This dumb picture of tomato sauce, cheese, and scorched bread has been making the internet rounds, blobbing from blog to blog under the guise of “jar pizza.” Pizza in a jar is a lie. It’s not pizza. It’s a delusion.
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What’s pizza? It’s inherently flat — that’s an essential part of it, conceptually. A pizza that isn’t flat isn’t a pizza. It can be square, it can be a trapezoid, it can be thick, it can be thin. It can be covered in anything you’d like. But put it in a jar, and it ceases to be pizza — it’s just a bunch of hot ingredients in a glass container. The blogger at 1FineCookie (!!?) admits as much herself: “Basically, all that you will be doing is layering your pizza ingredients into the jar.” Basically, yeah! But no, no. It might be a convenient, portable way to ingest nutrients, but it’s not a pizza.
You can no more transplant the elements of pizza, stuff them in a crude jar fit only for a peasant to drink river water out of and call it “pizza” than you could place the innards of BLT inside a carved out watermelon and call it a fucking popsicle. There are rules. There are rules for these things — we have to adhere to these rules or anything can be anything. Noun madness. Jars are pizzas and overturned turtles become lampshades, yogurt is steamed into omeletes — I don’t want to live in this world.
I get it. The internet pulsates with the urge to be as twee and shareable as possible. Oh my GOSH! Look at this lil’ jar pizza. Like like like. Click click click. Across a million Facebook walls and Pinterest pin boards (or whatever the hell) spreads this cylinder of goop. Babe, we have to make jar pizza! Look! Pizza in a jar!
I can’t wait to eat it with — with WHAT? How would you even eat this? With a spoon, like some sort of lobotomy case? Will you unhinge your jaw and pour it directly down your throat, an enormous Sicilian jello shot? Do you shatter the jar against your forehead and lap the pizza drek off the floor like a crazed dog? The eating of this bullshit makes even less sense than its assembly.
I condemn this thing. It’s not pizza. [1FineCookie]
All photos by 1FineCookie