How I Approach Pizza

Pizza. I’ve yet to write about it on this site, but it was inevitable, really. Just like I have my own set of ideas about eating barbeque, certainly burgers, and certainly I have rules about eating at any cafeteria (idea for another post), about which hot sauces, mayonnaise, canned chili, iced tea are the best to buy, and certainly I’ve poured considerable thought into pimento cheese, and what I’ve called the Southern-sytle deli, I have over the years formed some strong opinions about pizza and pizza places. As with most of my opinions, I won’t issue them until they’re sufficiently well-informed, and it just so happens that I understand quite a lot about pizza. When I got married back in 1999, we received a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer as a wedding gift, and it was on from there. I started to figure out breadmaking. You can make bread without a Kitchen-Aid, but the machine really opens up the possibilities. (Another article for another time). I came up with a basic pizza crust that I still make to this day. Also, I did two stints as a delivery driver for Dominoes, one in college, and one to pocket some quick cash after my divorce, so I can speak well enough to the chain pizza phenomenon and why I almost never buy chain pizza. Hell, I even have an opinion about store-bought frozen pizza (I only buy Red Baron). All of that is just to claim my bona fides to speak about pizza with some degree of authority.

First, it has struck me lately how truly decadent it is that we Americans eat pizza as an afterthought, because really it is such a rich and extravagant food with all the glorious combinations, toppings sourced from all over world, swimming in Mozarella, in a properly-ordered universe surely pizza would be a meal served with the frequency of the Thanksgiving turkey, like once or twice a year as a form of celebration. That we eat pizza as if it is nothing, that we take it for granite is remarkable. Wouldn’t you agree? So, I want to make that visible for only a moment and suggest to you that any day in which you’ve eaten a slice of hot and cheesy pizza, depite your numerous problems and worries otherwise, can’t be all that bad. Would you also agree with that?

Any place I’ve ever lived, and it’s been a handful of places to this point, I’ve scouted out the good local pizzeria. I do this for a few reasons, but they ought to be fairly obvious. The best pizza in town is almost always going to be sold by a locally-based pizza man, and if you live in a location that has a man who has devoted himself to that art form, he deserves your support. He needs to stay in business because Dominoes and Papa Johns and god-forsaken Pizza Hut and Little Caesars are terrible. Their dough comes off a truck, man, and to boot it is that universal overly bready mass-market stuff, tuned to the lowest common denominator. You want Bubba or Gino or Frankie over there spinning that dough in the air, coming in at 8 am to make it so it has enough time to rise. You want that guy who is turning out pizza as a matter of personal pride and not some minimum-wage road jockey who doesn’t give a shit. That said, though, I do have a soft spot for the extravaganZZa at Dominoes as me and my ex-wife used to take special delight in getting those when we lived together in a state of sin while students at Ole Miss, and I like the sausage at Papa Johns so much I tried to get a girlfriend to flirt with the manager so he’d slide her a box of it out the back door. I had visions of using that stuff for omelettes and such. She wouldn’t do it, though, and our relationship didn’t last. Still, it’s a goal of mine, to get my hands on a box of it. I just have to find the right woman.

Good pizza starts with the crust, and the crust is going to make or break any pizza place. The crust is why Dominoes and Papa Johns and Pizza Hut and Little Caesars suck. I’d rather eat something else entirely than a slice of the pizza offered by any of these chains, and that’s because it is too damned bready, too lifeless. Little Caesars, in particular, is nothing but bread, with only enough cheese on it to be pizza in the most nominal sense. One hair less cheese and it would be something else entirely. When I eat pizza there I worry I’m going to catch the diabetes, or in the parlance of my black brothers and sisters, the sugar. Pizza Hut was good until it started serving a frozen pan crust instead of making it in the stores. (Pizza Hut’s fall-off is definitely an article for another time.)

So, throwing out this ubiquitous “hand-tossed” (literally, it is never tossed, by hand or otherwise) crust offered by the chains, I will prefer a thin New York-style crust, the thinner the better, and definitely baked under the highest possible heat so that it is browned up and crispy, with perhaps even a hint of char on the edges. That said, though, there are so-called “deep-dish” crusts that are very good that one will find here and there. It just depends. Is it unique? Is it special? Is there some love there, some art? Is it light and crispy, sort of defying how you understand physics?

When it comes to toppings, throw everything on there, please. Give me the supreme, the deluxe, the extravaganZZA, and all you cheese pizza eating weirdos, please don’t even talk to me. You’re weird. Sometimes I’m with mixed company and there’s some picky-puss who says things like, “but, I don’t like mushrooms,” or, “I don’t like onions.” The anti-onion people really piss me off, too. They really push me to the edge of what I can tolerate. If I’m with a person like that, and I have to get only sausage, or god help me only pepperoni, something dies inside me. I mean, it’s fine, I’ll be stoical and I’ll survive, but I’ll be sad on the inside, but these cheese-only weirdos? There’s no help for you, and I’m sorry. I’m not putting up with you. You can only push a good man so far.

Exceptions to this do exist, though. The best pizza I’ve ever eaten, hands down, is served at Tribecca Allie in Sardis, Mississippi. What? You read that right. Sardis, Mississippi, a one-red-light nowhere town at the edge of the Mississippi Delta. It makes no sense whatsoever, but these guys know what they are doing. They serve only a ten-inch pizza in the Venetian style, brick-oven-baked, and they won’t make an everything-on-it pizza because their crust is delicate that it can’t really support the weight, so one or two toppings is what you want. Go to their website and read the about section. They’re total freaks about what they do, and that crust! Sweet mother Mary, the crust! Words fail me. It is the best thing ever. Light. Almost creamy, somehow, as in, it melts in your mouth. It’s an incredible place, and if you haven’t eaten there and you can physically get there, you need to fix that. Try the Polpette and and the pizza ensalata and tell them Jason sent you. Not really. I don’t think they’ll remember me.