Marilee J. Layman

The thing that distinguishes a pizza from an open-faced sandwich is that the bread is cooked at the same time the cheese on top is melted. A grilled cheese sandwich, open or closed, is a sandwich, even if you add tomato (quite traditional) and/or onion. And it's getting more like a pizza every second, except that the bread was baked earlier.

I have fairly rigid rules about what can be a pizza; but am quite open and accepting about flat bread-food. Thus, there is no such thing as a barbecue chicken pizza, because barbecue chicken isn't a pizza ingredient (think German beer). But it might well be excellent flat bread-food, if you like barbecue chicken more than I do. (I'm particularly bothered by the idea of combining it with cheese.)

I don't know what a Bagel Bite is, sorry.

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Some pizzas use parbaked crusts, so they're not all cooked at the same time as the cheese is melted. In general, the cheese would burn before the crust is baked.

I'm not getting the comparison with German beer -- I thought beer was a big German thing.

And here's Bagel Bites.

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All the pizza places where I've watched, they press or roll dough out, cover it with toppings and cheese, and then put it in the oven. This is also true for the home recipes I've used. I haven't encountered cases where the crust gets partially baked first or anything myself.

Germany had a law about beer purity, the Reinheitsgebot, that listed the valid beer ingredients. (For a long time it was the oldest consumer protection legislation on the books, but it's been replaced recently.)

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Bagel bite is a mini-pizza. I don't consider a toasted bread to be pizza unless it has tomato sauce on it, which completely ignores the original and traditional meaning of pizza, but old habits die hard. A toasted bread can be made into a sandwich (flip one piece on top of the other), or I can have two separate pieces of toasted bread-and-cheese. Using pita makes it an enclosed version, but it's still toasted cheese to me. I suppose I consider the bread only as a vehicle for the cheese.

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Yeah, a lot of pizzas just have olive oil on them without the tomato sauce.

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What makes you think a pizza isn't an open-faced sandwich? That's essentially how they started out. The main distinction I see is that American pizzas have grown absurdly large.

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That they started out in Egypt being only brushed with olive oil. I don't think of that as a sandwich, but I do think of it as pizza.

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Well, I think the issue is in your head, then. The only difference between one kind of bread with stuff on top and another kind of bread with stuff on top is not in the stuff, but how you think of it. A pizza is an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich. So is a bagel bite. And unlike a typical meatball "sandwich," they both enjoy the main advantage of a sandwich: you can pick them up and eat with your hands without making an epic mess.

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