Finally! Mainstream press takes a realistic photo of the novelty president.

Not a halo in sight.

You misspelled 'novelly'.

Shut the fuck up, Packard.

Actually, I find the picture quite telling. It's an allegory of how it doesn't matter who's the top dog, things are still going to be shit for the rest of us.

Too bready, and too heavy on the toppings. Not a good pizza.

Yeah, I'd substitute black olives for the pepperoni. Still can't compensate for that crust, though.

Black olives would RUIN that pizza. They taste nasty, and have the texture of washers.

Sorry, but I have to agree with garamet on this one. Olives are admittedly a matter of taste, but objectively you have to be very careful with pepperoni on pizza--it's a greasy mess waiting to destroy your other toppings and your crust--and whoever made that crust can't be trusted with pepperoni.

^This. Found out recently that my favorite pizza place in Brooklyn has gone out of business.

Mmmmmmh...

I'm happy this beautiful tradition is still alive

That sounds like two people who have neither tasted good olives, nor good pepperoni. If you take the trouble to get high quality stuff and treat it well, olives aren't nasty nor fabric-ky, and pepperoni aren't greasy.

Obviously, you are both dumb for thinking of food this way rather than my way. (<--- controversy! Red Room! )

[YT="In fact, you are most likely liars as well!"]sg_gj2UO2tU[/YT]

Depends on the kind of peperoni you use. The mild, long ones are IMHO too juicy as a pizza topping when not much care is taken to dry them a little when they come out of the jar. But the short, harder hot ones are excellent.

I love pepperoni. But olives are just plain nasty and shouldn't even be considered as part of a food group.

Now here's a pizza:

Memphis BBQ Chicken Pizza w/ shallots & cilantro.

I made a homemade pizza from scratch two nights ago, thin crust style. Just made it a cheese and mozzerella pizza, but added torn parma home, shaved parmesan and fresh rocket afterwards.

Decadent.

That's because you are a phillistine.

Garlic and chilli olives rule.

You're a New Yorker. NYC pizza has to have the best crust in the world. Our water supply comes from the Catskill Mountains Region. By the time it makes the 80 mile trip here through the aquaphors, it's minerally rich. A lot of experts believe that's why the crust in NYC pizza is so tasty.

No question. It's why you can't get really good pizza in SoCal (well, that and everyone's so diet conscious they don't use oil)...*^%$!! hard water.

In my experience, very few pizza places deal in high quality pepperoni, even those that otherwise make a quality pizza. Olives are just a safer bet if you're ordering toppings from an unfamiliar place or a place you know is not really all that great. The worst case scenario for olives is that you pick them off, but mediocre pepperoni will kill a pizza.

Good pepperoni on pizza can be a wonderful thing, but you really have to know before ordering and most of the time it's better if you really want pepperoni to just make your own pizza or add your own pepperoni to pizza you take home.

You are completely wrong about there being any controversy because clearly we don't really disagree and you're an idiot if you think we do.

I really like making toaster oven pizza using indian naan as the crust. The sauce is made from pureed tomatoes from my blender with a bunch of different herbs, and some fresh mozzarella and parmesan as well as whatever other toppings I decide to throw on.

Yummmmmmmmm.

Perhaps you are thinking of peperoncini?

Nope, peperoncini are closer to Cayenne and can get nasty hot. Hot pepperoni are those mild Jalapenos.

There is nothing like a good Neapolitan pizza.

Peperoncini are pickled. That's the huge difference.

Ah, so we are talking about two different things. Most of us, when speaking of Peperonni and pizza are discussing a sliced sausage.

The cheap pepperoni is not dry cured and in fact can't be dry cured because it uses low quality fats. The yellow fats you get with low quality animal feed like corn quickly go rancid when you try to dry cure the salumi. The traditional stuff though uses both less fat and a higher quality white fat which you get from better animal feed, it's monosaturated instead of polysaturated, and that stuff you can use to dry cure things the traditional way.

It's why the dry cured hard pepperoni doesn't produce the pools of grease you get from the cheap stuff you find at most chain pizza places. On the down side the dry cured pepperoni easily costs four to five times as much. Still, it tastes much better just like the water buffalo mozzarella tastes so much better than the generic unaged domestic cow's milk mozzarella.

I'm not saying NYC style pizza is bad, I do like to have a slice of thin crust once in a while, but most of the traditional NYC by the slice places really do make low quality pizza. I know artisan places have popped up in the last 20 years there but they've been kind of slow to pick up the high quality bandwagon which California pioneered going back to the 1970's. You could find places in LA and the Bay area even back in the 70's which made superior pizza to anything found in NYC at the time. Truly artisan with better ingredients, innovative toppings choices, and always a high temperature wood fired brick oven. It just cheesed me off when one of the posters in this thread claimed you can't get good pizza in California when in fact I find the pizza here to be vastly better than most of what is on offer in NYC at least until recently. Just made to a much higher standard mainly because the people ordering California style pizza were more concerned about their food, how it was made, where it came from, and how it was different from the mass produced stuff. Then, of course, there is the whole freshness thing due to so much grown right here where as in NYC everything is trucked in from thousands of miles away.

In the end I suppose it comes down to personal preference and I am happy NYC is now on to the artisan thing we've been doing for 30-40 years but it's a slap in the face to insult our pizza especially since everyone from Memphis to NYC is so busy trying to copy west coast style.