If you are not using cheese

What the original actually contributes

Fat, salt, and a physical layer that holds moisture and browns. Remove it and the pizza needs those jobs done another way, or the result is a dry, flat tomato bread.

See the full cheese entry

Where availability is the problem

Relevant to anyone avoiding dairy for dietary, religious or ethical reasons, and to kosher pizzerias serving meat toppings, where dairy and meat are not combined.

Options

1. Make a marinara rather than a cheeseless margherita

   Equivalent

   Behaves the same way in this application. You would not detect the swap.

   Available in: Everywhere

   How to use it

   Tomato, garlic, oregano and a generous olive oil finish. Use more oil than feels right — it is doing the cheese's job.

   What it does not change

   Nothing needs compensating for, because nothing is missing: this is a complete traditional pizza that never had cheese, protected by the AVPN standard and the EU TSG registration alongside the margherita.

   Well established
   • International Regulation for True Neapolitan Pizza (Disciplinare Internazionale) — Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN)
   • Commission Regulation (EU) No 97/2010 registering 'Pizza Napoletana' as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed (TSG) — European Commission

2. Roman pizza rossa or bianca

   Equivalent

   Behaves the same way in this application. You would not detect the swap.

   Available in: Everywhere

   How to use it

   Tray-baked, oil and salt, with or without tomato. No cheese is traditional.

   What it does not change

   These are everyday Roman bakery products in their own right, not adaptations of anything.

   Strongly supported
   • Accademia Italiana della Cucina — regional Italian food documentation — Accademia Italiana della Cucina

3. Commercial vegan mozzarella substitute

   Workable, with trade-offs

   The result is recognisably the style, but you lose something specific — named below.

   Available in: Widely in Europe, North America and Australia

   How to use it

   Choose one formulated to melt; apply a little olive oil over the top and bake slightly hotter.

   What changes

   Products vary enormously. Starch-and-oil based versions melt but brown poorly and taste flat; newer fermented versions are considerably better. None yet stretches like mozzarella.

   Limited evidence
   • Modernist Pizza — The Cooking Lab

4. Simply omitting cheese from a topping-heavy pizza

   Not recommended

   Commonly suggested, and it does not work here. The reason is given rather than the advice simply withheld.

   How to use it

   Rebuild the pizza around the absence instead.

   What changes

   Removing cheese from a recipe built around it leaves toppings unbound, drying separately on a bare base. The traditions above work because they were designed without cheese, not stripped of it.

   Generally accepted
   • Modernist Pizza — The Cooking Lab

Related

Evidence

• International Regulation for True Neapolitan Pizza (Disciplinare Internazionale) — Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN)
• Accademia Italiana della Cucina — regional Italian food documentation — Accademia Italiana della Cucina