Pizza Salads Are A Thing, But What Exactly Are They?

For most food lovers, pizza and salad are two entirely different meals. When you want something crisp and fresh after a long day at work you might opt for a spring green salad with asparagus. If you're in the mood for a meal full of melty cheese, baked bread, and Italian herbs, you're more likely to lean toward one of many homemade pizza and pizza dough recipes for weeknight dinner. Yet for those of us who have trouble deciding, a pizza salad combines the best of both worlds. Don't fret if you have zero knowledge about what constitutes a pizza salad. Let's get into the logistics.

In the most general sense, a pizza salad is a bed of greens and the cooked toppings of your favorite pizza combined together with a vinaigrette-style dressing. To add some relatable appeal, let's use a real-life example to make this unique pizza salad make more sense. If you and your friends order a pizza, yet you aren't in the mood for slice after slice of cheese, meat, and vegetable-covered bread, simply remove all of that flavor and eat those added extras with a side of greens instead. Voila! You now have a homemade pizza salad at your fingertips. Before we get into the different ways you can handcraft your very own pizza salad at home, how did this new and noteworthy salad first come to fruition?

If you're wondering how pizza and salad were thought to be configured together into one unusual meal, you can thank Drew Barrymore. The well-known movie star and television host uploaded a TikTok video last September of her specially-made dish that, unbeknownst to her at the time, would eventually take the internet by storm. In the viral video, Barrymore starts off by commenting that her unique meal is one to try, particularly if you're trying to avoid bread products.

@drewbarrymore

Wait for it...🍕🥗

♬ original sound – Drew Barrymore

She then removes the toppings from a slice of takeout vegetable and cheese pizza and adds the pizza toppings to a serving of fresh salad with similar vegetables as the pizza slice, such as tomato and red onion. She then mixes the ingredients together with a bit of dressing, proclaiming the combined mixture of cooked pizza toppings and crisp salad is a delicious way to enjoy pizza without the added gluten.

While Barrymore lightheartedly ate a plentiful bite of intact pizza at the end of her video, TikTok users wasted no time unloading countless comments in protest against the pizza salad such as "life's too short, eat the pizza." While you may not always have leftover pizza readily available to remove the toppings from and add to a bowl of fresh greens, there are plenty of ways to make your own unique pizza salad at home.

If you want to recreate Barrymore's popular pizza salad, yet don't necessarily want to decimate perfectly fine slices of pizza, there are a few additional ways you can recreate the flavors of a pizza salad at home. First, you have the option of sticking to a salad made with only fresh ingredients: Similar to a classic Italian salad recipe, you can combine fresh greens and flavorful pizza-like toppings such as pepperoni, artichoke hearts, black olives, and mozzarella balls. You can even add in a homemade dressing such as pesto vinaigrette to give your homemade pizza salad an extra punch of flavor.

If you want to take a few additional steps, you can follow culinary creator Jenny Osipova's recipe: On TikTok, the home chef uses massaged kale, simmered white beans, roasted tomatoes, and homemade croutons to make an authentic, yet flavorful pizza salad recipe. If wasting those precious pizza crusts pains you, simply use those to make your own version of garlic-infused croutons. While these options have their own flavorful characteristics, they're not the original buzzworthy salad. Therefore, for those of you who are determined to make Drew Barrymore's classic pizza salad recipe, all you need is a bed of greens, some robust veggies like green pepper and red onion, a zesty vinaigrette, and of course, the most important ingredient: Repurposed pizza toppings.