An Honest Question: What Do You Call Pizza Without Cheese?

Welcome to Off the Eaten Path, a series where our Test Kitchen creator Noah Tanen dives deep into regional recipes. Next up? Tomato Pie.

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For fanatics of regional pizza styles, tomato pie can be a bit of a hard sell. Seldom found in the case at an actual pizzeria, these golden crisp dough slabs blanketed in a thick layer of tomato sauce are popular throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Though tomato pie may be made with a small amount of pecorino cheese, either in the sauce itself or sprinkled on top after baking, there is no mozzarella, brick cheese, or Provel to be found on this slice. You can see why it’s often referred to, chiefly by detractors, as "pizza without cheese."

Though is tomato pie even pizza at all? I’ve always said that it's more like a focaccia with sauce. In fact, historically the dish is a byproduct of Italian bread bakeries. The idea is that any leftover bread dough can be repurposed into a value-added product by shoving it into a sheet tray with some olive oil and baking it with sauce on top. It’s often found right by the register, marketed essentially as an impulse buy, or a little snack for the road. For this reason, tomato pie is meant to be enjoyed at room temperature, ideally while walking down the street between errands or leaning over the hood of your car.

Tomato pie bakers and enjoyers alike seem to make a distinction between their beloved square slices and pizza. Louis Sarcones III himself, of the famed Sarcone’s Bakery in South Philadelphia, makes the distinction in this interview. That’s a bakery owner in a neighborhood at the epicenter of the tomato pie universe telling you” “The dough is not a pizza dough. It's a bread dough.”

Philadelphia, Rhode Island, and Utica, NY all lay claim to this dish as their own, but we’ll never know for sure where it originated. For those who don’t live in those places, tomato pie is incredibly easy to make at home. You can check out my recipe to give it a try yourself. If you’re worried about the lack of cheese, don’t worry, I add a generous handful of pecorino right into the sauce for a salty and tangy bite. And remember, it’s not really pizza anyway.