What makes a pizza a pizza?

By definition, it’s dough, sauce and cheese

I’m a reasonable person. I make informed decisions based on the data presented to me. This is especially true when having to pick a side in some of the world’s most polarizing debates.

One such question is what makes a pizza, well, a pizza? This is something that shouldn’t even be a debate, yet people throw the title around so loosely that the definition of pizza is losing its sanctity.

For decades, companies have been trying to pass off a mismatch of ingredients as pizza when it clearly isn’t, and the worst part is people are falling for it. A place called Quality Italian in New York City tries to call its wannabe a “pizza” when it replaces the entire crust with deep-fried chicken. Socalled breakfast pizza comes in all shapes and flavours, but often replaces tomato sauce with something like eggs or butter. Then don’t even get me started on the idea of a dessert pizza by popular ice cream establishments, which is just their flagship product moulded into the shape of a pizza.

This is all insulting to the pizza consumer. This is no “Is a hotdog a sandwich?” argument. We can easily use cold hard facts to squash any debate and unequivocally decide when a pizza should be called a pizza, and we don’t have to look any farther than the dictionary. No matter which dictionary you choose to use, you will always see three key ingredients in the definition: dough, tomato sauce and cheese.

Now with a measuring stick in hand, it’s easy to weed out knock- offs and keep the naysayers at bay. If you make a “mini- pizza” at home — replacing the crust with, say, toast or pitas — then you can’t call it a pizza. If you order a pizza without the cheese, then you no longer have a pizza in your hands.

And then there is the sauce. If you swap out tomato sauce for something like a BBQ, garlic Parmesan or an alfredo, then you technically don’t have a pizza either.

Look, I don’t make the rules, I just follow them. Sometimes the truth hurts, and the reality is that it’s hard to argue with a dictionary definition.

In order for something to be called a pizza, it must have dough, tomato sauce and cheese. And if you swap out one of those ingredients, then you better start calling it “pizza- like” or the logophiles, purists and true pizza lovers of this world will come knocking at your door.

WE DON’T HAVE TO LOOK ANY FARTHER THAN THE DICTIONARY.