Best Pizza Toppings

Fennel seed is what separates Italian sausage from any other ground pork on a pie, and American shops split it into sweet and hot, the latter cut with crushed red pepper. Crumbled on raw, it renders fat straight into the cheese as it bakes.

Genuine caramelization takes thirty to forty minutes over low heat, long enough for the sugars and amino acids in onion to brown into something jammy with no raw allium bite left. That labor is why the topping shows up on restaurant menus far more often than delivery ones.

At 2,500 to 8,000 Scoville heat units, jalapeños land where heat registers without erasing what sits under it. Pickled rings add acid and stay firm through the oven, while fresh slices soften and turn grassy. Either way the burn fades fast enough that you keep eating.

Sam Panopoulos put canned pineapple on a pizza at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario in 1962, naming it Hawaiian after the brand on the tin. The acid and bromelain cut salty pork, which is the real case for it, whatever the people who vote against it say.

Artichoke hearts hold one quadrant of a classic quattro stagioni, sharing the pie with mushrooms, ham, and olives. Jarred marinated hearts bring oil and acid that survive the oven, while fresh ones demand trimming and a lemon bath first. Their vegetal bitterness reads as restraint next to cured meat.

Pesto alla genovese is built on Basilico Genovese, which took EU Protected Designation of Origin status in 2005, pounded raw with pine nuts, garlic, and hard cheese. Heat wrecks it, so it lands in dollops after the bake or goes under the cheese as a base in place of tomato.

The uniform black discs on American pizza start as unripe green olives, lye-cured with air bubbled through the tanks and set with ferrous gluconate so the color survives canning. That processing strips the brine funk of a Kalamata but leaves a mild, even saltiness that reaches every slice.

Spinach anchors the florentine pie, usually over ricotta or garlic cream rather than tomato. Raw leaves collapse to a fraction of their volume and shed water, so kitchens wilt and wring them first. Done badly it waterlogs the crust, done right it is the rare green that earns its place.

Arugula sits in the mustard family, and its pepper comes from the same glucosinolates that give horseradish its edge. It wilts to nothing under heat, so it goes on raw after the bake, usually dressed with lemon and oil. With prosciutto and shaved parmesan it turns a finished pie into a salad course.

Castelvetrano, the Sicilian Nocellara del Belice, is the green olive worth arguing for: lye-cured rather than left to ferment, buttery, and vivid enough to read across a whole pie. Green olives keep more bitterness and firmer flesh than the canned black kind, which is why they hold up against sausage.

Ricotta means recooked, a reference to reheating the whey left behind from making mozzarella or provolone. Spooned on in dollops rather than spread, it stays white and faintly grainy through the bake. It is the backbone of a proper white pie, carrying garlic and black pepper better than mozzarella.

Burrata is a mozzarella pouch filled with stracciatella and cream, made in Puglia and protected as Burrata di Andria PGI since 2016. Bake it and it collapses into grease, so it gets torn over a finished pie and left to spill across the surface.

Raw red onion keeps its sulfur bite and its color through the oven, where white onion mostly vanishes into the cheese. Thin rings soften at the base and char at the tips under high heat. That durability is why it is standard on Greek and barbecue chicken pies.

Broccoli rabe is Brassica rapa despite the name, closer to a turnip than to broccoli, and its bitterness wants a blanch before it goes near dough. Philadelphia built a pork sandwich tradition on that same bitterness, and the sausage and rabe pizza in Italian-American shops runs on identical logic.

Prosciutto di Parma DOP is cured with sea salt and time alone, no nitrates, and cannot be sold until it has aged at least twelve months. Oven heat ruins the texture, so slices are draped over a hot pie once it comes out and allowed to slump. With arugula and shaved parmesan it forms the standard post-bake trio.

Cured pork brings smoke and sugar that no other meat topping offers, which is why bacon lands in the American top five order after order. Added raw it goes limp under cheese, so most kitchens par-cook it and scatter the pieces on top. It wants a sweet counterweight, hence pineapple and hot honey.

Few toppings get voted down as reliably, and American polls of least-wanted toppings hand anchovies the title year after year. The fillets dissolve almost completely in the oven, leaving glutamate depth rather than anything that reads as fish. Naples has treated them as standard for generations.

Mike Kurtz was already infusing honey with chilies when Paulie Gee's opened in Greenpoint in 2010, and the soppressata-topped Hellboy turned his drizzle into a fixture there. Bottled as Mike's Hot Honey, sweet heat spread from one Brooklyn pizzeria onto menus nationwide.

Zero on the Scoville scale, bell peppers carry none of the capsaicin their relatives do, so they contribute sweetness and snap instead of heat. Green ones stay grassy and firm while red and yellow have ripened longer and taste sweeter. They shed water, so thin slices beat thick chunks.

White button, cremini, and portobello are all Agaricus bisporus at different stages of maturity, which is why a portobello tastes like a concentrated button. Caps run roughly 90 percent water, so they need real oven heat or a pre-saute to avoid pooling on the cheese.

American surveys of favorite toppings put pepperoni first by a margin nothing else approaches. It is an Italian-American invention rather than an Italian one, with printed references surfacing around 1919 in New York. Natural-casing versions curl into grease-filled cups that crisp at the rim.

Drying concentrates tomato sugars and glutamates into something closer to a seasoning than a vegetable, so a scattered handful carries further than a full layer of sauce. Oil-packed halves stay pliable in the oven, while dry-packed ones need soaking first or they finish like leather.

Roasting whole heads until the cloves turn amber breaks down the sulfur compounds behind raw garlic's harshness, leaving a nearly sweet paste that spreads. Smeared on the dough it becomes the base layer of a white pie. Raw slivers scorch in a wood oven running near 900F; roasted cloves do not.

Goat cheese gets its tang from capric and caprylic fatty acids that cow's milk largely lacks, and it softens into white blobs instead of melting into a sheet. That acidity is why it belongs with caramelized onion, fig, or roasted beets rather than opposite pepperoni.

Sliced meatballs carry breadcrumb and egg, so they stay tender where crumbled sausage crisps up. Cooked before they ever touch dough, they are among the few toppings that arrive already seasoned and sauced. A fixture of Italian-American shops rather than Neapolitan ones.