Originally Posted by redcelticcurls

Originally Posted by SarcasmIsBeauty

Chicken, whether by its breeding or its genetics, is bland. It doesn't add much to a slice of pizza that it wouldn't add just as well if served on the side, see what I mean? There's no cosmic synergy in a chicken pizza, no greater-than-the-sum-of-its-partsness. (Don't even get me started on pasta-on-pizza... the horror!)
Sure, pizza and chicken cook in the same oven, but they remain largely unrelated to each other. Pepperoni, soppresata, or a good chunk of sausage, on the other hand, cooks not just on top of the pizza, but with the pizza. They release salty, flavorful fat that mingles with the melted cheese, drips into the sauce, and flavors the whole pie. They crisp up on the edges, adding salty, crisp bits of texture to match the crunch of the crust underneath.

Of course, some people seem to have come to the realization that chicken on its own is not the ideal pizza topping, which is where we enter the world of the three chicken-dish-pizza-hybrids. Namely, Buffalo Chicken Pizza, Chicken Ranch Pizza, and Barbecue Chicken Pizza.

These are pizza variants that you see commonly in college towns and in Middle America. Indeed, a pizza joint that didn't offer chicken ranch (or at the very least the option to sub tomato sauce for ranch dressing) in Michigan would seem downright odd. But at the risk of sounding like a total pizza snob (as if I haven't already done so already), I'm going to say this: buffalo, ranch, and barbecue chicken pizza were created only to cover up poor pizza. That is, it was created in places where the basics—crust, good sauce, good cheese—were not understood or executed well enough, and thus needed an additional dish of food spread on top of it to add flavor.

These are pizza variants that you see commonly in college towns and in Middle America. Indeed, a pizza joint that didn't offer chicken ranch (or at the very least the option to sub tomato sauce for ranch dressing) in Michigan would seem downright odd. But at the risk of sounding like a total pizza snob (as if I haven't already done so already), I'm going to say this: buffalo, ranch, and barbecue chicken pizza were created only to cover up poor pizza. That is, it was created in places where the basics—crust, good sauce, good cheese—were not understood or executed well enough, and thus needed an additional dish of food spread on top of it to add flavor.

That's not to say that all sauce-and-chicken pizza these days is made on inferior crust—the combo has become popular enough that you can now find it at all sorts of pizza joints from great to piss poor. I guess that's what happens when a collective flavor memory reaches critical mass?
To sum up: cured meats, like pepperoni, sausage, ham, guanciale, lardo, soppresata, capicola, pancetta, heck, even anchovies = all good. Fresh meats like steak, ground meat, chicken, pork, seared tuna = leave it on the side, thanks.

Originally Posted by WileESteelNervs