5 Things You Should Never Put on Pizza

While they might be well and good on their own, they really just don't work atop a pizza.
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A plain pizza is one of the world's perfect foods. Bread, cheese, and marinara sauce -- what could be better? Certain toppings really lend themselves to that flavor combination -- pepperoni, for example -- but there are certain foods that really just don't jibe with pizza. We tracked down eight, and while they might be well and good on their own, they really just don't work atop a pizza.

A pizza, by the broadest definition, can be any flatbread with any toppings, and obviously in that application you can find a way to get just about anything onto a pizza, because you'd be hard-pressed to find a flavor that doesn't work with bread. But for our purposes, we're talking about what you'd find in your standard New York-style pizzeria: a 'plain' pie, with just mozzarella and tomato sauce.

Lettuce

5 Things You Should Never Put on Pizza

It's almost funny how perfectly certain foods work with pizza, and how perfectly some other foods don't.

Just about any vegetable, when sliced, works just fine, even broccoli. Just about any meat, from sausage to fried chicken to roast beef, works like a charm. But try to add sushi-grade raw fish and you most likely won't be able to choke down a single bite.

The reason for this is simple: certain flavors and textures are compatible, and others aren't. Pizza is such a rich, strongly-flavored food that it has the potential to combine nicely with complementary ingredients, but when it doesn't, it really doesn't.

Surprisingly, some of these toppings have found a pizza-based home elsewhere around the world, but it leaves us scratching our heads because the combo really just doesn't work. Hey, if raw salmon or mayonnaise on pizza is your thing, go for it. But we wouldn't recommend it.

-Dan Myers, The Daily Meal

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