Ham, mozzarella and … orange?! Australia invents a new topping to enrage the pizza purists

Name: Orange pizza.
Age: First mentions come in 314BC and AD997 respectively. The combination, however, is a product of our own dark age.
Appearance: There's no getting round this – it's an orange pizza.
All pizzas are sort of orange, aren't they? By which I mean, a pizza with oranges on it.
What? Who on God's green Earth would do such a thing? Australians.
Ah, I see. Specifically Bubba Pizza, a chain restaurant with 15 outlets in Victoria.
And it is purposely putting oranges on pizza? It is putting smoked ham, fresh orange chunks and mozzarella on pizza. And it's not just doing it, it's selling it.
Let me guess: sparking online outrage? Correct. The pizzas have been around for a few months, but now it has blown up, with one commenter on Reddit posting: 'Some people just want to watch the world burn.'
Why has Bubba Pizza done this? The chain's managing director described it as 'a way to bring people together over something unexpected'.
I imagine it will upset the pizza purists. Pineapple on pizza upsets purists; oranges on pizza upsets people who like pineapple on pizza.
Is Bubba Pizza worried about what the Italians will think? Evidently not: when it launched the ham and orange pizza, it offered free samples to anyone who produced an Italian passport.
Yet another sign that the old international order is crumbling. You may be right. An earlier incidence of this abomination occurred in 2023, when a pizza topped with chicken, jalapeños and oranges was created in Hungary for the country's prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
Like I needed another reason to dislike that guy. Is this the worst thing that's ever happened to a pizza? No. It's possibly not even the worst thing to happen to a pizza in Australia, where you can order a full breakfast pizza in Melbourne, a chicken tikka masala pizza in Sydney or a pumpkin and hummus pizza in Brisbane.
But outside Australia and Hungary, everything is still OK, right? Nothing is still OK and it hasn't been for a long time. In Sweden, they put bananas on pizza.
Really? I watch lots of Scandi dramas and this never comes up. They know the idea would be impossible to export. In China, pizza topped with the notoriously smelly durian fruit is the most popular order at Pizza Hut, accounting for one in every four pizzas sold by the chain.
Ham and orange pizza is starting to seem a bit tame by comparison. This is how they suck you in.
In fact, I'm starting to develop a hankering for one. I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that.
Do say: 'Mozzarella, tomato, basil – basta!'
Don't say: 'The blueberries work surprisingly well, but the vanilla ice-cream melted in the oven.'

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