California-style pizza - Misplaced Pages

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California-style pizza is a style of pizza arising from the California Cuisine cooking style. Wolfgang Puck popularized this style of pizza. The California Pizza Kitchen is the major pizza chain associated with California-style pizza, but it is served in a number of California Cuisine restaurants.

While most other styles of pizza are associated with different kinds of crust, the distinguishing feature of California-style pizza is the use of nontraditional toppings that derive from cuisines other than the usual Italian-style tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese, and especially incorporating fresh vegetables such as artichokes. For example, California-style pizza might include Thai pizza topped with bean sprouts and peanut sauce; Mexican pizza topped with salsa, guacamole, and sour cream; Caribbean pizza topped with Jamaican jerk chicken; or chicken pizza with a white creamy garlic sauce. A breakfast pizza is in the same genre, with toppings such as scrambled eggs.

California pizzas are generally smaller than the standard eight-slice Neapolitan; most are single-serving dishes. Due to the "gourmet" nature of the California pizzas, their high menu price often misleads those from the eastern United States; almost no California style pizzas can serve more than two or three at most, yet they cost about the same as a much larger New York-style pizza. While this provides more versatility in individual tastes, it can be surprising to those who are used to the traditional size, expecting a single pizza to serve five or six people.

Unlike the other major regional pizza styles of New York, Chicago, or St. Louis, California pizza is not the dominant pizza style in its namesake region.

See also