37% Of People Think This Is The Most Underrated Pizza Topping
There are few dishes as divisive as a Hawaiian pizza. And by divisive we'd like to invite you to think back to the last time you dished out a Hawaiian pizza at a party — and either apologized or felt the need to explain yourself.
It's not because we just assume everyone loves pizza (yes, we're sure you pizza haters out there, in the paraphrased words of Michael Buble, we just haven't met you yet), it's because pineapple is a love it or hate it kind of thing.
You would think that with the amount of disdain that those who profess to love pizza also display at the thought of having pineapple on their pies, there would be few people that would actually admit to liking this topping. Yet, in a recent Mashed poll that compiled the opinions of 42,000 respondents globally, we found that 37 percent of you actually thought pineapple is the most underrated pizza topping. Mushrooms came in second with 32 percent, and banana peppers were a distant third at 13 percent followed by anchovies, which only garnered 10 percent of the vote.
The idea of pineapple on pizza didn't come from Hawaii
Before you ask how a delightful state like Hawaii could dream up such a divisive pizza topping, we'd like to point out that like the London Broil and Baked Alaska (origins: New York) and Chicken Kiev (origin: France) (via The Daily Meal), Hawaiian Pizza isn't actually from Hawaii — it's from Canada. And the inventor of that particular flavor was a man named Sam Panopoulos, reports Food Network Canada, who originally hailed from Greece, who discovered this now classic yet divisive combo, by throwing together different ingredients to see what would work and what wouldn't.
Panopoulos, who passed away in 2017, told Food Network Canada: "Today you can go to a Chinese place and have a chicken salad, Thai place they give you something else. But in those days [the 1960s] there was no way you could mix flavors. When you told someone to try pineapple on their pizza they looked at you like, 'Are you crazy?'"
In all fairness though, some people still think like that today, but in case you feel like an outlier on this issue, we're here to tell you that you shouldn't feel this way. Because almost 40 percent of folks around the world have told us that they don't mind having pineapple on their pizza — which is probably plenty more than you probably expected.