Is Pepperoni Your Favorite Pizza Topping?

When it comes to pizza toppings, we're all about the mushrooms. But pepperoni is by far the most popular pie-topper in America, according to The New York Times.

"Peperoni" (one p) is the Italian word for large peppers. But like "Jersey Shore," pepperoni, the air-dried spicy sausage, isn't really Italian.

"Purely an Italian-American creation, like chicken Parmesan," food writer John Mariani told the paper.

Michael Ruhlman, an expert in meat curing, goes so far as to call pepperoni a "bastard" dish.

“Bread, cheese and salami is a good idea,” he said. “But America has a way of taking a good idea, mass-producing it to the point of profound mediocrity, then losing our sense of where the idea comes from.”

Frankly, we've never been fans of pepperoni. Granted, we're not big meat-eaters, but the taste is kind of rubbery and simultaneously hard, in our opinion. Guess we're just not into dried meat.

But most Americans want extra pepperoni, please. Leading up to Super Bowl Sunday, Hormel, the biggest-selling brand in the U.S., tells the Times that it's sold enough pepperoni to tunnel all the way through planet Earth.

"There’s nothing quite like that spicy, smoky taste with pizza," Paul Bertolli, a cured meat specialist, told the paper.

Do you agree?