Which Vegetables Make for the Best Pizza Toppings?

The majority of people in the United States aren’t eating the daily recommended amount of vegetables, and we’ve taken it upon ourselves to change that! One of the best ways to increase the amount of veggies you’re eating is by adding more veggies to your pizza. Putting our heads together and utilizing our years of professional experience as pizza topping curators, we’ve made a list of the veggies that make for the best pizza toppings.

Tomatoes

Yes, tomato sauce has been the preferred pizza sauce of over 90% of people surveyed for the past 25 years, and that’s an accomplishment worth recognizing! Besides the sauce, don’t overlook the idea of adding fresh tomatoes to your pizza before baking. 

If you’re the biggest tomato fan on the planet, prove it by indulging in a pizza with tomato sauce, several different types of sliced fresh tomatoes (Roma, grape, heirloom, etc.), sun-dried tomatoes, and your cheese of choice.

Spinach

This one might be a bit of a hard sell for some, but trust us. Spinach is definitely one of the best pizza toppings, vegetable or not. It will both elevate and meld with the other flavors on offer, adding a freshness and an earthy vibe. If you’re not a fan of the texture of cooked spinach, chop it into smaller pieces or strips before adding it to your pizza.

Mushrooms

If you’re craving the savory, umami, meaty flavor but don’t want to eat… well… meat, try mushrooms instead! Button, cremini, baby bella, porcini, portobello, shitake, morel, and oyster all have their own slightly different flavors to bring to the table. Experiment with the different types of mushrooms and figure out which ones you like best.

Bell Peppers

Choose any color of bell peppers for your pizza; you can’t go wrong! Cooking peppers in the oven softens them up and brings out more richness to their vegetable flavor. If you want your peppers to retain a little bit of their bite, cook the pizza halfway before adding them.

Onions

This layered root vegetable offers salty or sweet flavors depending on how they’re prepared—and if you haven’t tried caramelizing the onions before adding them to the pie, you owe it yourself to remedy that egregious personal failing at your earliest convenience. 

Onions are included on our Deluxe Pizza, which also features plump mushrooms, Italian salsiccia, and crispy, mouth-watering bacon.

Garlic

We dare you to try to find a more iconic pizza flavor power couple than butter and garlic (maybe pepperoni and cheese, but we are discussing vegetables today!). If you love the flavor that garlic adds to your pizza, try different formats to shake it up a little bit: sautéed garlic, pickled garlic, garlic canned in olive oil. There really isn’t a wrong choice here, except the wrong choice of not adding more garlic to your pizza!

Garlic is included on our Tomato Basil Garlic Pizza (shocking, we know), which also features red-ripened tomatoes and fresh basil.

Black Olives

Love them or hate them (and for the record, we love them!), black olives add a deeply savory and salty boost to your pizza’s flavor. They’re especially good at taking rich, meaty flavored pizzas to the next level, and for the olive-haters, picking the olives off your piece of pizza can be a fun way to entertain yourself during dinner.

Pepperoncini

One of the most underrated veggie pizza toppings, the humble pepperoncini pepper is often treated like an afterthought by other pizza makers, tossed into the box as a… garnish (gasp!). We have the opposite opinion: pepperoncini peppers are delicious, and they deserve to have their day as one of the premier pizza toppings!

Pepperoncini is included on our Pepperoni Pepperoncini Pizza, which also features our classic pepperoni to accompany the sweet, tangy pepperoncini peppers.

Crushed Red Pepper Flakes

This one’s for the 2000s kids who want to remember the nostalgia of family pizza night. Packing a significant flavor boost and a lot of heat, crushed red pepper flakes are one of the easiest vegetables to add to your pizza. Some may ask whether crushed red pepper flakes are even a vegetable or if they’re more of a spice. The answer is we don’t know and we don’t care—but we highly recommend putting them on your pizza!

Potatoes (and Other Root Vegetables)

Believe it or not, potatoes actually make for a great pizza topping. Cook your potatoes about halfway—you want it to be mostly cooked but not overly browned on the outside—before chopping them up, adding them to your pizza, and baking as usual.

If you want to take it one step more refined, slice a potato into thin circles, then layer the potato slices on your pizza. Besides potatoes, you can also try turnips, sweet potatoes, or any other root veggies that happen to catch your eye and taste buds.

Avocado

We don’t care that avocado is technically a fruit and might not even really belong on pizza. It’s time to finally overthrow the concept of avocado toast in favor of a reheated slice of leftover pizza topped with fresh-sliced avocado. If you can put it in a salad, that makes it enough of a vegetable to put it on a pizza!

Although, that same logic doesn’t really apply to chicken…

Pineapple

Yes, we know that pineapples are not vegetables, and we also know that there is not the slightest bit of confusion regarding pineapple’s status as a fruit. However, putting pineapple on pizza is still underrated, so we’re going to spread the good word as much as we feel is necessary.

Pineapple contains one of the highest possible concentrations of vitamin C, and it adds a sweet and tart pop of brightness that cuts through the salty and rich flavors of cured meats like ham, pepperoni, or Canadian bacon. If you haven’t tried putting pineapple on your pizza, now is the time!

Whether you’re looking for a flavorful and savory option for meatless Monday, an after-school snack with more vitamins and minerals, or a way to add more veggies to your daily food plan without giving up the foods you love, adding more vegetables to your pizza is the answer.

You can find vegetables on several varieties of Dogtown Pizza, and we also offer a Vegetable Pizza if you want to go completely meat-free. Look for our pizzas in the freezer aisle of grocery stores in St. Louis—bon appétit!