.
 
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