I’ve never really thought of food/drink having complimentary flavors… Though, back in the days when I was a heavy soda drinker, I would have most likely drank Dr. Pepper or Mountain Dew with pizza.
Dipping pizza crust in soda sounds weird to my ears… if I were to dip pizza crust, I’d rather do it into something like marinara, buffalo sauce, cheese sauce, or honey mustard… dunking cookies in water also sounds cringe, but now I kind of want to crumble up some cookies in a bowl and pour milk over them and eat them like cereal and have to wonder why the thought never crossed my mind… Did once pour orange juice over fruit loops or fruit rings without realizing it(I think it was early after I went blind, I was the only one awake in the house, and I hadn’t yet developed the habit of smelling what’s in a milk jug before pouring), not as bad as you might think…
Though, something a bit odd I do regarding pizza: when I splurge for the cheap, microwavable pizzas I like, I like to fold them in half and eat them like a sandwich or soft taco.
For a long time, I would roll each individual slice and eat them rolled up. So I feel ya.
My favourites were usually oat cookies or chocolate cookies like oreos. Yum yum.
But you get to a certain point in your life when your body, especially your digestive tract, decides to be a total killjoy, and those things stop being as yummy.
Yes, on first thought disgusting, but on second thought not bad. The pure crust is hard and tastes dry, so I might try dipping it into something next time
I think this is basically the concept of lasagna. This might actually be interesting if you laid out pizza crust in a pan with pizza toppings and covered it with top crust - basically a calzone in pie-form, or perhaps similar to Chicago/inverted pan pizza.
What you’ve described does sound like pizza dip and might be good with garlic bread, if you aren’t avoiding carbs. Or for special midwestern US flair, cover pizza toppings in a baking pan with some crescent dough unrolled on top - “pizza cobbler”.
This is likely blasphemy, but to avoid bread I have taken to creating pizza with zero-carb tortilla as the crust. This is why it works best styled as a St. Louis/less-leavened flat-cracker pizza.
I’ve read a review that said St. Louis style pizza is basically pizza in nacho form, which I can kind of get on board with.
My friend (who is actually from Italy) made us panzerotti one day and it was the bomb. Essentially a pan-fried calzone, it combines the best elements of pizza, grilled cheese, and a Hot Pocket. And is quicker than baking a pizza or calzone. He used leftover dough and toppings from a “make your own pizza” night and it doesn’t require heating the oven, so good in the summer.
Lately I’ve been trying to make New England Greek style pizzas at home, since I’m now out of range to get them from a pizzeria. I haven’t yet perfected the crust but I’ve had plenty of opportunities to experiment with different toppings. Here is an excellent combination:
-a large quantity of Rao’s pizza sauce
-a thick layer of mortadella, sliced into bite-sized strips
-a blend of 75% mozzarella and 25% aged cheddar (the fancy kind with the crunchy little crystals in it)
All these mentions of regional variations is making me feel like an uncultured heathen even by the standards of the stereotype that Americans are uncultured heathens who are willfully ignorant of the wider world… which is saying something since half of them are named for parts of the US… Granted, most of my pizza consumption in my life has been from the major delivery chains(and my personal ranking is pretty much Papa John’s > pizza Hut = Dominoes > Little Ceasar’s though I still enjoy even little Caesar’s and they were the cheapest by a mile for a long time)…
I associate New York with a classic deep dish, but I have no idea what New England, Philly, or Chicago mean in terms of pizza… and I’m completely lost when you get into the stuff I’m assuming is Italian or at least trying to sound Italian.
Imo, New York is closest to the “classic” American pizza you get from Papa John’s or the like, “tavern” pizza is thin crust cut into squares, Chicago is deep dish, St Louis uses an unleavened crust that’s more like a cracker than normal bread, and most other regional styles are abominations that don’t deserve to be mentioned.
Pizza Hut had a “Big Dipper” pizza for a while that I really liked because I prefer less sauce, and this was basically rectangular deep-dish with toppings and cheese on crust that you dipped into sauce on the side.
a) deep-dish rules, haters to the left
b) Chicagoans probably eat more tavern-style pizza anyway
c) if you want to pick on someone’s pizza, look at Ohio Valley or Altoona
One time in Scranton, I ordered (what I didn’t realize was going to be) an Altoona-style pizza from the only pizzeria in town I could find that was open on a Sunday. I had to wait an hour and a half, and to apologize for the wait, they gave me a free second pizza that was supposed to be for someone else who never showed up.
I spent the next few days trying and failing to give away those pizzas to anyone who would have them. Velveeta on a pizza. Just why?
Pretty sure we passed the “just why” as it regards to “stuff on pizzas” (or even “depth of pizzas”, “shape of pizzas”, “lasagna-ness of pizzas”, “just-what-the-heck-can-we-do-to-it-and-still-call-it-a-pizza-with-a-reasonably-straight-face”) a looooooooooooooooong time ago.
By the way, I completely forgot my favourite thing to have on pizza.
Chocolate.
Natch: no cheese or tomato sauce or anything.
Pizza is a great base for desserts. It’s like an easy-bake pie. Apple and cinammon, hot and toasty, mm-mm!
Velveeta, they’re the shells and cheese people aren’t they? Admittedly, a kind of weird choice, but I wouldn’t say no to a cheese sauce on a pizza even if I prefer the usual pizza cheese blend… Though, now I kind of wonder how al dente rotini would be on a more typical pizza base… And I do like pairing pizza and pasta dishes in general.
Also, when I think lasagna, I think layers of tomato sauced ground meat(usually beef) alternating with sheets of pasta top with shredded cheese, the whole thing baked… And now I have a craving for my mother’s home made lasagna… Sadly, I’m pretty sure she took her recipe with her to the grave and she’s been dead 17 or 18 years…
Oh man, that makes me think of the dread of realizing you’ve ordered the dish at the restaurant they don’t make very much even though the person taking the order was like "are you sure you want us to turn on the pizza oven…?
They make easily melted cheese product, like the liquid cheese that makes it through a spigot at a ballpark. Velveeta is best used as a component of a sauce with better flavors because sometimes you want that texture that adheres to pasta or chips.
Pasta on a pizza that bakes at high heat properly would probably get weirdly crunchy?
There’s a place called the Glass Nickel in Madison, Wisconsin that puts weird things on pizzas. My sisters’ favorite is the Mac Daddy, which is cavatappi noodles and mac and cheese sauce, though I like the Couch Potato, with tater tots and sour cream.
I don’t know how they do it, but the noodles retain proper noodle texture.
So I feel ya.
