What are your favourite toppings? Homemade, store-bought or take-out (and if the latter, which brands/restaurants)?

I tend to do homemade (although lately with a store-bought crust) with pesto on tomato sauce, and my favourite toppings are from the pig family... smoked sausage, bacon etc.

I also love mushrooms and a bit of cheddar mixed in with my mozzerella cheese.

Once in a blue moon, I have a craving for a Pizza Pizza pepperoni slice, with the pepperoni done EXTRA crispy.

How about you?

Ooh pizza! Now this is a topic I can get behind! We make all of our pizza at home with a whole wheat beer dough recipe.

Some of our favorites:
*roasted vegetable and goat cheese
*tostada pizza (refried black beans, taco sauce, cheddar cheese, lettuce and tomato)
*bleu cheese and onion
*caramelized winter squash and onion
*spinach and chilis with feta
*pesto, tomato, and mozzerella
*eggplant, sundried tomatoes, and shallots

I could seriously eat pizza every single night for dinner. My next pizza inventions I want to work on are a samosa pizza and a barbeque tofu pizza.

Mcglory, I'm sensing that you are NOT a meataterian?

I make a Greek pizza on French bread - I just slice the bread lengthwise and hollow it out some. If I have some leftover chicken, I toss that on there along with feta or gongozola cheese, banana peppers, red onions, kalamata olives and whatever else sounds good. Instead of tomato sauce, I use either olive oil with garlic and herbs or pesto if it's languishing in the fridge.

I also make a quickie cheese pizza on pita bread for GirlWho and sometimes I throw some goat cheese, artichoke hearts, red onions, and salami or prosciutto on a pita and broil it until it's gorgeous.

This fall, when it's not too hot to turn on the oven, I think we'll do a make-your-own pizza bar for dinner every now and then. GirlWho would get a kick out of it.

Oh, our favorite restaurant/takeout pizza is Hideaway in Oklahoma. It's AWESOME.

I had a Greek pizza from a place in Seattle...I can't remember the name, but it was really good. It had lamb and feta and tzaziki sauce.

At home, we make our own dough and sauce, but since the kiddos are still fairly picky, we just stick with cheese.

AlphaGeek likes artichoke hearts and pesto and I'm a Margherita fan myself.

Anything but anchovies! ;-)

I love a thin crust pizza with goat cheese, mushrooms and peppers. But I will also eat anything with meat too!

Best I've ever had was the clam pie from Lombardi's brick oven on South 17th in Philly. Clams, tomato sauce, cheese, and a great artisanal crust with olive oil. Second best was their fresh mozzarella, tomato, and basil with olive oil. (I'm using the past tense because condo development flattened all of the businesses on that block.) Third best is any Sicilian pizza from Shields in Detroit. Fourth best is the anchovy and onion pie at Pisanos in Havertown.

I have two favorite toppings combinations pepperoni & jalepenos and canadian bacon & pineapple.

It's true Wookie... we are a meat free home. :) A couple more:

Treviso, Sundried Tomato & Goat Cheese Pizza
Serves 4-6

Marinade:
1/3 cup olive oil
3 cloves crushed garlic
1/4 cup chopped sun dried tomatoes in oil plus 1 Tablespoon oil from tomatoes
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
pinch of red pepper flakes
salt and pepper to taste
Pizza:
1 - 12 inch pizza crust
1/2 cup mozzarella cheese, grated
1/4 cup yellow bell peppers, cut into strips
1/4 cup red bell peppers, cut into strips
2 tablespoons diced green peppers
6 to 8 Royal Rose™ Treviso leaves
10 cloves of garlic sautéed until golden
1/4 cup crumbled goat cheese

Preheat oven to 400° F. Whisk first six ingredients in a bowl. Brush crust generously with marinade, sprinkle with mozzarella cheese and peppers. Bake until cheese bubbles, about 10 minutes. Remove pizza from oven. Brush leaves generously with remaining marinade. Fan treviso around pizza. Sprinkle with garlic, and goat cheese. Return pizza to oven and bake until treviso softens, about 10 minutes.

...and beet pizza! Yum!

cut into small circles and roast four small beets and four small onions in olive oil, rosemary, and a bit of balsamic vinegar at 350 for 30 minutes

remove, put on pizza crust (with more olive oil if you want) sprinkle goat cheese over top and cook for 10-20 minutes more.

Delicious!

FYI, treviso is a type of raddichio, the purply lettuce stuff. Using the brand name is not, of course, obligatory, just who I got the recipe from.

I have pizza almost every day at work. There is a great place right near Sesame Place if anyone is in the area. Anyway, it's got potato slices on it with crumbled bacon and whiz. (whiz is a Philly thing. Basically it's a liquid at room temperature. Sounds gross, but so yummy) Anyway, best pizza ever. The place is called The Original Dominck's. But there are quite a few of them.

I really like pesto sauce with mozzarella, black olives and feta cheese...throw some chicken on it and it's delightful!

Mmmm. Casella's in Charlottesville, VA has great pizza. I'm quite fond of no cheese, and with tomatoes, spinach, artichoke hearts, pepperoni and sausage.

In Albuquerque, it's a toss-up between Saggio's and Dion's. Either way, pepperoni and green chile. Of course in NM, we eat green chile on just about everything.

Oh, yeah, and at home I make my own crust (but I'd kill for recipe for awesome dough, if any of you have one) and we put on it Muir organic pizza sauce that we spice up a bit with extra olive oil, basil, garlic, and pepper, tomatoes, green peppers, onions, pepperoni and sometimes green chile and sometimes cheese. Mmmm. Sometimes I put roasted red or yellow peppers on it instead of the green chile.

Diggy, that sounds awful! It's not even the wiz that freaks me out, it's the potatoes. I can't imagine potatoes on pizza. Ick.

No, they're great! That's another pizza I forgot! Roasted new potato, garlic, and rosemary. The "wiz" does scare me though.

Mmmm Pizza Pizza....now I've got the jingle in my head...thanks wookie!

Our toppings on store bought pizza in Canada would be
Ham, green peppers and pineapple on the whole thing. Half tomatoes and the other half green olives but you can't get green olives south of the border and it makes me mental.

We make our own, and usually do a half with just cheese or something vegetarian and a half with peperoni for the processed meet loving boys in the house.

When we go out, 90% of the time it is to Papa's Pizza where the play place is fun for kids and the parents can watch from a window while drinking delicious cheap bear (like PBR) and eat delicious pizza. it's sweet!

When we head out to San Francisco in a couple of weeks (yay Frida at MOMA) I hear tell we have to visit a teh awesome place in Berkley, and we will.

We always get our pizza from Anthony's II. My favorite combo (admittedly, it does sound weird) is breakfast bacon, cream cheese and sundried tomatoes (in addition to the normal red sauce and mozzerella). Yum!!! They also do a really good spinach stuffed pizza.

Whole wheat beer dough? Damn! Can I order that online?

Pizza is great. No matter what your taste, there is something out there for you.

We prefer to make our own, but get the dough from Trader Joe's for a buck. I like pepperoni, onions, sausage, and bacon. My wife like pepperoni and pineapple. If we order it, we usually order from a hole-in-the-wall down the street from us called Joe Peep's. Their normal pepperoni pizza has an insane amount of pepperoni on it, but they also have the "blue collar" pizza, which is a normal amount of toppings, but cheap.

I have to say, though, even though I love the new york style pie, my favorite is Chicago Deep Dish pizza from Lou Malnati's in Chicago. I used to live a block from it when I was in school, and we usually order it once or twice a year and have it shipped on dry ice. It's spendy that way, but well worth it.

Fuck that government talk. Let's talk more about food.

I don't think you can order it online, but I can provide recipe if people want. We do it in the breadmaker so you would need to add time for kneading and rising:

(makes two crusts, we freeze them and pull them out as needed)
1 1/2 cup beer (quality doesn't matter, we use Lone Star)
3 3/4 flour (you can mix wheat and white or use all wheat and add a bunch of gluten)
1 1/2 butter (or soy margarine)
3 tbsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
yeast package or equivalent

We often add garlic powder or spices to ours as well.

Sorry, 1 1/2 tbsp butter.

Probably time for bed again.

I do love a creative pizza, but when really craving 'za...I'm a man of simple tastes. Give me a good pizza with quality sausage, meatball or pepperoni. Enough to really taste it, but not so much that it overtakes the taste of the entire slice.

Mmmmm. I'm hungry.

Cog, I once had Giordano's pizza - in Oklahoma City. It was flown in for a friend's relative's birthday.

Giorgano's is great as well. I've been there a few times. Realistically, all the deep dish pizza places in Chicago are really good, and almost all taste the same...at least to me.

That's cool that you had it in Oklahoma City. I don't know why it's cool, it just is.

Pizza is probably my all time favorite food. I practically lived on that stuff in college. I guess that's why I put on several pounds.

Sausage, onion and garlic. Deep dish or thin crust. Mmmmmmmmmmm, hungry now...

Pepperoncinis, chopped garlic and onions. Just don't ask me to kiss you afterwards.

Not that you would or anything.

There's a deep dish pizza place in Austin by Deep Eddy - one of the guys who is a manager or owner there, I forget which, his dad was a manager at Giordano's. The pizza is pretty close. And not nearly as expensive as flying it in.

I live in Chicagoland: Land of Stuffed Pizzas, and I loooove spinach stuffed pizza. So that is the only pizza I will order out. I'm not really a fan of regular flat pizza unless it's homemade.

So I make my own, usually. I also get the Trader Joe's dough, because then I don't have to make it, but still get it just as crispy as I like it.

I always make the same pizza (I'm like this in all my cooking: Find something that works, and then never change it again, ever.): sauce and mozzarella, then spinach (fresh is amazing, but frozen works in the winter), diced up tomatoes, and feta. Yum.

mcglory, I am taking notes on all your delicious sounding pizzas! I am totally intrigued by the idea of beet pizza, as we are knee deep in beets around here. I've been eating beet risotto, beets salad, and just plain beets, but it would never have occurred to me to put them on pizza!

now i'm hungry.

fuckers.

kisses,

jimbo

Giorgano's pizza is awesome. I have it every time I go to Chicago.

You people are making me feel like the little kid sitting at the adult table. The best is pepperoni, mushroom, and sausage pizza. (Yes, PMS pizza. It took me many years to figure out why my parents always laughed behind their hands as they ordered it.) For the love of all that is holy, no spinach or artichokes or non-mozzarella cheese. Why ruin a perfectly lovely pizza with something that could be considered healthy?

My favorite pizza shop, and the only one that delivered to my house, just shut down. The owner also happened to be the guy that bought my old Jeep when I sold it. Now I'm out tasty pizza and visitation rights with my first real vehicle, and it's very disappointing.

Gino's in Great Lakes, Chicago area had the best deep dish evah!

We used to order Dominoes pepperoni and mushroom for pizza night. BUt now I make grilled pizza with mushrooms and onions. The boys also dig calzone made with the same dough. Thank Gob for bread machines.

My personal favorite is tomato, basil, roasted garlic, and fresh mozzarella on homemade crust, but whenever we order in it is usually from Papa John's (I know, and it isn't even very good, but the boys like it) with just pepperoni and sometimes mushrooms. If we're going out for pizza, we go to this little hole in the wall place called J&G's that has the tastiest, greasiest pizza I've ever had. But it's really good.

However, I just had grilled pizza for dinner last night. It's one of our favorite things to cook in the summer. It had tomatoes, hot pepper, basil, and oregano from my garden, plus garlic, fresh mozzarella, grated parmesan, and some kind of imported spicy French salami-ish meat product that Mr. S got. Was delicious. The boys had plain Hormel pepperoni and mozzarella.

I made the crust (really good recipe--I posted it in recipe central a while back) myself, because I haven't found one to buy that I like better and it isn't that difficult to make. Then once you flatten the rounds out into whatever size you want, brush with olive oil, then grill on one side until slightly browned and puffy. Then brush the uncooked side with oil, remove to a pan, uncooked side down, and top however you like. Move back to the grill, put the lid down, and cook for five or so minutes, checking occasionally and rotating the pizza if needed, until the cheese is all bubbly and the bottom is nicely browned and crispy.

You can also do it in the oven at the highest temperature you can get, which is really good. Plus, the dough makes a very good foccacia.