Hawaiian pizza — Canada

Hawaiian pizza is a pizza built on the standard base of dough, tomato sauce and melted cheese, topped with pieces of ham and chunks of pineapple, an unusual pairing of savoury cured meat with sweet fruit that gives the pie its name despite having no direct tie to Hawaiian cooking. This version is reported from Canada, where it is said to have been devised in 1962 by Sam Panopoulos, a restaurateur in Chatham, Ontario, who ran the restaurant The Satellite with his brother; the pineapple came from a can already stocked for other dishes, and the name was borrowed from the pineapple brand rather than any place. The story is retold as a claim rather than a settled fact, and the pizza has since travelled well beyond its reported starting point. To prepare it, a round of pizza dough is stretched or rolled thin, spread with tomato sauce, and covered with a layer of grated mozzarella. Pieces of cooked ham and drained pineapple chunks, whether canned or fresh, are scattered over the cheese, sometimes with a few strips of bacon added for extra saltiness, before the pizza goes into a hot oven. What distinguishes this pizza is precisely that pairing of ham and pineapple over a plain tomato-and-cheese base, without the extra toppings common on other pizzas of the same family. It is baked at a high temperature until the crust turns golden and the cheese bubbles, then sliced and served hot, the fruit having softened slightly and released a little juice into the surrounding cheese.