The Surprising Pizza Toppings 17% Of People Chose As Their Favorite

What's your favorite pizza topping? Mashed asked that very question in a survey of 555 people in the United States. Some of the top choices won't surprise you. Pepperoni was popular, as were sausage and mushroom. Extra cheese got a lot of votes, which is understandable. It's fair to ask whether pizza without cheese can even be called pizza – as many members of the Reddit community have pointed out.

But 17 percent, or fully one in six of all the pizza lovers who we polled, picked none of the above when asked about their favorite pizza topping. More accurately, they said something else was their favorite topping, other than the usual crowd-pleasing pepperoni, sausage, mushroom, or cheese. Not to mention, these 17 percent even picked something ahead of bacon, which was a surprisingly unpopular choice at 6.49 percent. Maybe bacon lovers have had their fill by breakfast.

Anyhow, back to our 17 percent. What toppings are left that would satisfy these people? If they were on a desert island, but Domino's delivered there and they could only order the same single item on their pizza for the rest of their lives, what would that item be? OK, that's not how we asked the question, but we wonder if people took it seriously enough, given some of the answers we received.

Setting aside pepperoni, sausage, cheese, mushrooms, and even bacon, can you guess the most popular item among our 17-percenters? Of course, it had to be pineapple – perhaps the most hated pizza topping on the planet. Pineapple got fully 7.39 percent of the overall vote, accounting for nearly half the votes from our 17-percent group. Black olives were next, at 4.14 percent. Next in popularity among this group were onions, with 2.88 percent of the vote. Anchovies were favored by our saltier respondents, at a rate of 2.16 percent. Even pickles got multiple votes in our survey, and rounded out our 17.11 (to be exact) percent, with 0.54 percent of the vote.

Maybe you don't find the toppings favored by 17 percent of the people we surveyed all that unusual. Then try an experiment, next time your order pizza for takeout or delivery. One night, ask for a large pie with pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, bacon, and extra cheese. The person taking your order won't even blink and may even compliment you on your taste (unless they're vegetarian). The next night, order a large with pineapple, black olives, anchovies, onions, and pickles. Not only will your order-taker forget all about your good taste, they'll most certainly read your order back to you, to make sure they heard it right.

Our pizza-topping survey also allowed people to choose "other" as an option. This "other" accounted for 5.41 percent of the vote, and people's detailed responses were all over the place. They went from the sublime, such as green pepper (top-five worthy, easily) and fresh basil (oh yeah, right!), to the ... also sublime: jalapeños (tasty!), ham (just hold the pineapple, please), and barbecue chicken.

Maybe we judged too harshly. Looking back at our survey results, you might say that just about anything goes well with a proper crust, a flavorful sauce, and a gooey layer of cheese. So prove all the doubters wrong, and make your next order a "Triple-P" – pepperoni, pineapple, and pickle.