When Gordon Ramsay makes a breakfast pizza, he makes it his way: with baked beans and black pudding, of course.

At least, that was the case when the celebrity chef recently posted a YouTube cooking video shot with some pizza-making buddies in Cardiff, Wales. “Baked beans on a pizza,” Ramsay said as he was pressing out the dough. “They’re gonna ban us in Italy.” Laughing, he added, “If it works, it could be a staple here in North Wales. Baked beans on a pizza!”

Pizza purists almost certainly cocked their eyebrows—and perhaps gaped in abject horror—as they watched Ramsay prepare his English breakfast-inspired pie. From the start, the chef said he wanted to “create something new, something exciting, something for breakfast.”

Ramsay began with a bowl of marinara sauce and turned it into a bespoke Bloody Mary, mixing in a shot of Stoli vodka, followed by Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce for “a nice little kick” and a “little hint” of Tabasco for heat, plus salt and pepper.

So far so good—nothing wrong with a spicy sauce.

But then Ramsay popped open a can of baked beans. He scooped out several spoonfuls of the beans, stirred them into the sauce, and then decided what he really needed for this recipe was…more baked beans. Also a dollop or two of seaweed.

For toppings, he went with Welsh sausage, Welsh black pudding, smoked pancetta, mushrooms and one egg yolk at the center of the pie. “Trust me, there’s no full English breakfast anywhere without a beautiful fried egg,” Ramsay explained.

After popping the pie into a wood-burning oven, he clasped his hands together playfully and threw up a little prayer to the Lord Above. Post-bake, he added some shredded basil and grated Black Bomber cheese. As he sliced the pie, Ramsay at last expressed misgivings about the whole affair. “I’m still not sure,” he muttered. “Baked beans on a pizza.”

Ramsay was pleased with the end result. “It’s good,” he pronounced. “I like the Bloody Mary [sauce], and I love the Welsh black pudding…I think we’re onto something here, guys, huh?”

Commenters on Ramsay’s YouTube account weren’t so sure. “Gordon declares war on Italy,” one wrote. Another stated, “As a fan of both Italian cuisine and British cuisine, I am horrified.”

Some viewers were convinced Ramsay crafted the pizza solely to enrage Italians. Another wondered how the famed TV chef would have reacted “if this [pizza] was served to him on a show 10 years ago? You’d be able to power a small country for a year with the steam from his ears.”

But Ramsay isn’t the first Brit to put his own spin on an English breakfast pizza. Crazy Pedro’s in the UK dreamed up its own version, the Chippy Tea pizza, featuring a mushy-pea base, French fries, mozzarella and sausage. Nor did Ramsay invent baked beans as a pizza topping. During the 1990s all the way through 2003, the Heinz Baked Beanz Pizza was available at grocery stores in the UK—so the demand was clearly there. The foodservice brand even resurrected the baked-beans pizza, freshly made by select pizza shops in London, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Belfast and other UK cities, for a limited-time, delivery-only collab in November 2022.

Even so, the outrage was thick and heavy in the comments section on YouTube. One complainer put it quite succinctly: “Gordon could come to my home to cook this for me and I wouldn’t touch it….What in the world was he thinking?”

Food & Ingredients