"Brined" mushrooms by Adam Kuban. [Photograph: Adam Kuban]
Pizza is an egalitarian food. The best supporting evidence for this is the tolerance of canned mushrooms. My unfounded theory is that the majority of places that use mushrooms are topping with the canned variety. And this is mind boggling to me. Certainly canned mushrooms are cheaper and are less time-consuming to prepare than fresh, which, in order to be good need to be pre-cooked. It makes sense from a business angle that canned mushrooms are the way to go. But they still dominate the pizzeria scene because people are actually ordering the mushroom pizzas from these places. Otherwise, the topping would have gone the way of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow (officially extinct in 1990). So we must try to get to the bottom of this. Are canned mushrooms simply tolerated because we collectively affiliate them with pizza and thereby accept them in a Pizza Cognition Theory way? Or is there actually a lot of love for the little devils? Love em or hate em, tell us why in the comments.
About the author: Meredith Smith is the Slice editor. You can follow her on Twitter: @mertsmith.