Pizza… or Grilled Cheese

[aaronatthedoublef]

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts the other day while making pizza dough and they were talking about pizza. The discussion turned to frozen pizza and one of the castors declared that frozen pizza is ridiculous and you can just make pizza by putting sauce and cheese on naan.

If you put cheese on bread and call it pizza, what is the difference between that and grilled cheese? Yes, usually grilled cheese is grilled but just as often people will make it by putting it in the oven, especially if you're someplace that has a toaster oven and but no cooktop.

Yes there is French bread pizza, English muffin pizza, pizza bagels, etc. But those are really just gussied up grilled cheese sandwiches.

What do you think...

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[Mike Nolan]

Grilled cheese sandwiches are made from pre-baked bread that is toasted on the grill long enough to melt the cheese, but the cheese never goes through the change of state that you get when you bake cheese in a really hot oven. (And there are some cheeses that don't make that transition well, getting really oily when they fully melt.)

Mind you, a good grilled cheese sandwich is an excellent cold-weather comfort food, but it isn't in the same category as pizza, IMHO.

My wife prefers to melt the cheese on a griddle and then soak it up with toasted bread (no need to butter the bread), but that's not pizza, either.

Back when I was in college (Northwestern), Gulliver's on Howard Street made the best pizza bread I've ever had, though these days I can come pretty close to what I remember it being back in the early 70's. But pizza bread (whether on a hoagie, baguette or naan) isn't pizza, either, because the bread is pre-baked.

Although many pizza fanatics say it is all about the crust, I think the real test of pizza is that thin zone where the dough, the sauce and perhaps some of the cheese and other toppings meld into the perfect gooey bite as the bread bakes through. And I think that's what makes Chicago Deep Dish Pizza so different from New York Pizza, the gooey zone is bigger.

Frozen pizza is a somewhat different issue, even the best frozen pizza (and some of them are fairly good these days) will never beat a good freshly baked pizza. Part of it is that the crust is already half-baked (or more) and the other part is that frozen pizzas are never baked in a HOT oven (eg, 500 degrees or more.) And I think ANY home pizza is going to suffer in comparison to one baked in a professional pizza oven, where the temperature could be anywhere from 650 to 1100 degrees.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Growing up grilled cheese was a slice of American cheese (usually Kraft) on a slice of white bread (usually Burny Brothers for those who know and remember them) under the broiler. And that was grilled cheese for many years until we learned to do some cooking ourselves and learned that people would make a sandwich and cook it in a pan on the stove.

So to me, that has always been a form of grilled cheese. But Mike's distinctions between grilled cheese and pizza bread and pizza seem good.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by aaronatthedoublef.

[Mike Nolan]

My mother was big on Velveeta for grilled cheese sandwiches but I don't honestly remember the last time I bought any Velveeta, probably not in over 20 years.

We often use a combination of sharp cheddar and colby or co-jack cheese for grilled cheese sandwiches.

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