Ozzy Osbourne Was In Awe Of This Iconic NYC Food
"All day long I think of things, but nothing seems to satisfy," was perhaps sung by Ozzy Osbourne because he hadn't discovered pizza yet. If he had, he surely would have found a way to satisfy himself with a slice. It wasn't until The Prince of Darkness first came to perform with his band, Black Sabbath, in New York City in 1970 that he got a taste of a distinctive New York-style slice.
In his book, "I Am Ozzy," Osbourne wrote, "In New York, I discovered pizza. It blew my mind wide ... open. I would buy ten or twenty slices a day." He describes it in a very charming Ozzy Osbourne way, saying, "It's like bread, but it's better than any bread you've tasted in your life."
This was in stark contrast to the typical food of his working-class hometown, Birmingham, England. The Godfather of Heavy Metal complained, "In England it was always egg and chips, sausage and chips, pie and chips ... anything and chips. After a while, it just got boring, y'know?"
What happened when Ozzy tried to bring pizza back home
When Ozzy Osbourne returned home to his first wife, Thelma Riley, he did his best to introduce her to this wondrous new food he had discovered. His recipe sounds rather haphazard. According to his autobiography, he says, "I made some dough, then I got all these cans of beans and pilchards and olives ... and put them on top — it must have been about 15 quid's worth of gear."
He doesn't go into detail on his dough, and unfortunately, he didn't have access to our classic pizza crust recipe. His toppings are most charitably described as creative. Pilchards, which are a small oily fish, and olives are not unfamiliar to a pizza, but the beans are an interesting, and very British, addition. Luckily, later in life, as Ozzie states in a YouTube video, he learned to love just a straight-up simple pepperoni pizza, sometimes with mushrooms.
The Great Ozz finished the story with "after ten minutes, it just came dribbling out of the oven. It was like someone had been sick in there. Thelma just looked at it and went, 'I don't think I like pizza." Perhaps he should have followed our simple rule for pizza toppings: less is more.