Pie, traditionally, can be eaten hot or cold. This law applies equally to sweet as well as savory pies. In Alsace, quiche – made of cheese, egg and bacon – is sold in bakeries, at room temperature, to be eaten on the spot or taken home and warmed up.
Pizza, too, can be eaten hot or cold, and I would like to take just a brief moment to praise cold pizza for breakfast.
This is not to say that cold pizza is necessarily better than warm pizza, just different.
Recently, I did a side-by-side tasting of cold thin crust and cold deep dish from from Lou Malnati’s.
Thin crust pizza served cold has a firmness that’s not possible with warm pizza, which tends to flop. Cold thin crust pizza holds firm and has pleasant chewiness. It’s good to have fruit for breakfast, and if orange juice qualifies as a serving of fruit, surely tomato sauce qualifies, too. We also had a bunch of sliced veggies on top of the thin crust pizza, so that made it even more of a complete meal.
Deep dish pizza served cold was not as pleasant to eat as the thin crust pizza served cold. The deep dish pizza was firm enough, but getting a big mouthful of stiff cheese is not so much fun. The deep dish served cold failed to please for the same reason as deep dish served hot: there’s just too much damn cheese on it.
For both types of pizza, however, I found that the flavors actually “married” more pleasingly after a night in the refrigerator. Maybe just allowing the pizza to age overnight gives the spices and other ingredients some time to get to know one another.